Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1890-02-01

| high, some claim, as Christianity produced
| Surely there was no lack of knowledge in
morals; and no one will claim that the
| natural reason was dim in an age that pro-
| duced an Aristotle and a Plato, Horace. a
| Cicero and Seneca. And yet so STEPPED
| in corruption was that people, that Paul
can hardly find in his rich vocabulary
words to express the awful viieness of the
Roman world. Even Christianity was not
powerful enough TO suddenly save men
from the terrible last of the time; as wit
ness Corinth, that intellectual capital of
Greece. where the members of the Church,
even, claimed, in the name of Christian
| liberty, the right to praciics the common
sensualism of the time when the orgies
of heather feasts were initiated about the
very table of our Lord. But we do not
need PauPs terrible arraignment; the writ
ipgs OF Seneca. Tacitus, Suetonius and
many others tell as that however clearly
the natural reason many apprehend
morality. a corrupt heart will refuse to
practice 1t.
At the beginning o; the Christian Era,
marriage was utterly despised and Martial
POUNDS one Of his epigrams on the story of
a woman who had taken within month
her tenth husband. The temples were
worse than the brotheis OF to-day; the
sensuality of the time had never been sur
passed and, thank God, has not since been
equaled. The theaters were filled with
obscenity, where female dancers appeared
naked upon the stage. In the amphi-
theater the cruelties praeticed were more
than atrocious. Platforms were built to
drop in pieces, at @ signal, and hurl the
occupants into cages of wild beasts. Naked
women were tied to the horns of wild bulls
to make sport for a Roman holiday. Nero
was no excrescence upon Roman civiliza-
ton. Count the sittings i'll the amphi-
theaters where tender Christian maidens
were torn in pieces by wild beasts and you
will find Caligula national product of the
age. 1t was an age when men wrote moral
with Nero TO murder his own mother at
eventide. Let Us take down our college
textbooks. Livy says that Rome had
reached point where men could neither
bear their vices nor the remedy for them"
Juvenal says: There will be nothing
further which posterity may add to our
evil manners. Every vice stands already
at the topmost summit" Thegreat French
infdel, Renan, says: in Rome vice
Haunted itself with revolving cynicism and
in the public games the corruption was
frightful." Marcus Aurelius sought in vain
to stem the awful tide and reform the en-
pire; he might as well have sought to
arrest meteor in its fight. Matthew Ar
mold has written
On that hard Pagan world, disgust
And secret loathing fell;
Deep WEAKNESS and sated lust
Made human life hell.
1t is claimed that Christ brought no new
morality into the world. l do not admit
the charge, but religion is one thing and
morality is quite another He did bring
religion that so vitalized morality as 10
make of il saving power, instead Of an
intellectual conceit.
And from the very first woman shared
in the grand uplifting and ennobling of the
new world c3nquering faith. Born of
woman" was the Galilean peasant. Aris-
totle, the great writer of ethics, who had
fair share of natural reason" regarded
woman as OF an intermediate order be-
tween free man and a slave.n Socrates,
who possessed fair share of moral con-
seriousness, it is said, thanked God daily
that he was born "a free man and not
slave; Greek and not barbarian; male
and not female" Is there no advance in
that Gospel which proclaimed the time
when there shall be neither Jew nor
Greek, male mol female, barbarian, Scyth-
ian, bond nor free, but Christ is all and
in all ?" Born of a woman" This
is the need of praise that was
chanted in all the councils of
the church and recited in her creeds.
Woman was among His chosen, devoted
disciples, and co-laborers with Him upon
earth; women were the first converts in
Europe; Lydia and Philippi, the honor
able women of Thessalonica; Pricilla,
whose name more than once precedes her
husbands, as one no doubt superior in
spiritual power and genius. When So
cieties were formed we read salutations adj
dressed to women and epistles indited 10
them by the very foremost of Apostles,
and when the chain of Roman captive
clanked from his right arm, Paul tenderly
remembered the grandmother, Lois, and
mother Eunice. From this time woman
takes her rightful place beside her husband
as an equal, welded for life to the same
Joys and sorrows, the same trials and hon.
ors. Last at the cross, first at the sepul-
chre," henceforth she shares with man in
all that life can give; walks with him his
honored wife, and shares with him the
martyrs stake. Read the awful stories of
those heroic women whom Nero could not
subdue by all the tortures his malignant
ingenuity could devise; roasted alive.
dressed in sheep-skins and tossed to savage
dogs, tied upon red-hot chairs, torn limb
from limb, when a single word of denial
of their lord would save them from their
torture. Christianity has done something
for the woman who can display heroism like
this. Well might Libanius, the friend of
Julian, that bitter pagan, exclaim What
women these Christians hayem And look
ing at the hard fate of woman under the
prescription of Roman law, he might have
exclaimed Also What rights these Christian
women have And these rights were more
ol vraS Or,1a
in the hands of nominally Christian rulers
than legislation commenced TO give to
woman the legal rights Christian spirit
had already accorded to them. But we
need no grander testimony to the eleyating
power OF Christianity upon woman than
the simple knowledge that from the first
she was the consort of man in all his spir-
itual struggles and Hottest triumphs. l have
merely to note their influence upon the
great ones of the Christian church !:
Basil and Chrysostom, Jerome and AM
brose Gregory Nazianzen and Angus
tine. With man she overlaid the terrible
corruption of that dark Roman world With
the purifying influence of the Gospel OF
Jesus. With man, when the fifth century
ushered in the second period OF the mighty
conflict she still bore with him the torch
of the new faith, as for five centuries the
barbarian hordes hurled themselves upon
Rome and Europe, until in the feudal
period she found, it is claimed,
her exclusive sphere-a home in a
baron's castle. If history is not read
upside down that home may have been the
unit of the State, but it was none the less
| too often an increment of hell; and none
understood this better than the faithful
wife in appeal from the faithless husband,
That more was not gained by woman of an
institutional form in the first ten centuries
was due to two important facts. The Chris
| tan world was for the first five centuries
engaged in outstanding Rome, and in the
next five centuries in outstanding the
barbarians who conquered Rome. The
second fact is that Christianity sought to
win, not for itself nation, but the world.
Its message was for man. 1t might have