30 Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820)
Robert P. Wilson
Introduction
Judith Sargent was born into an elite family of merchants in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on May 1, 1751. Her family’s social position afforded her some formal education as a child, although limited due to her gender. Hungry for knowledge, however, young Judith Sargent took every opportunity to educate herself. The rise in literacy that began in the mid-18th century, and the fact that upper-class women were literate but largely inactive in (because barred from) public life, meant that publishers often catered to women readers. A variety of publications from both sides of the Atlantic were readily available, and a steady increase in the publication of women’s writing began to redefine the role of women in the public sphere. Inspired by other women writers like Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, Judith harbored ambitions of literary fame, writing poems, three plays, and a novel. She is best known to modern readers as an essayist who helped shape public dialogue about women’s changing relationship to men and to the nation in the early years of the American republic.
Judith Sargent married John Stevens, a fellow member of Gloucester’s merchant elite, in 1769. For Judith, the pairing was less than ideal, a decision she would later attribute to her youth and inexperience. She was frustrated that Stevens treated her more like a dependent than an equal, especially when it came to financial decisions. In 1786, bankrupt and facing debtor’s prison, John Stevens left the United States for the West Indies in a last-ditch effort to recoup his losses. He fell ill and died there the following year. Widowed and financially strained, Judith took up needlework and had to divide her late husband’s property among his creditors. While she was never destitute, growing up in an affluent family had made Judith acutely conscious of wealth, and her bouts with financial insecurity left her anxious about money for the rest of her life.
In 1788, Judith married John Murray, a Universalist preacher who had emigrated from England on the eve of the American Revolution. Reverend Murray was a charismatic speaker, and Judith initiated a letter correspondence with him after hearing him preach in Gloucester in 1774. Universalism was a progressive form of Christianity that challenged the Calvinist orthodoxies underlying religious tradition in New England since English Puritans first began colonizing Massachusetts in 1620. Universalists believed that Christ’s sacrifice secured redemption for all, not just a chosen few. Arriving in New England in the late 18th century, Universalism was linked to revolutionary principles like religious liberty and the separation of church and state. If taught to read, everyone, man or woman, could interpret the Bible for themselves. These struggles for religious liberty paved the way for critiques against what Judith called “the despotism of tradition” across all of social life. It is perhaps not surprising that the Universalist church was the first in America to ordain women.
John Murray was instrumental in establishing Universalism in America, dedicating the first Universalist meeting house in 1780. His extensive travels as a preacher introduced Judith to notables like John and Abigail Adams, Martha Washington, and the family of Benjamin Franklin. Staunch believers in the spiritual and intellectual equality of men and women before God, Judith and John Murray maintained a mutually supportive marriage in which they encouraged one another’s commitments to egalitarianism — hers through writing, and his through preaching. Grounded in “mutual esteem, mutual friendship, mutual confidence, [and] mutual forbearance,” the marriage was a practical demonstration of the gender equality Judith repeatedly asserted in her writing.
While she supported American independence from Great Britain, Judith regretted that a bloody war was its price. Her early unpublished writing was mostly poetry, but after the Revolution she turned to essays on liberty and human rights. A Universalist and voracious reader of works from both sides of the Atlantic, Judith identified herself as a “Citizen of the World” and situated her writings within an internationalist sphere in which universal humanity transcended gender distinctions, political affiliations, and national boundaries. She saw that the post-revolutionary social orders of the West were changing. But she also recognized that the appeals to equality and universal rights underwriting these changes were seldom realized in practice. The Declaration of Independence (1776) proclaimed that rights were inborn and inalienable, but the Constitution (1787) included no protections for women, African Americans, or Native Americans, and enforced slavery and indentured servitude. The American Revolution, which Thomas Paine characterized as a universal emancipation, was in fact a localized revolution in which a wealthy group of white Anglo-American men fomented the overthrow of an aristocratic British ruling class and installed themselves as the new ruling elites. Because the poor masses in the colonies had little to gain from a change in rulership that would leave political and economic hierarchies largely undisturbed, those few “patriots” who stood to gain the most from independence had to sway public opinion in their favor. The publishing industry was essential to this task.
