on oracle of eternal wisdom, it generated the monkish notions concerning womanhood.  If the desire of a wife is a weakness, which the apostle would gladly have forbidden, only that he feared worse consequences, an enthusiastic youth cannot but infer that it is a higher state of perfection not to desire a wife, and therefore aspires to “the crown of virginity.”  Here at once is full-grown monkery.  Hence that debasement of the imagination, which is directed perpetually to the lowest, instead of the highest side of the female nature.  Hence the disgusting admiration and invocation of Mary’s perpetual virginity.  Hence the transcendental doctrine of her immaculate conception from Anne, the “grandmother of God.”

In the above my critics have represented me to say that Christianity has done nothing for women.  I have not said so, but that what it has done has been exaggerated.  I say:  If the theory of Christianity is to take credit from the history of Christendom, it must also receive discredit.  Taking in the whole system of nuns and celibates, and the doctrine which sustains it, the root of which is apostolic, I doubt whether any balance of credit remains over from this side of Christian history.  I am well aware that the democratic doctrine of “the equality of souls” has a tendency to elevate women,—­and the poorer orders too; but this is not the whole of actual Christianity, which is a very heterogeneous mass.

2.  Again:  the modern doctrine, by aid of which West Indian slavery has been exterminated, is often put forward as Christian; but I had always discerned that it was not Biblical, and that, in respect to this great triumph, undue credit has been claimed for the fixed Biblical and authoritative doctrine.  As I have been greatly misunderstood in my first edition, I am induced to expand this topic.  Sir George Stephen,[15] after describing the long struggle in England against the West Indian interest and other obstacles, says, that, for some time, “worst of all, we found the people, not actually against us, but apathetic, lethargic, incredulous, indifferent.  It was then, and not till then, that we sounded the right note, and touched a chord that never ceased to vibrate. To uphold slavery was a crime against God! It was a NOVEL DOCTRINE, but it was a cry that was heard, for it would be heard.  The national conscience was awakened to inquiry, and inquiry soon produced conviction.”  Sir George justly calls the doctrine novel.  As developed in the controversy, it laid down the general proposition, that men and women are not, and cannot be chattels; and that all human enactments which decree this are morally null and void, as sinning against the higher law of nature and of God.  And the reason of this lies in the essential contrast of a moral personality and chattel.  Criminals may deserve to be bound and scourged, but they do not cease to be persons, nor indeed do even the insane.  Since every man