meaning. He seriously declared
that on more than one occasion he had heard an American woman say to
her husband, "Dear, will you bring me my shawl?" and the husband had
brought it! Worse than this, he had seen a husband, returning home at
evening, enter the parlor where his wife was sitting--perhaps in the
very best chair in the room--and the wife not only did not go and get
his slippers and dressing-gown, but she even remained seated, and left
him to find a chair as he could. In the view of this noted German
clergyman, the principles of the wife's equality with the husband, as
shown in the American home, is destructive of Christian
principles.[217]

Clerical action to-day, proves woman to hold the same place in the
eyes of the Church that she did during the dark ages. Woman is as
fully degraded, taking into consideration our civilization, as she
ever was. The form alone has changed. She is no longer burned at the
stake as a witch; she is no longer prostituted to feudal lords. The
age has outgrown a belief in the supernatural, and feudalism is dead;
yet the same principle which degraded her five hundred or a thousand
years since, still exists, even though its manifestation is not the
same. The feminine principle is still looked upon as secondary and
inferior,[218] though all the facts of nature and science prove it to
extend throughout creation.

It is through the Church idea of woman that the press of the world is
filled with scandals like the one that recently agitated the Romish
Church, in which the dead Cardinal Antonelli's name was bandied about
in courts of law. It is through Church interpretation of woman's
position that the suit of his putative daughter, the Countess
Lambertina, for his property, was decided against her on the ground
that she was "a sacrilegious child." The person who commits sacrilege
steals sacred things. "Sacrilegious" means violating sacred things. "A
sacrilegious child" is a child who "violated sacred things" by coming
into existence. Her father was holy; he did not violate holy things
when he violated and ruined a woman's life. He committed no sacrilege
in the eyes of the Church. His sin was nothing; but the unfortunate
result of his sin was a violation of holy things by the mere fact of
her coming into existence. What irony of all that is called holy!

It is because the Church has taught that woman was created solely for
man, that in tearing asunder a recent will in New York, it was p