Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/170

 way, was evidently invented by man himself for his own convenience). "Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee." And among all tribes, and in all nations he has ruled with a rod of iron! The Christian dispensation has interfered somewhat with his former reign of tyranny, for with the birth of Christ came, to a certain extent, the idealization and beatification of womanhood. The Greeks and Romans, however, had a latent glimmering idea of what Woman in all her glory should be, and of what she might possibly attain to in the future,—for all their grandest symbols of life, such as Truth, Beauty, Justice, Fortune, Fame, Wisdom, are always represented by their sculptors clothed in the female form divine. It is a curious fact, that in those early periods of civilization, when Literature and Art were just dawning upon the world, man, though aggregating to his own Ego nearly everything in the universe, paused before representing himself as a figure of Justice, Mercy or Wisdom. He evidently realized his unfitness to stand, even in marble, before the world as a symbol of moral virtue. He therefore, with a grace which well became him in those "pagan" days, bent the knee to all noble attributes of humanity as represented in Woman. Her fair face, her beauteous figure, greeted him in all his temples of worship;—as Venus and Diana she smiled upon him; as the goddess of Fortune or Chance, she accepted his votive wreaths,—as Fame or Victory, she gave him blessing whenever he went to war, or returned in triumph from the field;—and all this was but the embryo or shadowing-forth of woman's higher future and better