Page:Free Opinions, Freely Expressed on Certain Phases of Modern Social Life and Conduct.djvu/189

student can discover, his highest ideals of life have been depicted in the Feminine form. Fortune, Fame, Justice, the Arts and Sciences, are all represented by female figures lovingly designed by male hands. Evidently conscious in himself that a woman's purity, honesty, fidelity, and courage are nobler types of these virtues than his own, Man apparently is never weary of idealizing them as Woman womanly. Thoroughly aware of the supreme sovereignty Woman can exercise whenever he gives her the chance, he, while endeavouring to bind and hold her intellectual forces by his various edicts and customs, takes ever an incongruous satisfaction in doing her full justice by the magnitude of his feminine ideals. The divine spirit of Nature itself, called "Egeria," is always depicted by man as a woman. Faith, Hope and Charity, are represented as female spirits, as are the Three Graces. The Muses are women; so are the Fates. Hence, as all the virtues, morals, arts, and sciences are shown by the highest masculine skill as wearing woman's form and possessing woman's attributes, it is easy to see that man has always been perfectly aware in his inward intelligence of Woman's true worth and right place in creation, though, by such laws as he has made for his own better convenience, he has put up whatever barriers he can in the way of the too swift advancement of so superior and victorious a creature. Now that she is beginning to take an important share in the world's work and progress, he is becoming vaguely alarmed. In each art, in each profession he sees her gaining step by step to higher intellectual dominance. He watches her move