nd nurtured in such pestilent
domestic atmospheres; and sending out thousands of unhealthy,
misorganized, wrongly educated beings, the fruit of these _dis_unions,
to work ill both to themselves and their race. The world has much yet to
learn with regard to the conditions necessary to a true and legitimate
marriage of the sexes. There are thousands of illegal unions that have
been blessed by church and magistrate, which yet carry only ban in their
train. Whether read literally or not, the old, old story of the
temptation and the fall has a significance not often dreamed of in
respect to this question of marriage. It was a disturbance of the pure
and perfect allegiance of each to the other, no less than a fall from
the intimate communion of both with the Father of spirits. And a thicker
darkness rests over the means whereby the institution of marriage may be
rescued from its degradation, and man and woman be reinstated in the
loyalty they owe to each other, than over the means by which the
creature may make himself acceptable to the offended Creator; inasmuch
as the former is left, without any special revelation, to the slow
process of thought among men, to the workings of experience and the
results of observation. And these laws are age-long in their evolutions.
But when men and women have learned to look within themselves, have
turned an intelligent eye upon the necessities of their threefold
being, and when they recognize the God-made laws regulating these
necessities, and have begun to mate themselves accordingly, the world
will have received a powerful impulse toward its promised millennial
epoch.

Such, then, being, in brief, the relation of woman to man, it is
necessary to inquire, as pertinent to my subject, not so much whether
man gives her all the rights within his own sphere which she may
beneficially claim, but whether she has yet understood the weight and
significance of her own position in the scale of being, and has
exercised all the rights consequent therefrom. To know is far easier
than to live according to knowledge. It is to be feared that women
themselves have but a poor appreciation of the ideal of true womanhood.
Oh, is it not time this ideal should be worthily understood? Has not
poor suffering humanity borne the burden of its woes long enough, and
will not woman help to lift it from the tired, stooping shoulders? For
she may. How? Simply by working out her own divinely appointed mission.
And is th