Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/790

756 "the reason why women have no control in Parliament, why they make no laws, consent to none, abrogate none, is their Original Sin."

This doctrine of her original sin lies at the base of the religious and political disqualifications of woman. Christianity, through this doctrine, has been interpreted as sustaining man's rights alone. The offices held by her during the apostolic age, she has been gradually deprived of through ecclesiastical enactments. To Augustine, whose early life was spent in company with the most degraded of woman-kind, is Christianity indebted for the full development of the doctrine of Original Sin, which, although to be found in the religious systems of several ancient nations, was not a primitive one of the Christian Church. Taught as one of the most sacred mysteries of religion, which to doubt or to question was to hazard eternal damnation, it at once exerted a most powerful and repressing influence upon woman, fastening upon her a bondage which the civilization of the nineteenth century has not been able to cast off.

To this doctrine of woman's created inferiority we can trace those irregularities which for many centuries filled the Church with shame, for practices more obscene than the orgies of Babylon or Corinth, and which dragged Christendom to a darkness blacker than the night of heathendom in pagan countries—a darkness upon which the most searching efforts of historians cast scarcely one ray of light—a darkness so profound that from the seventh to the eleventh century no individual thought can be traced. All was sunk in superstition; men were bound by Church dogmas, and looked only to aggrandizement through her. The priesthood, which alone possessed a knowledge of letters, prostituted their learning to the basest uses; the nobility spent their lives in warring upon each other; the peasantry were the sport and victim by turns of priest and noble, while woman was the prey of all; her person and her rights possessing no consideration only as they could be made to advance the interest or serve the pleasure of noble, husband, father, or priest—some man-god to whose lightest desire all her wishes were made to bend. The most pronounced doctrine of the Church during this period was, that through woman sin had been introduced into the world; that woman's whole tendency was toward evil, and that had it not been for the unfortunate oversight of her creation, man would be dwelling in the paradisical innocence and happiness of Eden blessed with