210 RELIGIOUS FEELING 



rence; and they do all this noth withstanding sometimes their 

 assertions to the contrary. For it has occurred to me over 

 and over again to observe, both at home and abroad, that 

 members of what has been not undeservedly called by the 

 press * the shrieking sisterhood ' of masculine females 

 clamorous for women's rights strong-minded women who, 

 without respect to facts, assert woman's mental, if not 

 physical, equality with man constantly betake themselves 

 in all matters of difficulty to masculine support, advice, or 

 assistance. Nay, I have seen women who were philan- 

 thropists literally, figuratively, and professionally carry 

 their doubtfully Platonic admiration of man the length of 

 despising their own sex. It is shown in another chapter 

 that throughout the animal kingdom where mind exists at 

 all there is, as a rule, a sexual psychical distinction, the 

 female mind being inferior in strength to the male. And it 

 may here be added that a sense of dependence on that 

 superior mind, as well as superior body, of the male is, or 

 may be said to be, throughout the zoological series a natural 

 attribute or instinct of the female. 



Woman's idolatry of man was long ago pointed out by 

 Milton where, speaking of Adam and Eve, he says 



He for god only ; she for god in him. 



In our own day George Eliot portrays the same thing in 

 * Daniel Deronda,' the Jewish youth who is ' in the stead of 

 a god' to a woman; and another of the best of our modern 

 English novelists Mrs. Craik, better known as Miss Mulock 

 referring to self-sacrifice, remarks, 'Many a strong-minded, 

 noble-minded man becomes a sort of conscience to many a 

 weak woman, who regulates all her doings, not by abstract 

 conceptions of the right, but by what he husband, or brother, 

 or father thinJcs right. This is a practical worship of a 

 kind that is extremely common among ourselves, and a, 

 worship infinitely better in many cases than none at all. 

 In such cases weakness must find something strong to lean 

 upon and be supported by as much so as the long, trailing, 

 weak tendril of the climbing plant searches for until it finds 

 the needful support.' * 



1 ' Sermons out of Church,' 1875, p. 10. 



