Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/794

Rh band will refuse to nurse the baby on Sunday (when every kind of business is stopped) in order to let his wife attend church; but even then, as it is not his natural duty, he will soon be tired of it and perhaps get impatient waiting for the mother, chiefly when the baby is crying.

These, with the omnipresent quotations from St. Paul to the effect that women shall keep silence in the church, etc., formed the argument of the Bishop in two or three lengthy sermons. Indignant men, disgusted with the caliber of the opposition and yet obliged to notice it on account of the position of the divine, made ample rejoinders. Rev. Dr. Crary of Golden, in an exhaustive review of the Bishop's discourse, deprecated the making permanent and of universal application the commands which with Paul were evidently temporary and local, and said half the churches in Christendom would be closed if these were literally obeyed:

"Women should not usurp authority, therefore men should usurp all authority." This is the sort of logic we have always heard from men who are trotting along in the wake of progress and howling because the centuries do not stop rolling onward. In barbarous regions Paul is paraded against educating girls at all. In half-civilized nations Paul is doing service against educating girls except in the rudiments. Among people who are just beginning to see the hill-tops of a higher, nobler world, Paul is still on duty crowding off women from high-schools and colleges. Proud universities to-day have Paul standing guard over medical meanness and pushing down aspiring female souls from the founts of knowledge. Within our memory Paul has been the standing demonstration in favor of slavery, intemperance and the oppression of women.

Another sermon in which the Bishop lays solemn stress on the one sacred, inevitable duty of women to become wives and mothers, was answered by Mr. David Boyd of Greeley, who, among other things, asks the Bishop:

How, in view of the injunction to increase and multiply, he can justify the large celibate class created by positive command of the Catholic church, not only by the ordination of priests, but by the constant urging of the church that women should become the barren brides of Christ by taking on them the vows of nuns.

The Bishop published his lectures in pamphlet form, that their influence might be far-reaching, and curiously enough, the very same lectures were printed and scattered by the friends of suffrage as the best sort of document for the campaign now fairly inaugurated. D. M. Richards, the able chairman of the executive committee, and Dr. Avery, president of the association, showed themselves capable of both conceiving and executing a plan of operations which had the merit of at least deserving victory.

There was no lack of pens to defend women's claim to equal chances in the struggle for existence. In Denver, the Rocky Mountain News and the Times planted themselves fairly and squarely in an affirmative attitude, and gave generous aid to the effort. The Tribune's columns were in a state of chronic congestion from a plethora of protests, both feminine and masculine. One young lawyer said: "If suffrage is to come, let it come by man's call, and not by woman's clamor"; and, "When all the women of the land can show the ability to rear a family, and at the same time become eminent in some profession or art, then men will gladly welcome them." Whereupon the women naturally rushed into print to protest