," writes Godwin, "a
secure alliance, a friend that so far as the system of things extends
will never desert us, unhearing, inaccessible to importunity,
uncapricious, without passions, without favour, affection, or
partiality, that maketh its sun to rise on the evil and the good, and
its rain to descend on the just and the unjust."

Amid the dim but rosy mist of this vague faith the old man went out to
explore the unknown. A bolder and more rebellious thought was his real
legacy to his age. It is the central impulse of the whole revolutionary
school: "We know what we are: we know not what we might have been. But
surely we should have been greater than we are but for this disadvantage
[dogmatic religion, and particularly the doctrine of eternal
punishment]. It is as if we took some minute poison with everything that
was intended to nourish us. It is, we will suppose, of so mitigated a
quality as never to have had the power to kill. But it may nevertheless
stunt our growth, infuse a palsy into every one of our articulations,
and insensibly change us from giants of mind which we might have been
into a people of dwarfs."

Let us write Godwin's epitaph in his own Roman language. He stood erect
and independent. He spoke what he deemed to be truth. He did his part to
purge the veins of men of the subtle poisons which dwarf them.

CHAPTER VII

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

When women, standing at length beyond the last of the gates and walls
that have barred their road to freedom, measure their debt to history,
there will be little to claim their gratitude before the close of the
eighteenth century. The Protestant Reformation on the whole depressed
their status, and even among its more speculative sects the Quakers
stood alone in preaching the equality of the sexes. The English Whigs
ignored the existence of women. It was left for the French thinkers who
laid the foundations of the Revolution to formulate a view of society
and human nature which, as it were, insisted on its own application to
women. The idea of women's emancipation was alive among their
principles. One can name its parents, and one marvels not at all that it
seized this mind and the other, but that any mind among the professors
of the "new philosophy" contrived to escape it. The central thought,
which inspired the gospel of perfectibility has a meaning for men which
an enlightened mind can grasp, but it tells the plain obvious fact about
women.

When Hol