PREJUDICE.

“Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;

He who would search for pearls must dive below.”

                                                                 – Dryden.

“He that would seriously set upon the search of truth, ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a love of it, for he that loves it not will not take much pains to get it, nor be much concerned when he misses it.”

                                                                     – Locke.

     CHRIST lays great stress upon the truth. It has init a saving quality. “Sanctify them through thy truth.” –John 17:17. It is not possible for us to be sanctified only as far as we open our hearts to receive the truth, and inwardly resolve to obey it. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of truth. Jno. 14:17.

“Let us,” says the Duke of Argyl, “educate our-selves up to that high standard in the love of truth, under which we hate and disdain an intellectual fallacy as much as we hate and disdain a common lie.”

     Then, to the rights of women under the Gospel, as an important question, we should give our candid attention. If prejudiced, we should, as Daniel Webster said, “Conquer our prejudices.” The feeling against woman’s being accorded equal rights with man, is old and deeply rooted. Generally, among mankind, the law of force has been the prevailing law. The stronger have tyrannized over the weaker.

     Aristotle was one of the greatest of the old Greek philosophers. In his book on Politics and Economic she wrote: “By nature some beings command, and others obey, for the sake of mutual safety; for a being endowed with discernment and forethought is, by nature, the superior and governor; whereas he who is merely able to execute by bodily labor is the inferior and a natural slave; and hence the interest of master and slave is identical.”²

“It is clear then, that some men are free by nature, and others are slaves, and that in the case of the latter, the lot of slavery is both advantageous and just.”³

     Again, Aristotle wrote: “The art of war is, in some sense, a part of the art of acquisition; for hunting is apart of it, which it is necessary for us to employ against wild beasts, and against those of mankind who, being intended by nature for slavery, are unwilling to submit to it, and on this occasion, such a war is by nature just.”⁴

     Until recently, as long as there was any slavery to tolerate, human slavery was tolerated by the leading churches of this country. Reason and revelation were appealed to in defence of the practice of human slavery. No longer ago than 1836 the General Conference of the M. E. Church took the following action, as recorded on its journal:

     “Resolved by the delegates of the Annual Conferences in General Conference assembled:

     1.That they disapprove, in the most unqualified sense, the conduct of two members of the General Conference who are reported to have lectured in this city recently upon, and in favor of modern Abolition-ism.

     2.That they are decidedly opposed to modern Abolitionism, and wholly disclaim any right, wish, or intention to interfere in the civil and political relation between master and slave as it exists in the slaveholding States of this Union.”

     Some time after slavery was abolished by war, the above resolutions were repealed, and another General Conference of the same Church passed a resolution to the effect that it was a matter of congratulation that the Methodist Episcopal Church had always taken the lead of the sister churches in the anti-slavery movement.

     About thirty years ago the Right Rev. John Henry Hopkins, D. D., LL. D., one of the learned men of his day, and the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of the diocese of Vermont, wrote and published a book in which he endeavored to prove that human slavery, as it then existed in these United States, was supported by “the authority of the Bible, the writings of the Fathers, the decrees of Councils, the concurrent judgment of Protestant divines, and the Constitution. “The efforts to overthrow it he characterized as the “assaults of mistaken philanthropy, in union with infidelity, fanaticism, and political expediency.”

     If those who stood high as interpreters of Reason and Revelation, and who expressed the prevailing sentiment of their day, were so greatly mistaken on a subject which we now think so plain that it does not admit of dispute, that every man has a right to freedom, is it not possible that the current sentiment as to the position which WOMAN should be permitted to occupy in the Church of Christ may also be wrong?

     Reader, will you admit this possibility? Will you sit as an impartial juror in the case, and carefully weigh the evidence we may present?

     It has taken the world a long while to understand the Gospel of Jesus Christ; and even now it is but imperfectly understood.

     We cannot ascertain the truth of an opinion by inquiries about its age. Let us decide that as the Church did, for ages, misinterpret the teachings of the Bible on the subject of slavery, so it may now fail to apprehend its teaching on the question of woman’s rights.

     Christian men and women should not wait until a righteous cause is popular before they give it their influence. Those who do, are simply following fashion, while they may think they are following the Lord.

 “These loud ancestral boasts of yours,

How can they else than vex us?

Where were your dinner orators

When slavery grasped at Texas?

Dumb on his knees was every one

That now is bold as Caesar;

Mere pegs to hang an office on,

Such stalwart men as these are.”

                                          - Lowell.

     It is not enough to say that the right will ultimately triumph; if we claim to be righteous we should help make the right triumph.