[25] Ward, the American who rendered such service to the Chinese Emperor, has been deified. The Emperor, in a recent edict, has placed him among the major gods of China, commanding shrines to be built and worship to be paid to the memory of this American. The people are worshiping him along with the most ancient and powerful deities of their religion as a great deliverer from war and famine—as a powerful god in the form of man. In every household, school and temple, his name will be thus commemorated.—Newspaper Report.

[26] Diodorus Siculus.

[27] “I am nature, the parent of all things, the sovereign of the elements, the primary progeny of time, the most exalted of the deities, the first of the heavenly gods and goddesses, the queen of the shades, the uniform countenances who dispose with my rod the innumerable lights of heaven.”

[28] The salubrious breezes of the sea, and the mournful silence of the dead whose single deity the whole world venerates in many forms with various rites and many names. The Egyptians, skilled in ancient lore, worship me with proper ceremonies and call me by my true name—Queen Isis.

[29] Leeks, garlic, onions and beans.

[30] All the ancient nations appear to have had an ark or archa, in which to conceal something sacred.—Godfrey Higgins, Anacalypsis I, 347.

[31] The Sacred Song of Moses and Miriam was an early part of Jewish literature; the idea was borrowed like the ark from the religion of Isis.

[32] The throne of this brilliant queen who reigned 1600 years B.C. has recently been deposited in the British Museum. Her portrait, also brought to light, shows Caucasian features with a dimpled chin.

[33] Bryant was an English writer of the last century, a graduate of Cambridge who looked into many abstruse questions relating to ancient history. In 1796, eight years before his death, he published “A Dissertation Concerning the War of Troy.”

[34] That Homer came into Egypt, amongst other arguments they endeavor to prove it especially by the potion Helen gave Telemachus—in the story of Menelaus—to cause him to forget all his sorrows past, for the poet seems to have made an exact experiment of the potion Nepenthes, which he says Helen received from Polymnestes, the wife of Thonus, and brought it from Thebes in Egypt, and indeed in that city, even at this day, the women use this medicine with good success, and they say that in ancient times the medicine for the cure of anger and sorrow was only to be found among the Diospolitans, Thebes and Diospolis being affirmed by them to be one and the same city.—Diodorus Siculus, Vol. I, Chap. VII.

[35] The remaining three were Cyrus, Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander. Cyrus met defeat and death at the hands of Tomyris, queen of the Scythians, who caused him to be crucified, a punishment deemed so ignominious by the Romans that it was not inflicted upon the most criminal of their citizens. Because of his barbarity, Tomyris caused the head of Cyrus to be plunged into a sack of blood “that he might drink his fill.”

[36] Very few mummies of children have been found.—Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians.

[37] In relation to women the laws were very severe; for one that committed a rape upon a free woman was condemned to have his privy member cut off; for they judged that the three most heinous offenses were included in that one vile act, that is wrong, defilement and bastardy.—Diodorus, Vol. I, Chap. VII.

[38] Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries. Chapter on the Vestals.—Lanciani.

[39] The Anacalypsis II, 241.

[40] According to Commissioner of Education, Chang Lai Sin, Chinese women can read and write, and when a husband wishes to do anything he consults with his wife, and when the son comes home, although he may be prime minister, he shows his respect to his mother by bending his knee. “I claim that the Chinese institutions and system of education, both with regard to men and women, are far superior to those of any of the neighboring nations for a great many centuries, and that it is only within this century that China, after having been defeated by so many reverses in her arms, has turned to a foreign country—to the United States—for example and instruction.”

[41] The Shakers hold that the revelation of God is progressive. That in the first or antediluvian period of human nature God was known only as a Great Spirit; that in the second or Jewish period he was revealed as the Jehovah. He, she or a dual being, male or female, the “I am that I am;” that Jesus in the third cycle made God known as a father; and that in the last cycle commencing with 1770, A.D., “God is revealed in the character of Mother, an eternal Mother, the bearing spirit of all the creation of God.”—W. A. Parcelle.

