Page:Woman and her possibilities.djvu/37

 In books that we reverence for many reasons, we may every day read about systems of morality in which a man's wife is put along with his ox, and his ass, and things that are his, and that, too, without much if any choice on the woman's part at any stage of the proceedings. And even if the morality there set forth was meant to exist only in certain places, among certain peoples, and in a certain stage of the evolution of a particular race, it cannot be denied that the literal words of the Hebrew scriptures, without modification to present time, place, or circumstances, have an influence on a vast number of diverse races and sects at the present time.

When the Bible was accepted as the authoritative text-book on history, geography, and cosmography, as well as morality, there were some striking doctrines. St. Augustine said it was impossible there should be inhabitants on the opposite side of the earth, since no such race was recorded by scripture among the descendants of Adam. The most conclusive argument against the roundness of the earth was that, in the day of judgment, men on the other side of the globe could not see the Lord descending through the air. These beliefs were to those people as much integral parts of religious faith founded on scripture as was the belief in witchcraft to John Wesley, the scriptural sanction to negro slavery founded on the cursing of Ham by his father, or the objection to giving lying-in women chloroform on account of the child-bed curse pronounced in Eden.

In Christianity itself, when we separate the essentials from the accidentals, the original root from its excrescences, the tree itself from the profuse overgrowth that has overrun and concealed its goodly outline if not its very presence, we shall find that modern movements, modern philosophies, modern