Attuned to public dialogues surrounding national independence, Sargent Murray recognized the incommensurability between professed universal equality and actual inequality, on the one hand, and the power of publication in shaping public opinion on the other. Her writings argued for the realization of the revolutionary ideal of universal equality in the realm of gender, asserting the intellectual equality of men and women and calling for access to formal education for both girls and boys. She agreed with the traditional notion that mothers needed some education in order to prepare their male children for civic life, but further insisted that the intellectual development of women was fulfilling in itself. She emphasized women’s contributions to western culture, joining a transatlantic dialogue about women’s roles in the new social orders of the West. She would often use pen names, first “Constantia,” and later “the Gleaner,” a male persona through which she spoke openly about women’s education and employment, poverty, racial prejudice, justice, health, religion, and travel. When she published her collected essays (along with poems and two plays) in three volumes in 1798, the collection’s subscribers included the likes of Martha and George Washington, John Adams, John Hancock, and the governors of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
After the publication of The Gleaner in 1798, Judith’s involvement in the publishing world declined. This was in part due to the conservative backlash in New England following the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, which made her advocacy of revolutionary principles like universal equality less palatable to an American public who had already had their own revolution. There were personal reasons as well. Though she had achieved some writerly success, it did not match her literary aspirations, and the negative reviews of her three plays (produced in 1795, 1796, and 1804) took a toll on her confidence. She also devoted much of her energy to caring for her husband after his stroke in 1801, and to raising their daughter, Julia Maria, who had been born in 1791. John Murray died in 1815, and Judith moved to Mississippi in 1818 to live with Julia Maria and her husband. She died there in 1820.
Despite the influence her writings had on post-war discussions of gender, Sargent Murray’s work remained largely neglected until the 1990s, when a Universalist minister unearthed her letterbooks, which shed new light on her life and career and sparked interest in her contributions to American letters. Both of the texts included here hinge on Sargent Murray’s clever reversals of common sense assumptions. The first, “Desultory Thoughts upon the Utility of Encouraging a Degree of Self-Complacency, Especially in Female Bosoms” (1784), asserts that “ambition is a noble principle [when] properly directed,” and argues that the common practice of keeping girls intellectually stunted in the hopes they will grow up to be modest women actually has the opposite effect. The failure to nurture a girl’s “self-estimation” when young makes her susceptible to “the tongue of the flatterer” in womanhood, leading to a shallow pride in appearance rather than the more noble confidence that comes from a thriving “intellectual existence.” “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790) develops this notion by arguing that what are perceived as “natural” deficiencies in women are in fact the result of social norms that deprive them of the mental nourishment that comes from education. The essay concludes with a “supplement” in which Sargent Murray reverses the traditional (patriarchal) reading of the Book of Genesis that held that Eve was a weak-willed seductress who caved to temptation and dragged Adam (and thus all of mankind) into sin. Instead, Sargent Murray argues that while “all the arts of the grand deceiver…were requisite to mislead our general mother” – the devil appeared as a “shining angel” and promised to fulfill her “laudable ambition” for “a perfection of knowledge” – Adam followed not because of the devil’s wily deceptions or promises of enlightenment, but merely according to “a bare pusillanimous attachment to a woman!” Sargent Murray thus reverses gender stereotypes by characterizing Eve as inspirational and noble, and Adam as shortsighted and weak.
While her views on gender were progressive, Sargent Murray was no radical. In order to move beyond the indirect influence women could exercise in their capacities as wives and mothers to a more direct impact on public dialogue, Judith, like other women writers of her day, drew cultural authority from identifying more with men of her own class than with other women across the socioeconomic spectrum. While she knew gender inequities were artificial, she took hierarchical differences of class and ability to be actual. Though she knew that women were as capable as men of self-reliance, economic independence, and intellectual development, her views on womanhood were self-contradictory. She lamented the limitations society placed on women, yet celebrated motherhood as a woman’s natural (even spiritual) destiny. She believed that “custom tyrannizes over the strongest minds” and works to “confine the female intellect within the narrowest bounds,” but she did not encourage outright rebellion against culturally imposed gender norms. Called by some the “chief theorist of republican motherhood,” she did not reject roles traditionally assigned to women, but sought to enlarge them so as to include more direct participation in the public life of the nation. Nevertheless, by insisting that gender inequality was neither decreed by nature or by God nor reducible to any one person’s prejudices, but was built into a social order that could be changed through concerted action, she affirmed the possibility of a more egalitarian republic. Her progressive claim that marriage need not be every woman’s goal, and her views on women’s education and independence, placed her at the vanguard of transatlantic feminism, in the company of the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (whose famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published just two years after “On the Equality of the Sexes”) and the more radical French dissident Olympes de Gouges, who in 1793 paid for her vocal criticism of the post-revolutionary French patriarchy with her head.
References
Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray. Ed. Sharon M. Harris. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Sheila L. Skemp, Judith Sargent Murray: A Brief Biography with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998.