[42] In China the family acting through its natural representative is the political unit. This representative may be a woman. The only body in China that may be said to correspond with our law-making assemblies is the Academy of Science and Letters of Pekin, and women are not excluded from that learned conclave. La Cité Chinoise.—G. Eugene Simon.

[43] Art Letters, p. 322.—Bachofen.

[44] Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. XVI, Edinburgh, 1872.

[45] The divine element, according to the idea of the ancient world, was composed of two sexes. There were dei femma, and hence temples sacred to goddesses; holy sanctuaries where were celebrated mysteries in which men could not be permitted to participate. The worship of goddesses necessitated priestesses, so that women exercised the sacerdotal office in the ancient world. The wives of the Roman Consuls even offered public sacrifices at certain festivals. The more property the wife had, the more rights she had.—M. Derraimes.

[46] The superiority of woman’s condition in Europe and America is generally attributed to Christianity. We are anxious to give some credit to that influence, but it must not be forgotten that the nations of Northern Europe treated women with delicacy and devotion long before they were converted to the Christian faith. Long before the Christian era women were held in high estimation, and enjoyed as many privileges as they generally have since the spread of Christianity. Nichols.—Women of all Nations.

[47] When I go back to the most remote periods of antiquity into which it is possible to penetrate, I find clear and positive evidence of several important facts: First, no animal food was eaten; no animals were sacrificed. Higgins.—Anacalypsis II, p. 147.

[48] Observe that I.H.U. is Jod, male, father; “He” is female, Binah, and U is male, Vau, Son.—Sepher Yetzirah.

[49] The Perfect Way.—Kingsford.

[50] I.A.H. according to the Kabbalists, is I. (Father) and A.H. (Mother); composed of I. the male, and H. the mother. Nork.—Bibl. Mythol., I, 164-65 (note to Sod 166, 2, 354).

[51] Nork says the “Woman clothed with the sign of the Sun and the Moon is the bi-sexed or male-female deity; hence her name is Iah, composed of the masculine I and the feminine Ah. Sod.—Appendix 123.

[52] The Perfect Way, p. 78.

[53] That name of Deity, which occurring in the Old Testament is translated the Almighty, namely El Shaddai, signified the Breasted God, and is used when the mode of the divine nature implied is of a feminine character. Kingsford.—The Perfect Way, p. 68.

[54] A chief signification of the word Babel among Orientals was “God the Father.” The Tower of Babel therefore signifies the Tower of God the Father—a remarkable indication of the confusion, not alone of tongues, but of religious ideas arising from man’s attempt to worship the father alone.—E. L. Mason. Injustice to the sex reached its culmination in the enthronement of a personal God with a Son to share his glory, but wifeless, motherless, daughterless.—Dr. William Henry Channing.

[55] Those who have studied the ancient lore of Cabalistic books, know that in the ineffable name Yod-he-vau (or Jehovah), the first letter yod signifies the masculine, the second letter hu or ha the feminine, while the last letter van or vaud is said by Cabalists to indicate the vital life which fills all the throbbing universe from the union of eternal love with eternal wisdom. It is this ineffable holy (or whole) Mother and Father, which must be exalted and imaged forth in family and government with the woman-force more strongly emphasized, before even human society can be filled with that new creation with which the iridescent subtle mother-essence infuses and enwreathes all other realms of the pulsing universe. No man seems shaken at hearing of the fatherhood of Jehovah. Is motherhood less divine? Nothing but a male-born theology evolved from the overheated fires of feeling would have burned away all recognition of the fact that the presence of the “Eternal Womanly” in Yod-he-vau’s being is necessary to full-sphered perfection; none but those whose degraded estimate of woman has caused them to desecrate her holy office of high priestess of life, will see anything more sacrilegious in a recognition of “Our Mother in Heaven,” and in offering her the prayer “hallowed be thy name, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” than in saying the same things to the Father there. Those who chose to search will discover that the “Eternal Fatherhood of God,” in regard to which Protestant theologians talk so much, has been balanced in all ancient religions as well as in the nature of things by the eternal Motherhood in Jehovah’s being, without which Fatherhood would be impossible. This Motherhood has always and everywhere been the preserver and creator of the omnipresent life of all kinds which fills the throbbing universe. Yod-he-vau’s Lost Name can never be hallowed (made whole) without the Mother is there. E.L. Mason.—The Lost Name.

