All through that winter Hattie and I occupied our time studying the Bible and reading the commentaries of Clark, Scott, and Wordsworth (Bishop of Lincoln).  We found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch.  Surely the writers had a very low idea of the nature of their God.  They make Him not only anthropomorphic, but of the very lowest type, jealous and revengeful, loving violence rather than mercy.  I know no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman.  Miriam, the eldest sister of Moses and Aaron, a genius, a prophetess, with the family aptitude for diplomacy and government, is continually set aside because of her sex—­permitted to lead the women in singing and dancing, nothing more.  No woman could offer sacrifices nor eat the holy meats because, according to the Jews, she was too unclean and unholy.

But what is the use, say some, of attaching any importance to the customs and teachings of a barbarous people?  None whatever.  But when our bishops, archbishops, and ordained clergymen stand up in their pulpits and read selections from the Pentateuch with reverential voice, they make the women of their congregation believe that there really is some divine authority for their subjection.  In the Thirty-First Chapter of Numbers, in speaking of the spoils taken from the Midianites, the live stock is thus summarized:  “Five thousand sheep, threescore and twelve thousand beeves, threescore and one thousand asses, and thirty-two thousand women and women-children,” which Moses said the warriors might keep for themselves.  What a pity a Stead had not been there, to protect the child-women of the Midianites and rebuke the Lord’s chosen people as they deserved!  In placing the women after the sheep, the beeves, and the asses, we have a fair idea of their comparative importance in the scale of being, among the Jewish warriors.  No wonder the right reverend bishops and clergy of the Methodist Church, who believe in the divine origin and authority of the Pentateuch, exclude women from their great convocations in the American Republic in the nineteenth century.  In view of the fact that our children are taught to reverence the book as of divine origin, I think we have a right to ask that, in the next revision, all such passages be expurgated, and to that end learned, competent women must have an equal place on the revising committee.

Mrs. Margaret Bright Lucas came, in February, to spend a few days with us.  She was greatly shocked with many texts in the Old Testament, to which we called her attention, and said:  “Here is an insidious influence against the elevation of women, which but few of us have ever taken into consideration.”  She had just returned from a flying visit to America; having made two voyages across the Atlantic and traveled three thousand miles across the continent in two months, and this at the age of sixty-eight years.  She was enthusiastic in her praises of the women she met in the United States.  As her name was already on the committee to prepare “The Woman’s Bible,” we had her hearty approval of the undertaking.