Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/518

Rh have been intimate acquaintances of many eminent men, among whom were President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton. The activity displayed in managing the estate indicates the possession of marked executive ability, and the exercise she thus receives has doubtless had its share in keeping her young, well-preserved, and good-natured.

When the Rev. Knox Little visited this country in 1880, thinking the women of America specially needed his ministrations, he preached a sermon that called out the general ridicule of our literary women. In the Sunday Republic of December 12, Anne E. M'Dowell said:

The reverend gentlemen of St. Clement's Church, of this city, with their frequent English visiting clergymen, are not only trying their best to carry Christianity back into the dark ages, by reinvesting it with all old-time traditions and mummeries, but they are striving anew to forge chains for the minds, consciences, and bodies of women whom the spirit of Christian progress has, in a measure, made free in this country. The sermon of the Rev, Knox Little, rector of St. Alban's Church, Manchester, England, recently delivered at St. Clement's in this city, and reported in the daily Times, is just such an one as might be looked for from the class of thinkers whom he on that occasion represented. These ritualistic brethren are bitterly opposed to divorce, and hold the belief that so many Britons adhere to on their native soil, viz., that "woman is an inferior animal, created only for man's use and pleasure, and designed by Providence to be in absolute submission to her lord and master." The feeling engendered by this belief breeds contempt for and indifference to the nobler aspirations of women amongst men of the higher ranks, while it crops out in tyranny in the middle, and brutality in the lower classes of society. Even the gentry and nobility of Great Britain are not all exempt from brutal manifestations of power toward their wives. We once sheltered in our own house for weeks the wife of an English Earl who had been forced to leave her home and family through the brutality of her high-born husband—brutality from which the law could not or would not protect her. She died at our house, and when she was robed for her last rest much care had to be taken to arrange the dress and hair so that the scars of wounds inflicted on the throat, neck and cheek by her cruel husband might not be too apparent.

The reports of English police courts are full of disclosures of ill--treatment of women by their husbands, and year by year our own courts are more densely thronged by women asking safety from the brutality of men who at the altar have vowed to "love, honor and protect" them. In nearly all these cases, the men who are brought into our courts on the charge of maltreating women are of foreign birth who have been born and brought up under the spiritual guidance of such clergymen as the Rev. Knox-Little, who tell them, as he told the audience of women to whom he preached in this city: To her husband a wife owes the duty of unqualified obedience. There is no crime that a man can commit which justifies his wife in leaving him or applying for that monstrous thing, a divorce. It is her duty to submit herself to him always, and no crime he can commit justifies her lack of obedience. If he is a bad or wicked man she may gently remonstrate with him, but disobey him, never." Again, addressing his audience at St. Clement's, he says: "You may marry a bad man, but what of that? You had no right to marry a bad man. If you knew it, you deserved it. If you did not know it, you must endure it all the same. You can pray for him, and perhaps he. will reform; but leave him—never. Never think of that accursed thing—divorce. Divorce breaks up families—families build up the church. The Christian woman lives to build up the church." This is the sort of sermonizing, reiterated from year to. year, that makes brutes of Englishmen, of all classes, and sinks the average English woman to the condition of a child-bearing slave, valuable, mostly, for the number: of children she brings her husband. She is permitted to hold-no opinion unaccepted by her master, denied all reason and forced to frequent churches where she is forbidden the exercise of her common-sense, and where she is told: "Men are logical;