have no characteristic delicacy of woman, and no characteristic
coarseness of man. On the contrary, believing man and woman to have
the same nature, and to be therefore under obligation to have the same
character, I would subject them to a common standard of morals and
manners. The delicacy of man should be no less shrinking than that of
woman, and the bravery of woman should be one with the bravery of man.
Then would there be a public sentiment very unlike that which now
requires the sexes to differ in character, and which, therefore, holds
them amenable to different codes--codes that, in their partiality to
man, allow him to commit high crimes, and that, in their cruelty to
woman, make the bare suspicion of such crimes on her part the
justification of her hopeless degradation and ruin.

They who advocate that radical change in her dress which common sense
calls for, are infidels in the eyes of such as subscribe to this
interpretation of the Bible. For if the Bible teaches that the
Heaven-ordained condition of woman is so subordinate and her
Heaven-ordained character so mean, then they are infidels who would
have her cast aside a dress so becoming that character and condition,
and have her put on a dress so entirely at war with her humble nature,
as to indicate her conscious equality with man, and her purpose to
assert, achieve, and maintain her independence. Alas, how
misapprehended are the true objects and true uses of the Bible! That
blessed book is given to us, not so much that we may be taught by it
what to do, as that we may be urged by its solemn and fearful commands
and won by its melting entreaties, to do what we already know we
should do. Such, indeed, is the greatest value of its recorded fact
that Jesus Christ died to save us from our sins. We already know that
we should repent of our sins and put them away; and it is this fact
which furnishes our strongest possible motive for doing so. But men
run to the Bible professedly to be taught their duty in matters where
their very instincts--where the laws, written in large, unmistakable,
ineffaceable letters upon the very foundations of their being--teach
them their duty. I say _professedly_, for generally it is only so.
They run to the Bible, not to learn the truth, but to make the Bible
the minister to folly and sin. They run from themselves to the Bible,
because they can more easily succeed in twisting its records into the
service of their guilty passions an