might, because Christianity has done so much to eradicate the practise of polygamy; but I take for an example the most refined and cultivated of all the pagan nations known to authentic history, I mean the Athenians.

In proportion as men are elevated by the habits of civilization, the traits which distinguish them in their social relations are more delicately marked, and therefore, to be duly understood, require a more careful and accurate observation. This truth is material to be remembered in the present case; for in the Attica of the days of Pericles, the highest point perhaps of the greatness of the Republic, it is obvious to be seen, by many signs, that woman was neither the toy of the harem as in some pagan countries, nor the thrall of the field as in others. Men had learned to prize in the gentler sex the grace of manners, and the refinement of mind, which above aught else heighten the zest of her personal charms. Pericles himself was the constant and devoted admirer of Aspasia ; there was a Lais, the pride of Corinth, and a Phryne, in whose house stood a golden statue in the temple of Delphic Apollo.-But these were not the matrons of Greece, the mothers and the wives of her sages and her statesmen. The Attic usages required of ingenuous women to live a life of domestic seclusion; to depart from it was to lose their social estimation; they of course could not form the centres and the arbiters of refinement and of social intercourse as with us; and hence that intellectual converse of the other sex, which, with the Ionians and Athenians, as with us, had become a necessity of existence, devolved upon the Leanas and the Sapphos, who, in the cultivation of the intellect, had laid aside the purity of the heart.

While such is the testimony of history and biography, the facts are singularly illustrated by the poetry of the Athenians, especially their drama, which is itself a mirrored image of life, and the personation of its passions. In the dramatic poetry of modern Europe, as in our prose fiction, it is the passion of Love, which plays the prominent part. Of the thirty-three plays ascribed to Shakspeare, there are but Macbeth, Coriolanus, Timon, Julius Cæsar, Lear, and perhaps here and there one of the English historical plays, in which Love is not more or less the active operator of the plot. It is the master-passion of the modern drama. But, in Greek tragedy, Destiny, irrevocable Destiny secretly working out the happiness or misery of men and of nations, is the chosen agent of dramatic interest. It is

Prometheus, bound by the gods to a wild sea-rock because he had snatched fire from heaven for the good of mankind, listening to the chant of the oceanic nymphs, as with stern composure he awaits until, after innumerable ages have passed away, his predestined vindication and deliverance shall come. It is Edipus, the fore-doomed murderer of his father, and the husband of his mother, the greatest of criminals by no crime of his own, in his guilt and in his expiation the helpless instrument of Fate. It is Orestes predestined to avenge the murder of his father by himself becoming the murderer of his mother. It is the lovely Antigone, the appointed victim of filial duty and of sisterly affection. It is Iphigenia predestined to be slain by Agamemnon at Aulis, the unconscious object of her father's vow for the salvation of Greece. It is the Ion of Talfourd,-who in that exquisite composition has caught the true inspiration of the Greek muse, it is the pure and noble Ion, preordained to expiate in his person the sins of the royal race of Adrastus so that the offended gods may redeem bis country's desolation. Such was the comparative absence of the passion of Love from the dramatic poetry of the Athenians; such its eminent conspicuousness in that of christian Europe. Which remarkable difference between the ancient and the modern drama, it seems to me, is imputable, in no small part, to the new social position acquired by Woman in the countries of Christendom.

We have witnessed her condition in Attic Athens. Change the scene. Select any spot you choose in christian Europe or America, I care not where, so that a single ray of the illumination of religion and civil culture has reached it,-and observe the wider influence, the higher respect, which Woman has attained. When Philip of Spain's armada threatened England, queen Elizabeth repaired to the camp at Tilbury, clad in a steel corslet, with a general's truncheon in her hand, and rode on horse-back bare-headed through the ranks of the armed host. "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman," said she," but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too; and I take foul scorn that Parma or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm. Wherefore I am come to you at this time, being resolved, in the midst and heat of the battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God; and for my kingdom, and for my people, mine honor and my blood even in the dust." Earth and sky reëchoed the enthusiastic hurrahs of twenty thousand brave

English hearts as she rode along their glittering files; and the men, who saw that sight, and heard that speech, would have battled to the death in her behalf against the armies of all Europe. Again. When Maria Theresa of Austria saw her generals defeated, her armies dispersed, her cause almost desperate, she threw herself upon the generosity of her martial Hungarians. She appeared in their assembly with her infant son in her arms; unfolded to them her wrongs; besought their succor. Excited to enthusiasm by the spectacle of her beauty, her desolation, her trust in their loyalty, the gallant nobles rose spontaneously to their feet, their hands clanged instinctively upon their swordhilts, every blade flashed forth upon the eye, and the hall rang with their shout of acclamation,-" Moriamur pro rege nostro Maria Theresa!" These and a hundred other like scenes, which lie scattered up and down in the history of modern times, have no parallel out of the limits of christian Europe.