[1] It was a favorite doctrine of the Christian fathers that concupiscence or the sensual passion was the original sin of human nature. Lecky—Hist. European Morals. The tendency of the church towards the enforcement of celibacy was early seen. At the four Synods which assembled to establish the true faith in respect to the Holy nature of Christ’s Humanity, the first one at Nice, 318, the second at Constantinople with forty bishops present; the third at Ephesus with two hundred bishops present; the fourth at Chaledonia with many bishops together, they forever forbade all marriage to the minister at the altar. Monumenta Ecclesiastica, p. 347. To no minister at the altar is it allowed to marry, but it is forbidden to every one. Ibid.

[2] According to Christianity woman is the unclean one, the seducer who brought sin into the world and caused the fall of man. Consequently all apostles and fathers of the church have regarded marriage as an inevitable evil just as prostitution is regarded today. August Bebel.—Woman in the Past, Present and Future.

[3] Spirit in the Hebrew, as shown in the first chapter, answers to all genders; in the Greek to the feminine alone. With Kabbalists the “Divine Spirit” was conceded to be the feminine Jehovah, that is, the feminine principle of the Godhead.

[4] From Marcellina, in the second century, a body of the church took its name. Her life was pure, and her memory has descended to us free from calumny and reproach.

[5] Lowest in the scale of being are those invisible creatures called by Kabbalists the “elementary.”... The second class is composed of the invisible antitypes of the men to be born. Isis Unveiled, I, 310.

[6] Who maintained that Adam did not think of celebrating his nuptials till he went out of Paradise.

[7] It was the effect of God’s goodness to man that suffered him to sleep when Eve was formed, as Adam being endowed with a spirit of prophecy might foresee the evils which the production of Eve would cause to all mankind, so that God perhaps cast him into that sleep lest he should oppose the creation of his wife. Life of Adam by Loredano. Pub. at Amsterdam, 1696. See Bayle.

[8] Lecky.—Hist. European Morals.

[9] That marriage was evil was taught by Jerome.

[10] So fully retaining it as to require the circumcision of Timothy, the Gentile, before sending him as a missionary to the Jews.

[11] The Council of Tours (813) recommended bishops to read, and if possible retain by heart, the epistles of St. Paul.

[12] Although Paul “led about” other “women” saluting “some with a holy kiss.”

[13] 964. Notion of uncleanliness attaching to sexual relations fostered by the church. Herbert Spencer.—Descriptive Sociology, England.

[14] In the third century marriage was permitted to all orders and ranks of the clergy. Those, however, who continued in a state of celibacy, obtained by this abstinence a higher reputation of sanctity and virtue than others. This was owing to an almost general persuasion that they who took wives were of all others the most subject to the influence of malignant demons.—Mosheim.

[15] Old (Christian) theologians for a long time disputed upon the nature of females; a numerous party classed them among the brutes having neither soul nor reason. They called a council to arrest the progress of this heresy. It was contended that the women of Peru and other countries of America were without soul and reason. The first Christians made a distinction between men and women. Catholics would not permit them to sing in Church. Dictionnaire Feodal Paris, 1819.

[16] By a decree of the Council of Auxerre (A.D. 578), women on account of their impurity were forbidden to receive the sacrament into their naked hands.

