Page:Heroines of freethought (IA cu31924031228699).pdf/21

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MADAME ROLAND.
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thee; while death for him severed no such near and dear human ties as for thee, whose love for husband and child was deep and strong as thine own nature. His tears of anguish in the garden of Gethsemane were not more bitter than thine in the secrecy of thy gloomy prison cell; nor didst thou weakly ask watchers to share those hours of anguished renunciation. Pathetic as his "Father, forgive them!" is thy sorrowful "O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!"

The coming woman—our ideal—can never come in nobler guise than that of Madame Roland. Uplifted by the force of her pure moral character even above the sanguinary waves of that "Reign of Terror" — waves which left their defacing stain upon many of the fairest names that flashed meteor-like across that dismal panorama—the worst which even her Christian biographers have found to say of her is, that she was morally brave enough to avow herself a Deist. Philip and Grace Wharton, in their "Queens of Soci-