polls to deposit her ballot in opposition to the males, we might look more confidently for exhibitions of force, and, instead of finding woman submitting privately to the maltreatment of her husband, we should see her obliged to suffer publicly the brutality of many men.
I wish that women everywhere would study the one argument that can be brought against woman suffrage. It is this: Woman may reform man. He has shown us clearly that he will not reform himself. Now, unless woman will interest herself in this reformation, she has no business with the ballot. So far woman has done as well as man in the use of the ballot; she has done no better;
but she can, if she will. Man has no right to expect woman to take up issues that he ignores, nor has he any right to withhold the suffrage for fear she will do so. But woman in asking for the ballot ought to say to man. We will make better use of it than you have. This is the ground on which we must demand the suffrage. Not the use of the ballot simply to make our own importance greater, but the ballot as it could be used to raise politics out of its filthiness, corruption, and ignorance, and to bring in the reign of purity, patriotism, and intelligence.
| Therese A. Jenkins. |
| Cheyenne, W. T., November 15, 1888, |
THE DEVIL-THEORY.
IT is a somewhat melancholy thing to reflect that, while we have a ministry of truth in the men who, with dispassionate minds, are applying them-selves to discover the laws of nature and the true succession and affiliation of historical phenomena, we have also a ministry of error devoted to opposing, one by one, the conclusions of science, and fostering in the minds of those to whom it is addressed habits of false and inconclusive reasoning. We may quote, as an example of the first, the work of a man like our valued contributor, Dr. Andrew D. White, whose articles on "Demoniacal Possession and Insanity" in recent numbers of this magazine have attracted so much attention. We regret to have to quote as an illustration of the second the recent utterances, on the very same subject, of a man who stands to-day in what but lately was, perhaps, the most progressive pulpit of the whole country, that of Plymouth Church. The Rev. Dr. Lyman Abbott is a man of fine sympathies, of wide culture, and of much moderation of character and judgment. He is a man to whom we should have been disposed to look for steady work in the direction of sound and reasonable views; particularly considering the vantage-ground he occupies as successor to one who, whatever his faults and eccentricities, was ever looking toward the light, and had thoroughly reconciled himself to the leading tenets of modern science. Instead of this, however, we find him accepting to the fullest extent the doctrine of demoniacal possession, and defending it by arguments of the most sophistical character. While the ex-President of Cornell is laboring to banish from men's minds the last vestiges of belief in diabolic agency, the successor of Beecher is handling the devils of ancient narrative with all the tenderness and respect due to the most venerable possessions of the human race. Let us, then, briefly examine what this prominent divine has to say on the topic in question. Dr. Abbott announces the theory that "evil spirits exercise an influence over mankind." He explains later that by "evil spirits" he means "disembodied spirits"; and adds that there is "nothing unnatural" in their exercising the same kind of control over men that masterful characters exercise over others of weaker will. This hypothesis he holds to be not only scriptural, but more consonant than any other with the facts of science. Charles J. Guiteau, of repulsive memory, he considers to have been a man possessed. "What we call the impulses of our lower nature are often," Dr. Abbott is inclined to think, "the whispered suggestions of fiend-like natures, watching
