Page:Heroines of freethought (IA cu31924031228699).pdf/170

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
162
HARRIET MARTINEAU

prizes for the three best tracts "On the Introduction and Promotion of Christian Unitarianism among the Roman Catholics, the Jews, and Mohammedans.” She competed for all three, and, singularly enough, won them all, though three separate sets of judges were appointed to compare the merits of the different essays. All through her literary career, theology and the basis of religious belief seem to have occupied the greater share of her attention and investigation, and to the thoroughness and fearlessness of these investigations is due the advanced position she has taken on these subjects; a position which is peculiarly hard for a woman to maintain, as she finds herself arrayed against all but an infinitesimal minority of her own sex, and is thus deprived of most of that affiliation and intellectual companionship which is peculiarly necessary to the feminine mind.

So fearless a thinker as Miss Martineau, as a matter of course, could not long refrain from joining the ranks of radical re-