For it is in Christendom alone, that woman is the coëqual companion of man; the joint heir with him of the common heritage of immortality; the chosen partaker of his joys and sorrows on earth, and of his hopes of heaven; the object of his chivalrous adoration in youth, and of his respect and affection in age; placed on thrones, to be obeyed with a loyalty born of love, and devotion that is half a worship, or if she fall on evil times, and become the victim of civic strife, then to see the world shake at the story of her wrongs; and though excluded from ordinary political life, yet thus only when exclusion is shelter not dishonor, as the most precious jewels are guarded from the soil and contamination of vulgar use. Well might the holy women of the Evangelists cling to the cause of Christ; well might the early female martyrs of the church persevere unto death; well might Helena seek to infuse her faith into the heart of Constantine, and make it the religion of the Empire; well might Clotilda strive to gain over to it her Clovis and his Franks; well might the female sex in past and present times be distinguished for their devotion to Christianity. It has raised them to the rank that is their due, and redeemed them from a bondage of the soul worse than captivity of person. In our Europe and America, she is no longer shut up in household retirement, as in some countries, to be loved without respect, or issuing forth as in others, to be caressed without respect or love. Education, taste, knowledge, virtue, religious culture, intellectual embellishment, the grace and beauty of soul, are now con

joined in woman with her native loveliness of form and feature. We open the writings, which do honor to the literary cultivation of the age, and we find them strown with roses from the tasteful hand of woman; for to her also is the inspiration of genius imparted. We go abroad into the world, and we find the influence of her tender and benevolent spirit pervading life. We enter the gay saloon, and she is there, radiant in beauty, animating society, cheering, exalting, spiritualizing it, and beaming, like some bright particular star, the cynosure of all eyes. And we retreat into the domestic circle, there still to find her the dispenser of happiness,—and there to bestow the homage of our hearts at an altar such as the old idolatry never knelt before, to bow down to the incarnation of beauty enshrined in that sanctuary of home, where the vestal flame of true love is purified and hallowed by the divine precepts of Christianity.

Upon the whole matter, then, we may receive this for proved: The Church exercised a large influence over the moral and intellectual condition of modern Europe, its ideas, sentiments and manners. It gave impulse to intellectual cultivation; it stamped itself upon legislation, literature, science, and moral debate. And its influence upon all these points was in the main salutary; though in affairs of government, its doctrines were not congenial with freedom; for it always aimed to control the opinions of men, and their conduct also, in the article of their ethical relations, and ultimately aspired to the general dominion of society.

But in the very moment of the greatest power of the Church, appeared its incapacity of running successfully the race of empire; for, long before the world was ready for the Protestant Reformation, it was presaged by the schisms and dissensions of the churchmen themselves, and by the universal development of society in Italy, France, Britain, and elsewhere, consequent on the crusades. For, in the fourteenth century, the epoch of the revival of letters, intellectual cultivation, so long peculiar to the clergy, began to diffuse itself abroad; and in proportion as it augmented the intelligence of the laity, tended to throw back the clergy into their appropriate place, of the moral and theological guides of men, instead of their temporal and intellectual sovereigns. The Protestant Reformation naturally followed. It was the insurrection of European mind against the usurped dominion of thought and opinion asserted by the See of Rome. Whatever other considerations, of ecclesiastical reform in the

purgation of abuses, of political contention, or of personal inducement as in the conduct of Henry Tudor and his advisers, may have mixed themselves up in the affairs of Europe, that, -namely the emancipation of intellect and of conscience from the fetters of ecclesiastical servitude,—was the true motive spring of the Reformation.

In reflecting on the religious wars,-the sanguinary local persecutions, the reciprocal confiscations of property, massacres and burnings,-of the Catholic and Protestant divisions of the Christian Church at the period of the Reformation, we shall do injustice to Christianity as an institution, if we do not remember that throughout the progress of this long and desperate struggle of the mind to be free to have its own conscientious convictions, it was the learning and practice of discussion acquired within the Church, by the clergy themselves,—by the Martin Luthers, the Cranmers, the Calvins,-which successfully guided the less informed thinkers of lay Europe to the end of the religious revolution of modern Christendom. That stupendous mass of power, which the See of Rome had for so many ages been rolling together, was shaken and rent asunder, like the terrestrial globe in the agony of earthquake, not by assault from without, but by the irrepressible fires of freedom, which burnt within its own breast.

Thenceforth, Christianity ceased, except in particular countries, to act upon men so potentially as an institution, and is to be viewed, in respect of its connection with the progress of social refinement, rather as a faith. In the matter of its rites and tenets, it visibly pervades all the relations of life, and gives a coloring and a character to all the social institutions of Europe and America. Our thoughts, our language, our writings, our conduct, our laws, all the elements and the monuments of our civilization, bespeak its influence. And our peculiar moral condition, it is safe to say, is what it is, because of Christianity; for no man of whatever creed or profession, who listens to reason, and makes comparison of our own civilization with that of the ancients or of existing nations out of the pale of Christendom, can fail to perceive and avow the salutary influence of the tenets of Christianity upon the general organization of society; the spiritualizing and of course elevating effect of its continual reference to the immortality of the soul, and the aid derived by government and law from the soundness of its unequalled ethical code. In addition to which, consider how