fortune of the world_,
they were long permitted to monopolize.... The almost complete omission
from female education of those studies which most discipline and
strengthen the intellect, increases the difference, while at the
same time it has been usually made a main object to imbue them with a
passionate faith in traditional opinions, and to preserve them from
all contact with opposing views. But contracted knowledge and imperfect
sympathy are not the sole fruits of this education. It has always been
the peculiarity of a certain kind of theological teaching, that it
-inverts all the normal principles of judgment and absolutely destroys
intellectual diffidence. On other subjects we find if not a respect for
honest conviction, at least some sense of the amount of knowledge
that is requisite to entitle men to express an opinion on grave
controversies. A complete ignorance of the subject-matter of a dispute
restrains the confidence of dogmatism; and an ignorant person who is
aware that, by much reading and thinking in spheres of which he has
himself no knowledge, his educated neighbor has modified or rejected
opinions which that ignorant person had been taught, will, at least
if he is a man of sense or modesty, abstain from compassionating the
benighted condition of his more instructed friend. But on theological
questions this has never been so.

"Unfaltering belief being taught as the first of duties, and all doubt
being usually stigmatized as criminal or damnable, a state of mind is
formed to which we find no parallel in other fields. Many men and most
women, though completely ignorant of the very rudiments of biblical
criticism, historical research, or scientific discoveries, though they
have never read a single page, or Understood a single proposition of
the writings of those whom they condemn, and have absolutely no rational
knowledge either of the arguments by which their faith is defended, or
of those by which it has been impugned, will nevertheless adjudicate
with the utmost confidence upon every polemical question, denounce,
hate, pity, or pray for the conversion of all who dissent from what they
have been taught, assume, as a matter beyond the faintest possibility
of doubt, that the opinions they have received without inquiry must be
true, and that the opinions which others have arrived at by inquiry must
be false, and make it a main object of their lives to assail what they
call heresy in every way in their power