Perhaps, in so debased an age, so profligate a world, as that out of
which Christianity had risen, it was impossible to see the true beauty
and sanctity of those primary bonds of humanity. And while the relation
of the sexes was looked on in a wrong light, all other social relations
were necessarily also misconceived. "The very ideas of family and
national life," as it has been said, "those two divine roots of the
Church, severed from which she is certain to wither away into that most
cruel and most godless of spectres, a religious world, had perished in
the East, from the evil influence of the universal practice of slave-
holding, as well as from the degradation of that Jewish nation which had
been for ages the great witness for these ideas; and all classes, like
their forefather Adam--like, indeed, the Old Adam--the selfish,
cowardly, brute nature in every man and in every age--were shifting the
blame of sin from their own consciences to human relationships and
duties, and therein, to the God who had appointed them; and saying, as
of old, 'The woman whom Thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the
tree, and I did eat.'"
Much as Christianity did, even in Egypt, for woman, by asserting her
moral and spiritual equality with the man, there seems to have been no
suspicion that she was the true complement of the man, not merely by
softening him, but by strengthening him; that true manhood can be no
more developed without the influence of the woman, than true womanhood
without the influence of the man.
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