Page:The Woman Socialist - Snowden - 1907.djvu/49

 were, apparently, not worthy of consideration.

No man could claim to be more religious-minded than the writer of the world’s greatest epic, "Paradise Lost"; yet he, writing after more than sixteen hundred years of the teaching and influence of Christianity, advocates one scale of morality for one sex and a different one for the other, putting into the hands of the man the power of divorce, “the right which God had, from the beginning, entrusted to the husband.” His well-known line, too, is only just beginning to have its well-merited contempt—

Nothing could have been more unchristian than that act of Milton’s, by which he taught his daughters to read in foreign tongues for his delectation without permitting them to understand a word that they spoke.

Even now the Church persists in her unholy differentiation of the sexes. A woman may not speak in the Church. She may not minister from the pulpit. She may not enter a church hatless, no matter how hot and uncomfortable her head may