He, who as God was so full of mercy, forgiveness, and loving kindness to the suffering, the lost, and the fallen, with supreme wisdom, elected every man's conscience as his own judge. Had they, severally, no impurity of a like nature concealed from view? Were their lives so immaculate, that they could be self-elected arbiters of this woman's fate?

"He that is without sin among you let him cast a stone at her. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest even unto the last."

And between the sentence of condemnation and the fallen woman intervened a still more subtle and restraining influence. Christ, born of a woman, held, by virtue of His mother, womanhood sacred. Between the sinner and the Judge came the Personality of the Divine Son. Could man, born of woman's travail, look upon this pitiful creature and not weep? Could man, the brother, condemn a sister fallen through a brother's vice? Could Man, the God, knowing the supreme mission of woman, behold this sorry failure, but with the solemnity of omniscience?

Christ did not condone the crime; in tender mercy, from the height of His stainless purity and Divine authority, He commanded the woman to "sin no more"; but for the men, who hounded her down, He evinced the utmost scorn and the deepest disapprobation. Of all the depths of human depravity that saddened our Lord's troubled earthly life, from none did His infinite holiness recoil with such intense repulsion as from this hypocritical act of brutal malignity on the part of men, who, by the verdict of their own consciences, were themselves convicted of impurity. He marvelled at the hardness of the human heart; at the nature that had sunk so low, it could exult over the degradation of God's best gift to man.

The appeal then, from those men and women, who are fighting Christ's battle in the world, is made to the higher nature of man.

'Say to men, 'Come, suffer; you will hunger and thirst; you will perhaps be deceived, be betrayed, cursed; but you have a great duty to accomplish;' they will be deaf, perhaps, for a long time, to the severe voice of virtue; but on the day they do come to you, they will come as heroes, and will be invincible."1 The true inwardness of the sex-problem

1 Mazzini, see Note 3.

will be solved, when men look upon life, not only as an abnegation, but as a victory.1

"Unto thee shall be the desire, and thou shalt rule over it" (Genesis iv. 7).

"He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God, and he shall be My son " (Rev. xxi. 7).

And the sister-women will also plead with their fallen sisters; who will no longer cease to be sisters, because victims to the cruellest wrong that man can perpetrate on woman. They will teach them the divine mission of wifehood and motherhood; of the supreme sanctity of woman's functions; that woman, to whom men have assigned the lowest place, is the highest evolution of nature, and the chosen factor of Divine Wisdom to accomplish the loftiest moral ends.2 They will claim for the beautiful earthly frame its highest prerogative as the temple of the living God. They will ask, "Shall it be made a charnel house of all impurity?" "Be ye clean, that bear the vessels of the Lord." 3 For even now, women do not realise this fact, in its deep, its wondrous solemnity. This human body of woman, so perfect, so wisely adapted for a specific purpose, so beautifully proportioned by nature to further the great cosmic scheme of ultimate morality, purity, and holiness, is used, by the machinations of Satan himself, as the main tool for the dissemination of vice, and the widening of the borders of iniquity. It is, in truth, the earthly vehicle of sin unto death, or the chosen medium of righteousness unto everlasting life. The forces of good and of evil are ranged against each other, and lo so chary is the primary element of material, in pursuance of the universal law, that actually the same agent, under different conditions, is employed by both combatants as their strongest weapon of offence and defence!

And I would ask each woman, on which side does she range herself? There is no neutral ground. The contest is carried on by each individual unit on

one side or

-Matthew Arnold.

2 "The great end which the genius of the world-call it Providence, fate, or what you will-has at heart in civilisation, is the establishment of higher and higher codes of morality and of social relations among men.' History of Intellectual Development," Crozier.

3 Isaiah lii. 11.

the other. We fight for our sisters' liberty, and through them, for the emancipation of our sex; or for their continued bondage and our perpetual disgrace. We labour for the opening of the prison to them that are bound; or we strengthen the bands of wickedness for those "weeping in the playtime of the others, in the country of the free." We are champions for the truth that overcometh all things; or renegades in a losing cause, that has made lies its refuge, and hid itself under falsehood. For those who elect for the battle of the Cross, the struggle will be an arduous one, the fight sharp and decisive, the issue to be fought to the bitter end. But the night is far spent, the dawn is at hand; after the weeping and the anguish, "there shall be songs at break of day." The victory is assured. If it tarry, wait for it. The promise is to us and to our children; for "the testimony of Jesus is the Spirit of Prophecy," and He has said, "The covenant with death shall be disannulled, and the agreement with hell shall not stand."

