wth, constantly to retard them. Fear of
physical harm, fear of social ostracism, fear of eternal damnation. With
rare exceptions a child with a weak body, or any other dependent, will
do as he is told; and women have believed to order. They have done so
not only in Christianity but in Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Mormonism,
and Fetichism--in each and all of them. Each and all of these religions
being matter of faith, religion was the one subject in which every
Church alike claimed ignorance as a virtue; and the women understood
that the men understood it as little as they did. It was a field
where credulity and a solemn countenance placed all on an intellectual
level--and the altitude of the level was immaterial.

Women have never been expected to understand anything; hence jargon
about the "testimony of the spirit," the "three in one" absurdity, the
"horns of the altar," or the widow's oil miracle was not more empty or
unmeaning to her than a conversation about Bonds and Stocks, Political
Economy, or Medical Science. She swallowed her religion just as she did
her pills, because the doctor told her to, and said there was something
wrong with her head--and usually there was.

BEGINNING TO THINK.

The past education of woman gave her an outlook which simply embraced a
husband or nothing at all, which was often only a choice between two of
a kind.

There are a great many women to-day who think that orthodoxy is as great
nonsense as I do, but who are afraid to say so.

They whisper it to each other. They are afraid of the slander of the
Church.

I want to help make it so that they will dare to speak. I want to do
what I can to make it so that a mother won't have to evade the questions
of her children about the Bible.

CREEDS.

I am sometimes asked, "What do you propose to give in place of this
comforting faith? It makes people so happy. You take away all this
blessing and you give no other in its place. What is your creed?"

It has never seemed to me that a creed was the staff of life. Man cannot
live by creeds alone. I should not object, however, to one that should
read something like this:

I believe in honesty.

I believe that a Church has no right to teach what it does not know.

I believe that a clean life and a tender heart are worth more to this
world than all the faith and all the gods of Time.

I believe that this world needs all our best efforts and earnest
endeavors twenty-four hours ever