was sustained by the courts in taking from her the control of her
little daughter, simply because the mother thought best not to train
her in a special religious belief, but to allow her to wait until her
reason developed, that she might decide her religious views for
herself. A woman writing in the "Woman's Kingdom" department of The
_Chicago Inter-Ocean_, says:

The orthodox Church has been almost suicidal in its treatment of
women (and I write as one whose name still stands on the
membership list of the Presbyterian Church). Persons who have not
walked with wounded, lacerated hearts through the terrible
realities, can form no idea of the suffering occasioned young
women whose conscience summoned them to speak for temperance and
woman suffrage, by the persecutions encountered in the Church. We
have known clergymen come straight from the pulpit where they
have talked eloquently of "moral courage," of the heroism of
Martin Luther and Calvin and Wesley, and even of Garrison and
Harriet Beecher Stowe, to meet with a sneer some brave young
woman, who, with the same moral courage was proclaiming the truth
as revealed unto her. Our young women have been denied admittance
into theological schools; they have been compelled to go out into
the by-ways and hedges; they have been persecuted for
righteousness' sake. The Church has decreed that two-thirds of
its members shall be governed by the masculine one-third; but
despite this decision, woman will preach and the world will
listen.

Not only has woman recognized her own degradation, but the
largest-hearted men have also seen it. Thomas W. Higginson, in an
address at the anniversary of the Young Men's Christian Union, in New
York City, as long ago as 1858, in an address upon women in Christian
civilization, said:

No man can ever speak of the position of woman so mournfully as
she has done it for herself. Charlotte Bronte, Caroline Norton,
and indeed the majority of intellectual women, from the beginning
to the end of their lives, have touched us to sadness even in
mirth, and the mournful memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, looking back
upon years when she had been the chief intellectual joy of
English society, could only deduce the hope, "that there might be
some other world hereafter, where justice would be done to
woman."

The essayist, E. P.