Their position in the established Church gives them commanding influence, and the universal spirit and practice of the age in all departments, ecclesiastical and secular alike,-to move in masses, to seek every object by aggregations of men, to centralize every interest, and to give force to opinion by the suffrages of multitudes,-unite to make this mode of action essential. In case the true principles of the Church are not brought out in this massive form, and made powerfully to bear on the ecclesiastical movements now going on within her own enclosures; and if an equally useful leaven is not made to influence the State so as to check its tendencies to foster, encourage, and strengthen Popery; then we must dread the consequences. Were the non-established bodies to lay aside all their peculiar feelings and views, and patriotically unite to effect these objects, we fear their isolation without the pale of the Establishment would so expose them to the suspicion of interested designs, that, in their present temper, the Statesmen of all parties would look upon the effort as either fanatical or sinister. It would be pure folly for us to shut our eyes against the fact, that the evangelical body in the Church enjoy, in that circumstance, a great advantage. Our sincere desire is to see them use it well; for the advancement of true religion in their own fold, and the dissemination of truth and righteousness in the State. Good leaders, united counsels, vigorous exertions, in Church and Parliament, would soon successfully tell on the moral and religious state of this great community.

But we return to offer a closing remark on the two theologico-literary Societies on which we have been animadverting. We look upon them as two separate seed-plots within the same enclosure. What the fruit may ultimately turn out to be, we cannot pretend to foresee. It will be, as we think, abundant, whatever may be its qualities. The age is too active to be creative; but it is admirably fitted, by the velocity of its movements, to scatter the productions of other periods. It is easy to perceive, in this state of things, that the success (humanly speaking) of one class of principles over the other must depend on the industry of dissemination, as well as on the skill and eloquence of its advocates. The best cause is always, at first, the least successful. Good men trust in the independent force of truth; fraudulent and Jesuitical men rely on the adroit employment of means. Experience teaches us that sound principles-such is the order of Providencestand in need of a wise, firm, united, and vigorous advocacy and support; and it is only by the use of these essential appliances that truth and religion can be maintained in a world of selfishness and sin. We look on the progress of events with anxiety, but not distrust. Error is mutable, truth is eternal!

Our want of space forbids any notice of the other Societies for the present.

August 22d, 1845.

PHILEMON.

THE WOMEN OF HEATHEN ANTIQUITY.*

NEITHER the religion nor the laws of the most polished eras of Greece and Rome exercised any favourable influence on domestic manners; and, amidst all their multiplied luxuries, the Heathens were utter strangers to

"The Female Disciple of the first three Centuries of the Christian Era: her Trials and her Mission. By Mrs. Henry Smith. London. Longman and Co.

the endearing charities which animate the Christian home. With them, domestic ties and happiness were subservient to the political welfare of the state. It was the citizen and not the man, society and not the individual, civil aggrandisement and not moral principle, mind and intellect, but not the heart and the affections, which stood foremost and alone in the social system of the legislator and philosopher.

Indeed, fully to appreciate the incalculable blessings conferred upon woman by the Gospel, we have but to contrast her present condition with that of our sex in the most brilliant ages of antiquity. We shall there behold her mind degraded and enslaved; while her form, in its loveliest contours, adorned the portico and the temple. We shall see her, both as a daughter, a wife, and a mother, held in a state of rigorous tutelage, brought up in ignorance, and debarred from all share of domestic authority, and doomed only to incessant and servile drudgery; the victim of her husband's capricious jealousy or cruel repudiation during life, and at his sole disposal even after his death; liable to see the most cherished of her offspring snatched from her maternal bosom, and destroyed without remorse, by the sanguinary law of infanticide; and all this at the hands, not of the ignorant and the vulgar, but of the noble and the illustrious; the heroes, the orators, the sages of antiquity, men whom history has invested with the halo of renown.

The barbarity of the Roman law not only sanctioned and encouraged the murder of infants, but it extended its severity even to adults. It considered children not as persons, but as things, which might be sold or destroyed at the discretion of their owner. Prior to marriage the daughters were rigorously secluded in the retirement of the gynæceum,* allowed to associate only with slaves, and subjected to restraints which tended to prevent the cultivation of the mind.

The most cruel exercise of paternal authority, however, was that which empowered a father to compel his married daughter to repudiate a husband whom she tenderly loved, and whom he had himself approved. Roman history furnishes us with numerous instances of this singular species of power. What was, if possible, still more arbitrary, the wife, even if the mother of a large family, was, no less than her children, under the despotic control of her husband, with this only difference, that he was not at liberty to sell her. She might, however, be dismissed or retained at pleasure; and for certain offences, such as excess in wine, and others of a yet more venial nature, the husband possessed full power to put her to death; being at once Judge and jury, accuser and executioner. The laws of ancient Rome even allowed a husband to repudiate his wife for taking his keys!

