society than any other
sentiment except that of religion itself.

Female friendship, however, must ever have adorned and cheered the
world; it naturally springs from the depths of a woman's soul. However
dark and dismal society may have been under the withering influences of
Paganism, it is probable that glorious instances could be chronicled of
the devotion of woman to man and of man to woman, which was not
intensified by the passion of love. Nevertheless, the condition of
women in the Pagan world, even with all the influences of civilization,
was unfavorable to that sentiment which is such a charm in social life.

The Pagan woman belonged to her husband or her father rather than to
herself. As more fully shown in the discussion of Cleopatra, she was
universally regarded as inferior to man, and made to be his slave. She
was miserably educated; she was secluded from intercourse with
strangers; she was shut up in her home; she was given in marriage
without her consent; she was guarded by female slaves; she was valued
chiefly as a domestic servant, or as an animal to prevent the extinction
of families; she was seldom honored; she was doomed to household
drudgeries as if she were capable of nothing higher; in short, her lot
was hard, because it was unequal, humiliating, and sometimes degrading,
making her to be either timorous, frivolous, or artful. Her amusements
were trivial, her taste vitiated, her education neglected, her rights
violated, her aspirations scorned. The poets represented her as
capricious, fickle, and false. She rose only to fall; she lived only to
die. She was a victim, a toy, or a slave. Bedizened or burdened, she was
either an object of degrading admiration or of cold neglect.

The Jewish women seem to have been more favored and honored than women
were in Greece or Rome, even in the highest periods of their
civilization. But in Jewish history woman was the coy maiden, or the
vigilant housekeeper, or the ambitious mother, or the intriguing wife,
or the obedient daughter, or the patriotic song-stress, rather than the
sympathetic friend. Though we admire the beautiful Rachel, or the heroic
Deborah, or the virtuous Abigail, or the affectionate Ruth, or the
fortunate Esther, or the brave Judith, or the generous Shunamite, we do
not find in the Rachels and Esthers the hallowed ministrations of the
Marys, the Marthas and the Phoebes, until Christianity had developed the
virtues of the heart and kindled the