Page:Woman and the Bible.pdf/12

8 would not only be ostracized by society, but many of them would find themselves behind prison bars.

When woman reasons more and believes less, then, and not till then, will her charter to liberty be signed.

The rib doctrine is the tap root of her inferiority and degradation. The hour is here now, when women are calling theologians to the bar of reason, and they will no longer believe the supernatural, miraculous fables of the Bible that put the brand of inferiority upon their sex.

"Every Hour Brings Forth Some Grasping Truth."—Holmes.

Theology is nothing, if it is not dogmatic. So women have ever been taught that it is their "bounden duty" to be silent and obedient, and that the women of the Bible are shining examples of these so-called virtues. The dogmatism of the pulpit has outwardly succeeded in the subjection theory and the poetry of the pulpit has stimulated women to action and service, and fed their vanity, always with the paramount idea that "woman's sphere" was bounded by her duty to do only such things as shall suit man's interest, pleasure or convenience.

All this preaching only shows the utter ignorance of the characters of the Bible women and that they were as great an enigma and as unmanageable as the women of today, the Bible itself will show.

Woman is today quietly smiling at her masculine censors, the beings whose swaddling clothes she adjusts, and saying to herself "let them babble about a subject of which they know nothing. It amuses them, and does not affect women. These men are neither saints nor heroes, so we refuse to canonize them, and go on doing our own way just as the Bible women did."