Some one asked a minister for his conception of the personal appearance of the devil.  His reply was, “A false-hearted and well-dressed gentleman, or a vain and fashionable woman.”  Woman was Satan’s first ally, though he worked in ambush, and approached man in concealment.  In the wisdom of his choice we discover the peril of woman.  It may be well briefly to review the public manner in which Satan employs her talent for the ruin of man and in opposing the rule of Christ.

1.  Passing over her social power, and without referring to her wiles of speech, of dress, of flattery, and of love, think of her in the arena of politics, joining her forces to infidelity, and with the disbelievers of the Bible, to obtain for woman a place for which she is not fitted, and which will destroy her peace, injure and undermine her influence in the home, and cause her to neglect wifehood and motherhood, to turn from the interior world of a quiet home, to the outside world of conflict and strife.  It is the boast of a writer in favor of “Woman’s Rights,” that “among the disbelievers of revealed religion, I have not found, during a life of half a century, a single opponent to the doctrine of equal rights for males and females.”  The correctness of this statement is to a wonderful extent true.  The believers of the Bible claim that the teachings and commands of the Word of God are in opposition to the doctrine.  When woman joins the ranks of the infidel, she turns from God, and loses her power in her former sphere.

2.  If there is one foe more than another, that threatens us as a nation, nearly all agree in pronouncing that foe to be Romanism.  Take this fact in connection with the obvious truth, that it is fashionable to pander to Rome.  Because of this tendency ripening into results, the State of New York, politically, is lost to Protestantism, and is as much Roman Catholic as is Italy or Rome.  Whence comes this influence, or producing cause?  Can we trace it to woman?  It will be admitted that the influence of Roman Catholic servants in our homes has never been measured.  The nurse teaches the child the use of the beads, and familiarizes the child, committed to her keeping, to the cross, as an emblem of worship.  Imagine the alarm of a Christian mother, when, because of the absence of the nurse it became a necessity to see the child to bed, when, to her surprise, the little girl of five years pulled out from beneath the pillow her beads and cross, and began going through the Papal forms of worship!  The mother wisely forbore a rebuke, changed her nurse, and led her child back to Christ, and so rescued her.  How many children are finding in their nurses, rather than in their mothers, their religious teachers?  The influence of Romish servants in our homes is felt in still another way.  Because of them there is a barrier to discussion, or even to conversation, concerning this monstrous error, which, like the frogs of Egypt, invades our very bread-troughs.  No man dare express his mind concerning Romanism at his table if the servant is a Romanist, lest he lose the services so much in demand, or lest he be reported to the priest, and so be placed under the ban or the displeasure of the Church of Rome, which is used as an engine of political and social power against the truth as it is in Jesus.