of condition and rights than there was, and is, after the fall. "Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall over thee." This sounds like something penal, though perhaps some would regard it as merely predictive, and intended to describe the cruel and brutalizing tendency of sin, in turning man, who ought to be the loving companion of his wife, into a tyrant. How fearfully, if predictive, this sentence has been fulfilled, the degradation of woman—her wrongs, her sorrows, and her vices, in many cases, most painfully attest.
History, which will ever be found to accredit revelation, proves the fact that in most Pagan and Mohammedan nations, whether ancient or modern, woman has been cruelly and wickedly sunk below her proper level in social and domestic life. "Hated and despised from her birth, and her birth itself esteemed a calamity—in some countries not even allowed the rank of a moral and responsible agent—so tenderly alive to her degradation that she acquiesces in the murder of her female offspring—immured from infancy—without education—married without her consent—in a multitude of instances sold by her parents—refused the confidence of her husband, and banished from his table—on his death doomed to the funeral pile, or to contempt that renders life a burden." In such a condition she has been the household drudge, or the mere object of passion. She has ministered to the gratification of man's indolence or appetites, but has not been his companion, his counselor, or his
