“Will be as God, knowing good and evil.” Knowing for yourselves, and able to choose between the evil and the good.  Here ambition again overleaped itself.  Humility was slain, and a womanly virtue was destroyed by the tempter, who aimed to infuse into the mind of the woman, first, a doubt of the truth of the Word of God, and of the certainty of the divine threatening; second, a suspicion that God was withholding from her a good, instead of guarding her against an evil; and, third, he attempted to induce her to believe that adherence to this divine command stood in the way of her freedom, of her growth, and so by the words, “Ye will be as God, knowing good and evil,” he strove to awaken the feeling of self-exaltation,—­the longing for a higher development, in which she should attain to self-discretion and freedom of choice and action.

This suspicion is very common, even among our good women.  When a woman gets cold in her love for Jesus, she becomes suspicious of those she loves.  She permits the feeling, “My husband gives too much for benevolence, too little to me, and he is away too much in meetings, and is too little in his home,” to influence her.  She begins to talk against the church, and loves to stay at home.  Finds excuses for keeping away from the prayer meeting or from the paths of endeavor, and becomes a hinderance instead of a blessing to husband, to family, and to society.  A man finds it difficult to push the bark of benevolence and of holy endeavor up against the current of womanly opposition and suspicion, but when in the work of God she acts the part of a helpmeet, everything moves smoothly.  A recent writer uses this language:  “Expel woman as you will, she is in fact the parish.  Within, in her lowest spiritual form, as the ruling spirit she inspires, and sometimes writes the sermons.  Without, as the bulk of his congregation, she watches over his orthodoxy, verifies his texts, visits his schools, and harasses his sick.” ...  “The preacher who thunders so defiantly against spiritual foes, is trembling all the time beneath the critical eye that is watching him with so merciless an accuracy in his texts.  Impelled, guided, censured by woman, we can hardly wonder if, in nine cases out of ten, the parson turns woman himself, and the usurpation of woman’s rights in the services of religion has been deftly avenged by the subjugation of the usurpers.  Expelled from the temple, woman has simply put her priesthood into commission, and discharges her ministerial duties by proxy.”  Woman is the mainspring and the chief support of Ritualism.  Things were at a dead lock and stand still, until the so-called devotion gave an impetus to the movement.  The medieval church have glorified the devotion of woman; but once become a devotee, it had locked her in the cloister.  As far as action in the world without was concerned, the veil served simply as a species of suicide, and the impulses of woman, after all the crowns and pretty speeches of her religious counsellors,