usages of the society in which they lived, where those usages were not in themselves immoral or contrary to the Word of God.  Kindred to I Cor. xiv, 34, 35, and referring to the same thing, is I Tim. ii, 11, 12:  “Let the women learn in silence with all subjection.  But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.”  For a woman to attempt any thing either in public or private that man claimed as his peculiar function, was strictly prohibited by Roman law; and Christian women, as well as men, were to be submissive to the “powers that be.”  Those who contend, from their rendering of these texts, that women are prohibited by them from taking part in the public worship of God, to be consistent, should also insist that they must not enter the house of God at all; because they are as strictly charged by Paul to remain at home and learn in silence from their husbands, as to refrain from speaking.

Now, if women are to be silent in the Church; that is, if they are neither to pray, speak, nor sing in public—­for singing is certainly one method of conveying instruction to those who hear, and is therefore teaching them how to ascribe praise to God—­if they are, upon Scriptural authority, to know nothing but what they may learn from their husbands at home,—­then our whole system of civilized education with regard to women is out of place; we had better borrow a leaf from the Turks or Chinese.  Girls here are sent to school, and encouraged to exert their mental energies to the utmost in acquiring knowledge.  Both mothers and daughters are taken to church, and if they have tuneful voices they are expected to sing; all of which is manifestly improper and unchristian, if women are to receive all religious instruction from their “husbands at home” only, and in silence.  The taking of women to church, or indeed out of the house, therefore, is exposing them to the temptation of hearing and receiving instruction from unauthorized lips; for—­fearfully depraved though it may be in the sight of some—­women are quite as prone as men to listen to what is told them and to remember what they hear, and—­worse still—­to reason out difficult problems for themselves.

And what is to be done for widows, or poor women who have never been blessed with husbands?  Are they to go down to death in heathenish darkness, because the genial light of a husband’s countenance has ceased to shine upon them, or, perhaps, has never done so?  Must unmarried women forever continue in ignorance of the glorious Gospel of Christ, because they have no husbands to teach them?  As girls, according to such a rendering, they ought not to have learned any thing; for a father’s teaching—­if it were proper for him to give it—­and a husband’s might differ widely.  Besides, what is to be done for those women who are blessed with husbands incapable of teaching them; or, as is notoriously so frequently the case, who choose rather to spend their time in places of disreputable character than at their homes with their families!