[17] Catherine reproached the Protestants with this impious license as with a great crime. “Les femmes chantant aux orgies des huguenots, dit Georges l’apotre; apprenez donc, predicans, que saint Paul a dit; Mulieres in ecclesiaetaccant; et que dans le chapitre de l’apocolypse l’evoque de Thyathire est manace de la damnation pour avoir permis a une femme de parles a l’eglise. See Redavances Seigneur.

[18] When part singing was first introduced into the United States, great objection was made to women taking the soprano or leading part, which by virtue of his superiority it was declared belonged to man. Therefore woman was relegated to the bass or tenor but nature proved too powerful, and man was eventually compelled to take bass or tenor as his part, while woman carried the soprano, says the History of Music.

[19] Leviticus 12:15. Dr. Smith characterizes a sin-offering as a sacrifice made with the idea of propitiation and atonement; its central idea, that of expiation, representing a broken covenant between God and the offender; that while death was deserved, the substitute was accepted in lieu of the criminal.—Dictionary of the Bible.

[20] The Talmud (Mishna), declared three cleansings were necessary for leprosy and three for children, thus placing the bringing of an immortal being into life upon the same plane of defilement with the most hideous plague of antiquity.

[21] The mean term of life for these wretched girls under religious confinement in a nunnery was about ten years. From the fifteenth century a sickness was common, known as Disease of the Cloisters. It was described by Carmen. Jewish contempt of the feminine was not alone exhibited in prohibiting her entrance into the holy places of the temple, and in the ceremonies of her purification, but also in the especial holiness of male animals which alone were used for sacrifice. Under Jewish law the sons alone inherited, the elder receiving a double portion as the beginning of his father’s strength. See Deut. 21-15. If perchance the mother also possessed an inheritance that was also divided among the sons to the exclusion of daughters. The modern English law of primogeniture is traceable to Judaism. Even the commandments were made subservient to masculine ideas, the tenth classing a man’s wife with his cattle and slaves, while the penalties of the seventh were usually visited upon her alone.

[22] The reign of Constantine marks the epoch of the transformation of Christianity from a religious into a political system. Draper.—Conflict of Religion and Science.

[23] “The woman that cometh to give thanks must offer accustomed offering in this kingdom; it is the law of the kingdom in such cases.”

[24] In the year 1867 the Right Rev. Bishop Coxe, of the Western Diocese of New York, refused the sacrament to those women patients of Dr. Foster’s Sanitarium at Clifton Springs, N.Y., whose heads were uncovered, although the rite was performed in the domestic chapel of that institution and under the same roof as the patient’s own rooms. During the famous See trial at Newark, N.J., 1876, the prosecutor, Rev. Dr. Craven, declared that every woman before him wore her head covered in token of her subordination.

[25] The Catholic Congress of July, 1892, telegraphing the pope it would strive to obtain for the Holy See the recovery of its inalienable prerogative and territorial independence, was convened at Fulda.

[26] “In the old days, no woman was allowed to put her foot within the walls of the monastery at San Augustin, Mexico. A noble lady of Spain, wife of the reigning Viceroy, was bent on visiting it. Nothing could stop her, and in she came. But she found only empty cloisters, for each virtuous monk locked himself securely in his cell, and afterward every stone in the floor which her sacrilegious feet had touched was carefully replaced by a new one fresh from the mountain top. Times are sadly changed. The house has now been turned into a hotel.”

[27] Sacerdotal Celibacy.—Lea.

[28] Studies in Church History.—Lea.

[29] History of Materialism.

[30] Seals upon legal papers owe their origin to the custom of the uneducated noble warrior stamping the imprint of his clenched or mailed hand upon wax as his signature.

[31] St. Theresa founded the Barefoot Carmelites, and it is but a few years since thousands of its members assembled to do honor to her name.

