concept of the angelic woman, the natural vestal; we see her at full
length in the romances of mediaeval chivalry. What emerged in the
end was a sort of double doctrine, first that women were devils and
secondly that they were angels. This preposterous dualism has
merged, as we have seen, into a compromise dogma in modern
times. By that dogma it is held, on the one hand, that women are
unintelligent and immoral, and on the other hand, that they are free
from all those weaknesses of the flesh which distinguish men. This,
roughly speaking, is the notion of the average male numskull today.


Christianity has thus both libelled women and flattered them, but
with the weight always on the side of the libel. It is therefore
at bottom, their enemy, as the religion of Christ, now wholly extinct,
was their friend. And as they gradually throw off the shackles that
have bound them for a thousand years they show appreciation of the
fact. Women, indeed, are not naturally religious, and they are
growing less and less religious as year chases year. Their ordinary
devotion has little if any pious exaltation in it; it is a routine practice,
force on them by the masculine notion that an appearance of
holiness is proper to their lowly station, and a masculine feeling that
church-going somehow keeps them in order, and out of doings that
would be less reassuring. When they exhibit any genuine religious
fervour, its sexual character is usually so obvious that even the
majority of men are cognizant of it. Women never go flocking
ecstatically to a church in which the agent of God in the pulpit is an
elderly asthmatic with a watchful wife. When one finds them driven
to frenzies by the merits of the saints, and weeping over the sorrows
of the heathen, and rushing out to haul the whole vicinage up to
grace, and spending hours on their knees in hysterical abasement