ound authority on
logic. An orthodox preacher talking about logic is a sight to arouse the
compassion of a demon. Next to the natural sciences, logic can give the
Church the colic quicker than any other kind of a green apple. And so it
is not strange that the clergy should be afraid that it would disagree
with the more delicate constitution of a woman. They always did maintain
that any diet that was a trifle too heavy for them couldn't be digested
by anybody else; and they would be perfectly right in their supposition
if intellectual dyspepsia or softening of the brain were contagious.

The "sphere" of no other creature is wholly determined and bounded by
_one physical_ characteristic or capacity. To every other creature is
conceded without question the right to use more than one talent.

But the Fathers decided in holy and solemn council that it would be
"unbecoming" for a woman to learn the alphabet, and that she could have
no possible use for such information. They said that she would be a
better mother without distracting her dear little brain with the
a, b, c's, and that therefore she should not learn them. They also
decided that she who was so far lost to modesty as to become acquainted
with the multiplication table "was an unfit associate for our wives and
mothers." There was something wrong with such a woman. She was either a
"witch" or else she was "married to the devil."

That is the way the Church encouraged education for women. This
was done, the holy Fathers said, to "protect women from the awful
temptations of life to which the Lord in his infinite wisdom had
subjected man." They had too much respect for their wives and mothers to
permit them to come in contact with the wickedness of long division
or cube root, and they hoped while life lasted that no man would be
so negligent of duty as to allow his sister to soil her pure mind with
conic sections.

Well, in time there were a few women brave enough, and a few men
honorable and moral enough, to set aside the letter of this prohibition;
but much of its spirit still blossoms in all its splendor in Columbia,
Harvard, Yale, and various other institutions of learning, where women
are either not permitted to enter at all or are required to learn and
accomplish unaided that which it takes a large faculty of instructors
and every known or obtainable educational device (together with future
business stimulus) to enable the young men to do the same thing!

The