[32] The annals of the Church of Rome give us the history of that celebrated prostitute Marozia of the tenth century, who lived in public concubinage with Pope Sergius III., whom she had raised to the papal throne. Afterwards she and her sister Theodosia placed another of their lovers, under name of Anastatius III., and after him John X., in the same position. Still later this same powerful Marozia placed the tiara upon the head of her son by Pope Sergius under name of John XI., and this before he was sixteen years of age. The celebrated Countess Matilda exerted no less power over popedom, while within this century the maid of Kent has issued orders to the pope himself.

[33] The first abbess, Petrouville, becoming involved in a dispute with the powerful bishop of Angers, summoned him before the council of Chateraroux and Poicters, where she pleaded the cause of her order and won her case. In 1349 the abbess Theophegenie denied the right of the seneschal of Poitou to judge the monks of Fontervault, and gained it for herself. In 1500, Mary of Brittany, in concert with the pope’s deputies, drew up with an unfaltering hand the new statutes of the order. Legouve.—Moral History of Women.

[34] No community was richer or more influential, yet during six hundred years and under thirty-two abbesses, every one of its privileges were attacked by masculine pride or violence, and every one maintained by the vigor of the women.—Sketches of Fontervault.

[35] What is more remarkable the monks of this convent were under control of the abbess and nuns, receiving their food as alms.—Ibid.

[36] “The Lord’s Prayer,” taught his disciples by Jesus, recognizes the loss, and demands restoration of the feminine in “Hallowed (whole) be Thy Name.”

[37] Woman should always be clothed in mourning and rags, that the eye may perceive in her only a penitent, drowned to tears, and so doing for the sin of having ruined the whole human race. Woman is the gateway of satan, who broke the seal of the forbidden tree and who first violated the divine law.

[38] Gildas, in the first half of the sixth century, declared the clergy were utterly corrupt. Lea.—Studies in Church History.

[39] In the third century marriage was permitted to all ranks and orders of the clergy. Those, however, who continued in a state of celibacy, obtained by this abstinence a higher reputation of sanctity and virtue than others. This was owing to the almost general persuasion that they who took wives were of all others the most subject to the influence of malignant demons.—Mosheim. As early as the third century, says Bayle, were several maidens who resolved never to marry.

[40] The priests of the Greek Church are still forbidden a second marriage. In the beginning of the reign of Edward I, when men in orders were prohibited from marriage in England, a statute was framed under which lay felons were deprived of the clergy in case they had committed bigamy in addition to their other offenses; bigamy in the clerical sense meaning marriage with a widow or with two maidens in succession.

[41] Pelagius II., sixty-fifth pope in censuring those priests, who after the death of their wives have become fathers by their servants, recommended that the culpable females should be immured in convents to perform perpetual penance for the fault of the priest. Cormenin.—History of the Popes, p. 84.

[42] A priest’s wife is nothing but a snare of the devil, and he who is ensnared thereby on to his end will be seized fast by the devil, and he must afterwards pass into the hands of fiends and totally perish.—Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical, pp. 438-42. Canons of Aelfric and Aelfric’s Pastoral Epistles, p. 458.

[43] Momumenta Ecclesiastica. Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical.

[44] In order to understand the morals of the clergy of this period, it is important that we should make mention of a law which was passed by the emperors Valentinian, Valerius and Gratian toward the end of the year 370. It prohibited ecclesiastics and monks from entering the houses of widows and single women living alone or who had lost their parents. Dr. Cormenin.—History of the Popes, p. 62.

[45] Lecky finds evidence of the most hideous immorality in these restrictions, which forbade the presence even of a mother or sister in a priest’s house. Lea says it is somewhat significant that when in France the rule of celibacy was completely enforced churchmen should find it necessary to revive this hideously suggestive restriction which denied the priest the society of his mother and sister.—Sacerdotal Celibacy, p. 344.

[46] He declared it to be the highest degree of wickedness to rise from a woman’s side to make the body of Christ. He was discovered the same night with a woman to the great indignation of the people, and obliged to flee the country to escape condign punishment.

