Page:Heroines of freethought (IA cu31924031228699).pdf/52

44 husband's love! and noble testimony of the husband to the merit of his wife! A writer in the London Critical Review says, in regard to her, “The objections to her character are those common to her with mast of the French writers and politicians of that period. They are philosophers without wisdom, and moralists without religion.” "Her life,” say Philip and Grace Wharton, “was morally faultless; but she was a Deist.” Even the liberal-hearted Lydia Maria Child remarks, “I might enlarge upon other points of her character, which qualify my respect for Madame Roland; but the times in which she lived were corrupt, and religion cast away as an idle toy, fit only for the superannuated.”

All of which means only that the one blemish to be found in her by her biographers was that which soon shall be accounted the highest evidence of her clear insight—that she had dared to think for herself in religious as in other matters, and being a brave as well as conscientious wo-