"I am the Lord: that is My name: and My glory will I not give to another. Behold, the former things are come to pass, and new things do I declare: before they spring forth I tell you of them" (Isaiah xlii. 8, 9).

I saw, as in a vision, the Angel of God stand, guarding the Tree of Life. And he cried sorrowfully, looking down the ages, "Is it given to none of the children of men to eat of the Tree of Life, and to live for evermore?"

And as he spake, he beheld afar off the Figure of a Man, bearing a Cross, bent with sorrow and acquainted with grief, His face marred as no other man's, while from His brow fell drops of bloody sweat, and, toiling, He laid the Cross at the foot of the Tree of Life. Then the Angel cried, "My Lord and my God!" and he fell down and worshipped. And he said, "Do the children of men follow Thee, O my Lord Christ?" And the Figure rose in sublime majesty, His Face transfigured with the glory of the Divine, and He answered him, pointing down the roadway, "Behold, I see a great company of men and women, more than any man can number, and each bears a cross; and, as they lay them at My feet, they shall eat of the Tree of Life and live for evermore; and the leaves shall be for the Healing of the Nations."

1 Isaiah xxviii. 18.

PART VI

WOMAN AS THE WORKER IN THE PAST

WHEN surrounded by the finished products of this nineteenth century civilisation, we regard the varied triumphs of industry, art, science, and culture with a complacent sense of justifiable pride in the standard of perfection men's handiwork has reached, it is very seldom that the small beginnings which have led to these splendid results are called to mind; or indeed, any effort made to trace to the fountain-head the various fertilising streams, which, through the ages, have in ever-broadening areas, enriched, ennobled, and humanised mankind. To many masculine minds, it would possibly produce an unpleasant shock of surprise, and be met with a scornful incredulity, if it were whispered, that all the social and industrial development upon which modern civilisation rests, is owing, to a great extent, to the inventive genius and crude expedients of primitive woman, to the rude, uncultured mothers of the race. Yet, far-fetched and exaggerated as this statement may appear to many, it falls short of the truth, as patient research, with an honest desire for unbiassed justice, has discovered it.

"All the social fabrics of the world are built around women," ," is the evidence of Professor Otis Mason. "If women now sit on thrones, if the most beautiful painting in the world is of a mother and her child, if the image of a woman crowns the dome of the American Capitol, if in allegory and metaphor, and painting and sculpture, the highest ideals are women, it is because they have a right to be there. By all their drudgery and patience, by all their suffering and kindness, they have earned their right to be there." 1 I will therefore glance, alas, in a perfunctory and superficial manner, at the salient points of this in

1 "Women's Share in Primitive Culture," Professor Otis Mason.

teresting subject, and array some of the evidence of woman's first efforts for the social and æsthetic benefit of the race.

"Woman's work," says the Proverb, "is never done." Through the mists of tradition one humble figure always looms with more or less distinctness in the background, ever bending in lowly toil, ever patient, untiring, and insistent. In the folk-lore of the tribes, and in the primitive mythologies, a female deity invariably presided over those important functions of life, that may be termed social and industrial, and consequently the most beautiful and poetical myths and fables of antiquity are centred in the female form divine.

As I have before remarked, these glimmerings of great truths in the nascent human mind were always shrouded in the mystic language and signs of the primitive faiths. Thus the beneficent Earth-Mother, the resplendent Queen of the Air, the Sustainer of Life, the Protector of Mankind, the living Source of Fire, the Personification of Love, and the Ideal of Beauty, the exquisite embodiment of the Soul, the Preserver of Water-springs, the Guardian of Health, the Fountain of Wisdom, the Tamer of Wild Beasts, the Weaver of Life's Threads, and the Patroness of the Arts and Sciences, were but the etherealised forms of women, who had worked, suffered, and died before the eyes of men. Primitive man, in his simple faith, peopled the heavens above him with female divinities, benign helpful spirits, to whom he owed the greatest blessings of hearth and field, because their humble prototypes were ever with him, the ministers of such sweetness, comfort, and culture as he enjoyed. Man's mind, in those early days of mental development, was not imaginative but realistic. It was primarily upon the objects he saw, felt, and heard he bestowed the instinctive impulse of worship. In the light therefore of his daily experience, it was not strange that he should shadow forth, in the eternal mysteries of the skies, the glorified ideal of the ready helpmeet labouring by his side. And no proof of woman's supreme share in the primitive culture of the race can be stronger, than to find her distinctive attributes, achievements, services, and characteristics symbolised in the chief goddesses of the various cultes of pre-historic times.1

1 See "L'Eve Nouvelle," by Jules Bois.