[47] It is not difficult to conceive the order of ideas that produced that passionate horror of the fair sex which is such a striking characteristic of old Catholic theology. Celibacy was universally conceded as the highest form of virtue, and in order to make it acceptable theologians exhausted all the resources of their eloquence in describing the iniquity of those whose charm had rendered it so rare. Hence the long and fiery disquisitions on the unparalleled malignity, the unconceivable subtlety, the frivolity, the unfaithfulness, the unconquerable evil propensities of woman. Lecky.—Hist. European Morals.

[48] The Fathers of the Church for the most part, vie with each other in their depreciation of woman and denouncing her with every vile epithet, held it a degradation for a saint to touch even his aged mother with his hand in order to sustain her feeble steps.... For it declared woman unworthy through inherent impurity even to set foot within the sanctuaries of its temples; suffered her to exercise the function of wife and mother only under the spell of a triple exorcism, and denied her when dead burial within its more sacred precincts even though she was an abbess of undoubted sanctity. Anna Kingsford.—The Perfect Way, p. 286.

[49] Disease of the Cloisters.

[50] When the sailors of Columbus returned from the new world they brought with them a disease of an unknown character, which speedily found its way into every part of Europe. None were exempt; the king on his throne, the beggar in his hovel, noble and peasant, priest and layman alike succumbed to the dire influence which made Christendom one vast charnel house. Of it, Montesquieu said: “It is now two centuries since a disease unknown to our ancestors was first transplanted from the new world to ours, and came to attack human nature in the very source of life and pleasure. Most of the powerful families of the South of Europe were seen to perish by a distemper that was grown too common to be ignominious, and was considered in no other light than that of being fatal. Works, I, 265.

[51] St. Ambrose and others believed not that they (women) were human creatures like other people. Luther.—Familiar Discourses, p. 383.

[52] When a woman is born it is a deficit of nature and contrary to her intentions, as is the case when a person is born blind or lame or with any natural defect, and as we frequently see happens in fruit trees which never ripen. In like manner a woman may be called a fortuitous animal and produced by accident.

[53] Cajetan, living from 1496 to 1534, became General of the Dominican Order and afterwards Cardinal.

[54] “The Father alone is creator.”

[55] By decree of the Council of Lyons, 1042, barons were allowed to enslave the children of married clergy.—Younge.

[56] In 1108 priests were again ordered to put away their wives. Such as kept them and presumptuously celebrated mass were to be excommunicated. Even the company of their wives was to be avoided. Monks and priests who for love of their wives left their orders suffering excommunication, were again admitted after forty days penance if afterwards forsaking them.

[57] Dulaure.—Histoire de Paris, I, 387, note.

[58] The abbot elect of St. Augustine, at Canterbury, in 1171, was found on investigation to have seventeen illegitimate children in a single village. An abbot of St. Pelayo, in Spain, in 1130, was proved to have kept no less than seventy mistresses.—Hist. European Morals, p. 350.

[59] A tax called “cullagium,” which was a license to clergymen to keep concubines, was during several years systematically levied by princes.—Ibid 2, 349.

[60] Supplement to Lumires, 50th question, Art, III.

[61] St. Anselm, although very strict in the enforcement of the canons favoring celibacy, found recalcitrant priests in his own diocese whose course he characterized as “bestial insanity.”

[62] So says Bayle, author of the Historical and Critical Dictionary, a magnificent work in many volumes. Bayle was a man of whom it has justly been said his “profound and varied knowledge not only did much to enlighten the age in which he lived by pointing out the errors and supplying the deficiencies of contemporaneous writers of the seventeenth century, but down to the present time his work has preserved a repository of facts from which scholars continually draw.”

[63] Those who support celibacy would perhaps choose rather to allow crimes than marriage, because they derive considerable revenue by giving license to keep concubines. A certain prelate boasted openly at his table that he had in his diocese 1,000 priests who kept concubines, and who paid him, each of them, a crown a year for their license.—Cornelius Aggrippa.