On the Equality of the Sexes
TO THE EDITORS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS MAGAZINE,
GENTLEMEN,
The following ESSAY is yielded to the patronage of Candour.—If it hath been anticipated, the testimony of many respectable persons, who saw it in manuscripts as early as the year 1779, can obviate the imputation of plagiarism.
| THAT minds are not alike, full well I know, This truth each day’s experience will show; To heights surprising some great spirits soar, With inborn strength mysterious depths explore; Their eager gaze surveys the path of light, Confest it stood to Newton’s piercing sight. Deep science, like a bashful maid retires, And but the ardent breast her worth inspires; By perseverance the coy fair is won. And Genius, led by Study, wears the crown. But some there are who wish not to improve Who never can the path of knowledge love, Whose souls almost with the dull body one, With anxious care each mental pleasure shun; Weak is the level’d, enervated mind, And but while here to vegetate design’d. The torpid spirit mingling with its clod, Can scarcely boast its origin from God; Stupidly dull—they move progressing on— They eat, and drink, and all their work is done. While others, emulous of sweet applause, Industrious seek for each event a cause, Tracing the hidden springs whence knowledge flows, Which nature all in beauteous order shows. Yet cannot I their sentiments imbibe, Who this distinction to the sex ascribe, As if a woman’s form must needs enrol, A weak, a servile, an inferiour soul; And that the guise of man must still proclaim, Greatness of mind, and him, to be the same: Yet as the hours revolve fair proofs arise, Which the bright wreath of growing fame supplies; And in past times some men have sunk so low, That female records nothing less can show. But imbecility is still confin’d, And by the lordly sex to us consign’d; They rob us of the power t’improve, And then declare we only trifles love; Yet haste the era, when the world shall know, That such distinctions only dwell below; The soul unfetter’d, to no sex confin’d, Was for the abodes of cloudless day design’d. Mean time we emulate their manly fires, Though erudition all their thoughts inspires, Yet nature with equality imparts And noble passions, swell e’en female hearts. |
Is it upon mature consideration we adopt the idea, that nature is thus partial in her distributions? Is it indeed a fact, that she hath yielded to one half of the human species so unquestionable a mental superiority? I know that to both sexes elevated understandings, and the reverse, are common. But, suffer me to ask, in what the minds of females are so notoriously deficient, or unequal. May not the intellectual powers be ranged under these four heads – imagination, reason, memory and judgment. The province of imagination hath long since been surrendered to us, and we have been crowned and undoubted sovereigns of the regions of fancy. Invention is perhaps the most arduous effort of the mind; this branch of imagination hath been particularly ceded to us, and we have been time out of mind invested with that creative faculty. Observe the variety of fashions (here I bar the contemptuous smile) which distinguish and adorn the female world: how continually are they changing, insomuch that they almost render the wise man’s assertion problematical, and we are ready to say, there is something new under the sun. Now what a playfulness, what an exuberance of fancy, what strength of inventine imagination, doth this continual variation discover? Again, it hath been observed, that if the turpitude of the conduct of our sex, hath been ever so enormous, so extremely ready are we, that the very first thought presents us with an apology, so plausible, as to produce our actions even in an amiable light. Another instance of our creative powers, is our talent for slander; how ingenious are we at inventive scandal? what a formidable story can we in a moment fabricate merely from the force of a prolifick imagination? how many reputations, in the fertile brain of a female, have been utterly despoiled? how industrious are we at improving a hint? suspicion how easily do we convert into conviction, and conviction, embellished by the power of eloquence, stalks abroad to the surprise and confusion of unsuspecting innocence. Perhaps it will be asked if I furnish these facts as instances of excellency in our sex. Certainly not; but as proofs of a creative faculty, of a lively imagination. Assuredly great activity of mind is thereby discovered, and was this activity properly directed, what beneficial effects would follow. Is the needle and kitchen sufficient to employ the operations of a soul thus organized? I should conceive not, Nay, it is a truth that those very departments leave the intelligent principle vacant, and at liberty for speculation. Are we deficient in reason? we can only reason from what we know, and if an opportunity of acquiring knowledge hath been denied us, the inferiority of our sex cannot fairly be deduced from thence. Memory, I believe, will be allowed us in common, since everyone’s experience must testify, that a loquacious old woman is as frequently met with, as a communicative man; their subjects are alike drawn from the fund of other times, and the transactions of their youth, or of maturer life, entertain, or perhaps fatigue you, in the evening of their lives.
