d guilty purposes than they can
their inflexible convictions. They run to the Bible for a paramount
authority that shall override and supplant these uncomfortable
convictions. They run from the teachings of their nature and the
remonstrances of their consciences to find something more palatable.
Hence, we find the rum-drinker, and slaveholder, and polygamist, and
other criminals going to the Bible. They go to it for the very purpose
of justifying their known sins. But not only may we not go to the
Bible to justify what we ourselves have already condemned, but we must
not take to the judicature of that book, as an open question, any of
the wrongs against which nature and common sense cry out--any of the
wrongs which nature and common sense call on us to condemn.

So fraught with evil, and ruinous evil, is this practice, on the part
of the Church as well as the world, of inquiring the judgment of the
Bible in regard to sins, which the natural and universal conscience
condemns, but which the inquirer means to persist in, if only he can
get the Bible to testify against his conscience and in favor of his
sins; so baleful, I say, is this practice, as to drive me to the
conclusion that the Bible can not continue to be a blessing to mankind
in spite of it. The practice, in its present wide and well-nigh
universal extent, turns the heavenly volume into a curse. Owing to
this practice, the Bible is, this day, a hindrance rather than a help
to civilization.

But if woman is of the same nature and same dignity with man, and if
as much and as varied labor is needed to supply her wants as to supply
the wants of man, and if for her to be, as she so emphatically is,
poor and destitute and dependent, is as fatal to her happiness and
usefulness and to the fulfillment of the high purposes of her
existence, as the like circumstances would be to the honor and welfare
of man, why then put her in a dress which compels her to be a
pauper--a pauper, whether in ribbons or rags? Why, I ask, put her in a
dress suited only to those occasional and brief moods, in which man
regards her as his darling, his idol, and his angel; or to that
general state of his mind in which he looks upon her as his servant,
and with feelings certainly much nearer contempt than adoration.
Strive as you will to elevate woman, nevertheless the disabilities and
degradation of this dress, together with that large group of false
views of the uses of her being and of her rel