INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY ON THE POSITION OF WOMEN. 35 



how the prophet bewails the lost glories and yet justifies Gocl 

 in the destruction and desolation He deals out to vice. Even 

 so, Phenicia was not quite done with, for the colony, Carthage^ 

 was more splendid than Tyre. You all know the storv of Cato 

 and his reiterated " Carthago delenda est,'' and how the 

 austere and lordly Roman was brought against them and finally 

 wiped them out. That is the verdict of God on such evil. It 

 took 1500 years to effect, but it was done at last. 



Turn to Egypt. Among the thousands of pictures of social 

 life, you find order and decency. You may see here and there 

 gangs of slaves working under the cruel knout, but no repre- 

 sentation of moral evil ; therefore Egypt has been punished, 

 but not destroyed. 



To Greece we owe almost every good thing we possess, except 

 religion. Israel alone was entrusted with the gem of the ring, 

 the priceless treasure of the knowledge of God, but Athens gave 

 us philosophy, poetry, art, civic freedom, and all the treasures 

 of cultivation (except Science) which make life sweet to us. 

 But, alas, Athens was not good in household relations, and some- 

 times we wish that we did not know so much about her. On 

 the one hand we have detailed and most beautiful characters 

 given us, such as Antigone and Electra, the very incarnations 

 for all time of fidehty and loyalty, showing at any rate what 

 the ideal was for a woman. It is always the same story of 

 courage in the cause of the right and endurance undismayed by 

 death. But on the other hand the domestic life was bad. I 

 am afraid that the total verdict of the nobler men would be that 

 of Hippolytus in the Phoedra, where he says that women are 

 the authors of all the real evils of life, all the biting, degrading 

 evils, and that he wished the gods would propagate the race 

 on some other plan ; how nice it would be, he says, if a man 

 might go to their temples and beg for a httle son to teach and 

 to train and to bear his name when he was dead ! To look back 

 over such a history is, alas, a sight to make us women ashamed. 



Bome we know from its very foundation, the one great virile 

 nation of the world, having the force, the wisdom and the justice 

 of an experienced man. Bemarkably austere and pure to begin 

 with, a rod in the hand of God to chastise the loose and self- 

 indulgent lands, and then corrupted by nearly a thousand years 

 of unmitigated success, and sinking to a dissolution so horrible 

 that it filled the whole civilised world with its decay, and had to 

 be swept off the earth by the hordes of the comparatively clean 

 and strong barbarians. 



