Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/822

788 Christ" was not here, and proceeded to illustrate his meaning. He seriously declared that on more than one occasion he had heard an American woman say to her husband, "Dear, will you bring me my shawl?" and the husband had brought it! Worse than this, he had seen a husband, returning home at evening, enter the parlor where his wife was sitting—perhaps in the very best chair in the room—and the wife not only did not go and get his slippers and dressing-gown, but she even remained seated, and left him to find a chair as he could. In the view of this noted German clergyman, the principles of the wife's equality with the husband, as shown in the American home, is destructive of Christian principles.

Clerical action to-day, proves woman to hold the same place in the eyes of the Church that she did during the dark ages. Woman is as fully degraded, taking into consideration our civilization, as she ever was. The form alone has changed. She is no longer burned at the stake as a witch; she is no longer prostituted to feudal lords. The age has outgrown a belief in the supernatural, and feudalism is dead; yet the same principle which degraded her five hundred or a thousand years since, still exists, even though its manifestation is not the same. The feminine principle is still looked upon as secondary and inferior, though all the facts of nature and science prove it to extend throughout creation.

It is through the Church idea of woman that the press of the world is filled with scandals like the one that recently agitated the Romish Church, in which the dead Cardinal Antonelli's name was bandied about in courts of law. It is through Church interpretation of woman's position that the suit of his putative daughter, the Countess Lambertina, for his property, was decided against her on the ground that she was "a sacrilegious child." The person who commits sacrilege steals sacred things. "Sacrilegious" means violating sacred things. "A sacrilegious child" is a child who "violated sacred things" by coming into existence. Her father was holy; he did not violate holy things when he violated and ruined a woman's life. He committed no sacrilege in the eyes of the Church. His sin was nothing; but the unfortunate result of his sin was a violation