“But our judgment is not so strong—we do not distinguish so well.”—Yet it may be questioned, from what doth this superiority, in this determining faculty of the soul, proceed. May we not trace its source in the difference of education, and continued advantages? Will it be said that the judgment of a male of two years old, is more sage than that of a female’s of the same age? I believe the reverse is generally observed to be true. But from that period what partiality! how is the one exalted, and the other depressed, by the contrary modes of education which are adopted! the one is taught to aspire, and the other is early confined and limitted. As their years increase, the sister must be wholly domesticated, while the brother is led by the hand through all the flowery paths of science. Grant that their minds are by nature equal, yet who shall wonder at the apparent superiority, if indeed custom becomes second nature; nay if it taketh place of nature, and that it doth the experience of each day will evince. At length arrived at womanhood, the uncultivated fair one feels a void, which the employments allotted her are by no means capable of filling. What can she do? to books she may not apply; or if she doth, to those only of the novel kind, lest she merit the appellation of a learned lady; and what ideas have been affixed to this term, the observation of many can testify. Fashion, scandal, and sometimes what is still more reprehensible, are then called in to her relief; and who can say to what lengths the liberties she takes may proceed. Meantimes she herself is most unhappy; she feels the want of a cultivated mind. Is she single, she in vain seeks to fill up time from sexual employments or amusements. Is she united to a person whose soul nature made equal to her own, education hath set him so far above her, that in those entertainments which are productive of such rational felicity, she is not qualified to accompany him. She experiences a mortifying consciousness of inferiority, which embitters every enjoyment. Doth the person to whom her adverse fate hath consigned her, possess a mind incapable of improvement, she is equally wretched, in being so closely connected with an individual whom she cannot but despise. Now, was she permitted the same instructors as her brother, (with an eye however to their particular departments) for the employment of a rational mind an ample field would be opened. In astronomy she might catch a glimpse of the immensity of the Deity, and thence she would form amazing conceptions of the august and supreme Intelligence. In geography she would admire Jehovah in the midst of his benevolence; thus adapting this globe to the various wants and amusements of its inhabitants. In natural philosophy she would adore the infinite majesty of heaven, clothed in condescension; and as she traversed the reptile world, she would hail the goodness of a creating God. A mind, thus filled, would have little room for the trifles with which our sex are, with too much justice, accused of amusing themselves, and they would thus be rendered fit companions for those, who should one day wear them as their crown. Fashions, in their variety, would then give place to conjectures, which might perhaps conduce to the improvements of the literary world; and there would be no leisure for slander or detraction. Reputation would not then be blasted, but serious speculations would occupy the lively imaginations of the sex. Unnecessary visits would only be indulged by way of relaxation, or to answer the demands of consanguinity and friendship. Females would become discreet, their judgments would be invigorated, and their partners for life being circumspectly chosen, an unhappy Hymen would then be as rare, as is now the reverse.
Will it be urged that those acquirements would supersede our domestick duties. I answer that every requisite in female economy is easily attained; and, with truth I can add, that when once attained, they require no further mental attention. Nay, while we are pursuing the needle, or the superintendency of the family, I repeat, that our minds are at full liberty for reflection; that imagination may exert itself in full vigor; and that if a just foundation is early laid, our ideas will then be worthy of rational beings. If we were industrious we might easily find time to arrange them upon paper, or should avocations press too hard for such an indulgence, the hours allotted for conversation would at least become more refined and rational. Should it still be vociferated, “Your domestick employments are sufficient” – I would calmly ask, is it reasonable, that a candidate for immortality, for the joys of heaven, an intelligent being, who is to spend an eternity in contemplating the works of the Deity, should at present be so degraded, as to be allowed no other ideas, than those which are suggested by the mechanism of a pudding, or the sewing the seams of a garment? Pity that all such censurers of female improvement do not go one step further, and deny their future existence; to be consistent they surely ought.
Yes, ye lordly, ye haughty sex, our souls are by nature equal to yours; the same breath of God animates, enlivens, and invigorates us; and that we are not fallen lower than yourselves, let those witness who have greatly towered above the various discouragements by which they have been so heavily oppressed; and though I am unacquainted with the list of celebrated characters on either side, yet from the observations I have made in the contracted circle in which I have moved, I dare confidently believe, that from the commencement of time to the present day, there hath been as many females, as males, who, by the mere force of natural powers, have merited the crown of applause; who, thus unassisted, have seized the wreath of fame. I know there are who assert, that as the animal power of the one sex are superiour, of course their mental faculties also must be stronger; thus attributing strength of mind to the transient organization of this earth born tenement. But if this reasoning is just, man must be content to yield the palm to many of the brute creation, since by not a few of his brethren of the field, he is far surpassed in bodily strength. Moreover, was this argument admitted, it would prove too much, for occular demonstration evinceth, that there are many robust masculine ladies, and effeminate gentlemen. Yet I fancy that Mr. Pope, though clogged with an enervated body, and distinguished by a diminutive stature, could nevertheless lay claim to greatness of soul; and perhaps there are many other instances which might be adduced to combat so unphilosophical an opinion. Do we not often see, that when the clay built tabernacle is well nigh dissolved, when it is just ready to mingle with the parent soil, the immortal inhabitant aspires to, and even attaineth heights the most sublime, and which were before wholly unexplored. Besides, were we to grant that animal strength proved any thing, taking into consideration the accustomed impartiality of nature, we should be induced to imagine, that she had invested the female mind with superiour strength as an equivalent for the bodily powers of man. But waving this however palpable advantage, for equality only, we wish to contend.
