The Works of Robert G Ingersoll

Book excerpt: Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: PREFACE TO HELEN H. GARDENER'S MEN, WOMEN AND GODS. NOTHING gives me more pleasure, nothing gives greater promise for the future, than the fact that woman is achieving intellectual and physical liberty. It is refreshing to know that here, in our country, there are thousands of women who think, and express their thoughts?who are thoroughly free and thoroughly conscientious?who have neither been narrowed nor corrupted by a heartless creed?who do not worship a being in heaven whom they would shudderingly loathe on earth?women who do not stand before the altar of a cruel faith, with downcast eyes of timid acquiescence, and pay to impudent authority the tribute of a thoughtless yes. They are no longer satisfied with being told. They examine for themselves. They have ceased to be the prisoners of society? the satisfied serfs of husbands, or the echoes of priests. They demand the rights that naturally belong to intelligent human beings. If wives, they wish to be the equals of husbands. If mothers, they wish to rear their children in the atmosphere of love, liberty and philosophy. They believe that woman can discharge all her duties without the aid of superstition, and preserve all that is true, pure, and tender, without sacrificing in the temple of absurdity the convictions of the soul. Woman is not the intellectual inferior of man. She has lacked, not mind, but opportunity. In the long night of barbarism, physical strength and the cruelty to use it. werethe badges of superiority. Muscle was more than mind. In the ignorant age of Faith, the loving nature of woman was abused. Her conscience was rendered morbid and diseased. It might almost be said that she was betrayed by her own virtues. At best she secured, not opportunity, but flattery?the preface to degradation. She was de...