r the bitter words I have heard spoken against her
faith, by men who have an Inquisition which excommunicates those who ask
to leave their communion in peace, and an _Index Expurgatorius_ on which
this article may possibly have the honor of figuring,--and, far worse
than these, the reluctant, pharisaical confession, that it might perhaps
be _possible_ that one who so believed should be accepted of the
Creator,--and then recall the sweet peace and love that show through
all her looks, the price of untold sacrifices and labors,--and again
recollect how thousands of women, filled with the same spirit, die,
without a murmur, to earthly life, die to their own names even, that
they may know nothing but their holy duties,--while men are torturing
and denouncing their fellows, and while we can hear day and night the
clinking of the hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the
"Prometheus," to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast
of human nature,--I have been ready to believe that we have even now a
new revelation, and the name of its Messiah is WOMAN!

* * * * *

----I should be sorry,--I remarked, a day or two afterwards, to the
divinity-student,--if anything I said tended in any way to foster any
jealousy between the professions, or to throw disrespect upon that one
on whose counsel and sympathies almost all of us lean in our moments
of trial. But we are false to our new conditions of life, if we do not
resolutely maintain our religious as well as our political freedom,
in the face of any and all supposed monopolies. Certain men will, of
course, say two things, if we do not take their views: first, that we
don't know anything about these matters; and, secondly, that we are not
so good as they are. They have a polarized phraseology for saying these
things, but it comes to precisely that. To which it may be answered, in
the first place, that we have good authority for saying that even babes
and sucklings know _something_; and, in the second, that, if there is a
mote or so to be removed from our premises, the courts and councils of
the last few years have found beams enough in some other quarters to
build a church that would hold all the good people in Boston and have
sticks enough left to make a bonfire for all the heretics.

As to that terrible depolarizing process of mine, of which we were
talking the other day, I will give you a specimen of one way of managing
it, i