Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/560

534 Procrustean process to conform the enlarged natures of the present to the past. While the human soul, like the infinite in wisdom and love, is ever governed by the eternal law of progress, creeds and codes are always changing. All things founded in immutable truth grow only the stronger by every trial.

. . . . The sacred traditions of both Jew and Gentile agree in ascribing to woman a primary agency in the introduction of human evils. In the Greek. Mythology, she is indeed not the first offender; but she is the bearer of the box that contained all the crimes and diseases which have punished our world for the abuse of liberty. It is worthy of remark that Pandora, who is the Eve: of the Grecian system, being like her Hebrew correspondent, created for special purposes, was the joint work of all the gods. Venus gave her beauty, Minerva. wisdom, Apollo the art of music, Mercury eloquence, and the rest the perfection and completeness of all her divine accomplishments. Her name signifies gifts. from all.

 A combination and a form indeed Where every god did seem to set his seal, To give the world assurance of a paragon."

Prometheus made the first man of clay and animated him with fire stolen from Heaven. Jupiter is represented as attaching the terrible consequences of a rational and responsible vitality, thus conferred upon a creation of earth, by sending this wonderfully gifted Pandora into the world loaded with all the evils which it was fated to endure. It was her destiny to be the occasion of the fall, the instrument of doom; but her fortunes are linked to the resurrection and life, as well as the suffering and death of the race. Among the gifts of Pandora which had otherwise been fatal, she brought hope which lay concealed after all the others had flown abroad on their missions of mischief. In our Sacred Story this point in the parable has a clear explanation: "The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head." If she brought death into the world, she brought forth a Son who "taketh away the sins of the world." . . . . These myths, whether received as simple facts, or poetic fiction, whose oracles always: reveal the deepest signification of facts, alike indicate the eminent agency of woman in the fall and rising again of the human image of the divine upon earth.

. . . . From the marriage hour woman is presented only in a series of dissolving views. First. She stands beside her husband radian' in girlish beauty. She worships. One side of the lesson is well learned, that of entire dependence. Not once has she dreamed that there must be mutual dependence and separate fountains of reciprocal life. . . . . In the next scene the child wife appears withering away from life as from the heart she is not large or noble enough to fill — pining in the darkness of her home-life, made only the deeper by her inactivity, ignorance, and despair. . . . . In another view she has passed the season of despair, and appears as the heartless votary of fashion, a flirt, or that most to be dreaded, most to be despised being, a married coquette; at once seductive, heartless, and basely unprincipled; or as beauty of person has faded away, she may be found turning from these lighter styles of toys to a quiet kind of handmaiden piety and philanthropy.

.... Marriage as it now exists is only a name, a form without a soul, a bondage, legal and therefore honorable. Only equals can make this relation. True marriage is a union of soul with soul, a blending of two in one, without