22 ^ag Sermons, (fssajs, mrb gtbwfos. fn. 



desire us to look up to the feminine moral sense as the 

 purer and the nobler ; and bid man abdicate his usurped 

 sovereignty over Nature in favour of the female line. 

 On the other hand, there are persons not to be outdone 

 in all loyalty and just respect for woman-kind, but by 

 nature hard of head and haters of delusion, however 

 charming, who not only repudiate the new woman- 

 worship which so many sentimentalists and some philo- 

 sophers are desirous of setting up, but, carrying thei? 

 audacity further, deny even the natural equality of the 

 sexes. They assert, on the contrary, that in every 

 excellent character, whether mental or physical, the 

 average woman is inferior to the average man, in the 

 sense of having that character less in quantity, and lower 

 in quality. Tell these persons of the rapid perceptions and 

 the instinctive intellectual insight of women, and they 

 reply that the feminine mental peculiarities, which pass 

 under these names, are merely the outcome of a greater 

 impressibility to the superficial aspects of things, and of 

 the absence of that restraint upon expression, which, in 

 men, is imposed by reflection and a sense of responsibility. 

 Talk of the passive endurance of the weaker sex, and 

 opponents of this kind remind you that Job was a man, 

 and that, until quite recent times, patience and long- 

 suffering were not counted among the specially feminine 

 virtues. Claim passionate tenderness as especially 

 feminine, and the inquiry is made whether all the best 

 love-poetry in existence (except, perhaps, the "Sonnets 

 from the Portuguese " ) has not been written by men ; 

 whether the song which embodies the ideal of pure and 

 tender passion Adelaida was written by Frau Beeth- 

 oven ; whether it was the Fornarina, or Kaphael, who 

 painted the Sistine Madonna. Nay, we have known one 

 such heretic go so far as to lay his hands upon the arK 

 itself, so to speak, and to defend the startling paradox 