While the seductive charms of the abandoned Aspasia, Lasthenia, and Axisthea were embellished with all the fascination of wit and eloquence, and received the homage of Pericles, Socrates, and Plato, the Grecian matron was consigned to ignorance and contempt; and the enduring fidelity of Penelope, and the tender affection of Andromache, so far from calling forth the responsive smile of conjugal love, only elicited the authoritative command to retire to the gynæceum and resume the distaff.

After marriage, some time elapsed ere the Grecian wife ventured to speak to her husband, or the latter entered into conversation with her. At no period was she intrusted with any knowledge of his private affairs, much

* The gynæceum was situated in the most retired part of the house, closely guarded, sometimes even defended by dogs, and in Asia by eunuchs.

less was her opinion or advice either sought or tolerated. Xenophon, one of the most excellent of the Athenians, admitted that there were few friends with whom he conversed so seldom as with his wife. The Romans differed materially from the Greeks and Orientals in one point of their treatment of women, namely, in not secluding them from the society of men; still the Roman husbands were very incommunicative; and it seems to have been an understood, if not a written, law, that women should avoid all inquisitiveness, and speak only in the presence of their husbands.

The ancient Egyptians were excessively jealous of their wives; and, having decreed it to be indecent for females to go abroad without shoes, they deprived them of the means of wearing them, by threatening with death any one who should make shoes for women.

By the laws of Athens, slaves, women, lunatics, and infants, were comprehended under one class, which was pronounced subject to various legal disabilities. According to Roman jurisprudence, no one could make a woman his heir, nor could she acquire property except for the benefit of her husband.

The whole burden of domestic economy was imposed upon the wife, unaccompanied by the slightest proof of trust or confidence. Solon enacted that no wife should leave home on a visit with more than three garments; the size of her basket was restricted to a cubit in length, and her provisions to the value of an obolus. In some instances it was even considered criminal for a wife to form any intimacy beyond the walls of her own dwelling, because it might lead her to embezzle the goods committed to her care.

On the demise of the husband he was at liberty to transfer his authority over his wife to her son, or next of kin ; or he might, if he chose, bequeath her to a future husband: strange as it may seem, the law allowed him to select a slave for his successor, of which we have an instance in the father of Demosthenes. The grave and dignified Romans were even not averse to a temporary transfer of their wives, during the life-time of the husband: it is recorded of Cato, that not being able to prevail on the husband of his daughter Portia to bestow her upon his friend Hortensius, he cheerfully gave up his own wife Marcia, a proposal to which her father acceded without hesitation.

Notwithstanding this licence on the part of the husband, the law kept the female sex in rigorous subjection; and, in addition to the authority of the husband, appointed the special tribunal of the Gynæconomists, to take cognizance of all offences committed by married women who appeared in public, and to punish the slightest deviation from the stately gravity which they were prescribed to maintain. When a case was not submitted to official investigation, the husband himself sat as Judge, and pronounced sentence upon his wife in presence of her relations. The Romans had a goddess whose peculiar office it was to reconcile the disputes of married life her name, however, of Viriplaca, "the appeaser of husbands," intimated that she expected her female suitors to be the yielding party.

The Romans for many ages abstained from divorce; it was not till the close of the sixth century of their era, that a Roman citizen first claimed this fatal privilege: once introduced, however, it opened wide the floodgates of crime; and the Roman matrons, who clamoured loudly for an equality of rights, too soon became its victims. In consequence of the removal of many of their former legal restrictions, women were now in some cases permitted to exercise the right of divorce. Such a step, however, was always considered scandalous, and branded by the name of depart

ure from her husband; while a man was said merely to dismiss, or cast out, his wife. By the law of the Twelve Tables, the form of divorce was as follows:-" When a man will put away his wife, the form of doing it shall be by taking from her the keys of the house, and giving her what she brought.'

Hence this law set no bounds to the caprice of the husband: its fatal facility extended from the highest to the lowest stations, and shed a baneful influence over the morals and manners of domestic life. Cicero dismissed his wife Terentia, after a union of thirty years, on the pretence of her being peevish and expensive; though only eleven years before, when in exile and disgrace, he addressed to her those beautiful letters, in which he says, that she has been cruelly robbed of her whole fortune on his account; calls her, "My Terentia, thou most faithful and best of wives;" conjures her to join him in his banishment; and says, he can never think himself completely ruined whilst he enjoys her society. Metella, the wife of Sylla, was divorced on an equally trivial plea. It seems that she was so unfortunate as to be seized with a dangerous illness in the midst of the series of magnificent fêtes, in honour of Hercules, which Sylla gave on his abdication. Religious rejoicings were not to be profaned by any melancholy circumstances of death or mourning. Sylla, therefore, who was “exemplarily religious," sent her a bill of divorce, by order of the Pontifices, and caused her to be removed to another abode. Marcus Brutus, Dolabella, the younger Cato, Pompey, Julius Cæsar, Augustus, and many other celebrated characters, were guilty of the same wanton cruelty.

