PUBLIC LIBRARY ASTOR, LENOX AND 1899 Capy Right secured, agreeably to Act of Congress, by entry in the Clerk's Office of the Circuit Court of the United States, for the Northern District of New-York, on the Twentieth day of September, A. D. 1833. DEDICATION. TO THE LADIES OF THE UNITED STATES. Can any apology be necessary, for addressing you on the present occasion? If so, permit me, my fair readers, to offer the following considerations; and to hope, at the same time, that you may give them all the weight to which they are justly entitled. If there be any difference, in a temporal point of view, in the necessity and importance of the Christian Revelation, to one portion of the human race, more than another, that difference is in favor of the Female Sex. If women wish to know how much they are indebted to Christianity for the blessings which they now enjoy, let them compare, for a moment, their degraded condition, under the ancient heathen or pagan mythology, and that of the Arabian Impostor, or the Braminical System of Asia, with the elevation which they have derived, in the social state, from the prevalence of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Let them view themselves in Greece and Rome, under the heathen or pagan system, as the absolute property, the humble, devoted and degraded slaves of their fathers and their husbands, from whose tyranny, however revolting it may have been to humanity, there was no appeal. Their tears fell unheeded; the ears of their tyrants were deaf to their sighs and lamentations; their sufferings excited no sympathy in the bosom of the oppressor; and for their wrongs there was no remedy, no mitigation or redress! Such is the portrait of female subjugation, under the heathen system of antiquity. But the evil did not stop here; for where the person is enslaved, the mind becomes either morbid and melancholy, or corrupt and depraved: The moral sense is blunted or totally destroyed: And hence it is, that notwithstanding a few boasted names, like the Roman LUCRETIA and CORNELIA, a true portrait of Female Manners in ancient Greece and Rome, could not be drawn by any writer who regards the laws of delicacy and decorum, to say nothing of Christian purity and piety. In fact, as to Greece, we look in vain for an illustrious woman, though Gillies pretends to draw a favorable picture, after Homer, of the conjugal virtues of the women of that country, during a certain epoch in her history, when lacerated by the furies of civil discord; yet the strongest instance of female excellence, with which he presents us, carries with it its own refutation; and proves not only the degradation of the sex, but the vile and abominable superstition of the age. We should not indeed think of looking to HOMER for a portrait of female ex-. cellence, such as would suit the taste and the moral sense of a modern Christian, or even those of a refined and honorable sceptic, of the present day.. Under the Mahometan system, women are nothing more than the mere passive instruments.or objects of the brutal passions of their lords and masters, from the Grand Turk, down to the meanest of his Janissaries, or the most insignificant of his enslaved and degraded vassals. To be the slave of the Grand Tyrant of his country, is a condition too base to be borne with ease by any human being; but to be the slave of slaves, is still more humiliating and beyond endurance, especially to a virtuous and noble spirited woman. But if such be, or has been, the wretched condition of women under those foreign auspices, what are we to think or feel, when we behold them, under the Braminical System, cast into the Ganges, in their infancy, as food for the monsters of the deep, and under the cruel pretext that they cannot be provided for in this life, on account of the overgrown population and consequent poverty of the country: And if saved from this cruel fate, we see them still doomed to be dragged alive to a horrible martyrdom on the funeral pile of their deceased husbands!or voluntarily, through a gross superstition, yielding to the inhuman and barbarous rite! Again, in the Savage State, as we are acquainted with it, where neither the Gods of Greece and Rome, nor the Arabian Impostor, nor the creed of the Grand Lama, or Braminical creed, bear sway, but where some dark and barbarous notions of the "Great Spirit" prevail, they are still doomed to misery and degradation the most painful and humiliating. What a disgusting and shocking picture of female existence, is presented in the wife of an American Savage (a Red Jacket, a Tecumseh, or a Black Hawk)-carrying her offspring on her back, and esteeming herself fortunate if that be her only burthen, through thorny paths, and over rugged precipices; or doomed to some other equally painful and laborious exertion, by the stern tyranny of her uncivilised, unchristianised, and consequently unfeeling husband. It is, in short, only where the bright beams of the Sun of Righteousness irradiate the intellectual and moral world, that WOMAN enjoys the privileges to which she is justly and richly entitled, and becomes the equal and endeared friend and companion of MAN, instead of the slave of his power and his caprice, and the victim of his ill-humor and brutality: And yet, to the regret and astonishment of every rational being, every sound head and pure heart in the country, we have lately seen a woman, so much the enemy of her sex, without being sensible of it, as to prostitute her fine talents, talents of the highest order indeed, in the unhallowed attempt to destroy our faith in the divinity and pre-eminent necessity and utility of the Christian Revelation ! And alas! we have seen men-men of boasted superiority following this accomplished, but deluded, female in her mad and mischievous career! It was never my disposition to become an alarm |