In the midst of such universal corruption, it needs not excite our surprise that women soon learned to vie with the other sex in applications for divorce; and there were some who computed their age, not by the number of Consuls, but of husbands. So completely, indeed, had the Roman women thrown aside the natural modesty of their sex, that they frequently took a personal part in the gladiatorial shows of the arena; and, under Nero and Domitian, even ladies of rank came forward in these encounters. Added to all this, the introduction of Asiatic luxuries had induced an even more than oriental effeminacy of manners; while the long series of conscriptions and murders, the private treachery and violence, which marked the overthrow of the republic, nearly extinguished the last flickering remains of Roman virtue, and reacted with an accumulated force of crime and calamity upon the female character. We learn, from Roman authors and poets, that at no former period of their history were the women so utterly abandoned, as at the time of the introduction of Christianity: it seemed as if the whole framework of society, and all the bonds of domestic life, were on the eve of disruption.

Yet had the outward machinery of Paganism never been maintained with more costly splendour: holocausts flamed upon the altars, and human victims were sacrificed in honour of the gods ; the Senate consulted ora

* Dr. Magee, in his "Dissertation on the Atonement," says, that the practice of human sacrifices" prevailed also among the Romans; as appears not only from the devotions so frequent in the early periods of their history, but from the express testimonies of Livy, Plutarch, and Pliny. In the year of Rome 657, we find a law enacted, in the consulship of Lentulus and Crassus, by which it was prohibited; but it appears, notwithstanding, to have been in existence so late even as in the time of Trajan; for at this time, three vestal virgins having been punished for incontinence, the Pontiffs, on consulting the books of the sibyls, to know whether a suff

cles, and the General paused before omens; but the soul and essence of polytheism was gone. At no time had its moral influence put any great restraint upon the passions; yet the terror of the gods, and the vague apprehension of an hereafter, presented some check to the outward commission of crime. But even this barrier, frail as it was, had now been completely undermined by the scepticism of philosophers, and the scoffs of poets. Men, when they have thrown off the authority and restraints of religion, may, to a certain extent, maintain the outward decencies of life, because they are more habitually influenced by reason, and maxims of worldly calculation; but when woman assumes the atheist, she unsexes herself, and becomes an object of contempt and detestation even to the avowed scorner. By the constitution of her nature, she is influenced by the feelings and the affections; and when these are enlisted on the side of the worst passions of our nature,-licentiousness, ambition, and revenge,— she plunges, without any counteracting principle, into the very vortex of sin. We need only compare the Deffands, the Châtelets, the Rolands of modern France, with the Fulvias, the Livias, the Messalinas of Rome, to be convinced that a woman, in the moment of apostasy, becomes reckless and abandoned; for she has lost the only stay of her weakness, the only safeguard of her virtue.

ORIGINAL LETTER OF THE RIGHT HONOURABLE SELINA COUNTESS DOWAGER OF HUNTINGDON TO THE REV. JOHN WESLEY.

March 25th, 1742.

I HAD yours to-day. John Taylor will be with you by the time this is : do with him what you will. I bid him tell you from me, that unless David Taylor* would commit his flock into your or your brother's hands, I dare not support or countenance him.

cient atonement had been made, and finding that the offended deity continued incensed, ordered two men and two women, Greeks and Gauls, to be buried alive. Porphyry also assures us, that, even in his time, a man was every year sacrificed at the shrine of Jupiter Latialis."

* David Taylor was formerly a servant in the family of the Earl of Huntingdon; a man of ability and knowledge, who was called to an acquaintance with the truth, under the preaching of the early Methodists. He was employed by the Countess as an itinerant Evangelist in the villages and hamlets in the immediate vicinity of Donnington-Park, where her Ladyship frequently resided. The great success which attended his labours induced the Countess to enlarge the sphere of work. He visited various parts of Cheshire and Derbyshire, particularly the mountainous district of the Peak, where he was eminently successful. It was during his visits to this neighbourhood that he became acquainted with Mr. Ingham, whom he afterwards frequently assisted among his societies in Yorkshire, particularly at Birstal, where he raised a great spirit of inquiry prior to the arrival of John Nelson in his native town. Frequent mention is made of David in the letters of the Countess, and in the Journals of Mr. Wesley. About the period when the above letter was written, David had fallen under the displeasure of her Ladyship and Mr. Wesley, on account of an ill-judged marriage he had contracted, and embracing the wild vagaries of Mr. Ingham and other Moravian teachers, with regard to the plan of sal vation emphatically termed "the German stillness." In a letter dated January 9th, 1742, addressed to Mr. Wesley, Lady Huntingdon observes :-"Your opinion of David will, I fear, be found too true. I think it will be best to take no notice till I find a way to do it effectually. When we lose our plainness, there ends the ChrisA double-minded man who can bear?" Not finding himself at home among the Moravians, he forsook them, and joined himself to, or at least attended the

tian.