I AM aware that there are many passages in the sacred oracles which seem to give the advantage to the other sex; but I consider all these as wholly metaphorical. Thus David was a man after God’s own heart, yet see him enervated by his licentious passions! behold him following Uriah to the death, and shew me wherein could consist the immaculate Being’s complacency. Listen to the curses which Job bestoweth upon the day of his nativity, and tell me where is his perfection, where his patience–literally it existed not. David and Job were types of him who was to come; and the superiority of man, as exhibited in scripture, being also emblematical, all arguments deduced from thence, of course fall to the ground. The exquisite delicacy of the female mind proclaimeth the exactness of its texture, while its nice sense of honour announceth its innate, its native grandeur. And indeed, in one respect, the preeminence seems to be tacitly allowed us; for after an education which limits and confines, and employments and recreations which naturally tend to enervate the body, and debilitate the mind; after we have from early youth been adorned with ribbons, and other gewgaws, dressed out like the ancient victims previous to a sacrifice, being taught by the care of our parents in collecting the most showy materials that the ornamenting our exteriour ought to be the principal object of our attention; after, I say, fifteen years thus spent, we are introduced into the world, amid the united adulation of every beholder. Praise is sweet to the soul; we are immediately intoxicated by large draughts of flattery, which being plentifully administered, is to the pride of our hearts, the most acceptable incense. It is expected that with the other sex we should commence immediate war, and that we should triumph over the machinations of the most artful. We must be constantly upon our guard; prudence and discretion must be our characteristiks; and we must rise superiour to, and obtain a complete victory over those who have been long adding to the native strength of their minds, by an unremitted study of men and books, and who have, moreover, conceived from the loose characters which they have seen portrayed in the extensive variety of their reading, a most contemptible opinion of the sex. Thus unequal, we are, notwithstanding, forced to the combat, and the infamy which is consequent upon the smallest deviation in our conduct, proclaims the high idea which was formed of our native strength; and thus, indirectly at least, is the preference acknowledged to be our due. And if we are allowed an equality of acquirements, let serious studies equally employ our minds, and we will bid our souls arise to equal strengths. We will meet upon even ground, the despot man; we will rush with alacrity to the combat, and, crowned by success, we shall then answer the exalted expectations, which are formed. Though sensibility, soft compassion, and gentle commiseration, are inmates in the female bosom, yet against every deep laid art, altogether fearless of the event, we will set them in array; for assuredly the wreath of victory will encircle the spotless brow. If we meet an equal, a sensible friend, we will reward him with the hand of amity, and through life we will be assiduous to promote his happiness; but from every deep laid scheme, for our ruin, retiring into ourselves, amid the flowery paths of science, we will indulge in all the refined and sentimental pleasures of contemplation: And should it still be urged, that the studies thus insisted upon would interfere with our more peculiar department, I must further reply, that early hours, and close application, will do wonders; and to her who is from the first dawn of reason taught to fill up time rationally, both the requisites will be easy. I grant that niggard fortune is too generally unfriendly to the mind; and that much of that valuable treasure, time, is necessarily expended upon the wants of the body; but it should be remembered; that in embarrassed circumstances our companions have as little leisure for literary improvements, as is afforded to us; for most certainly their provident care is at least as requisite as our exertions. Nay, we have even more leisure for sedentary pleasures, as our avocations are more retired, much less laborious, and, as hath been observed, by no means require that avidity of attention which is proper to the employments of the other sex. In high life, or, in other words, where the parties are in possession of affluence, the objection respecting time is wholly obviated, and of course falls to the ground; and it may also be repeated, that many of those hours which are at present swallowed up in fashion and scandal, might be redeemed, were we habituated to useful reflections. But in one respect, O ye arbiters of our fate! we confess that the superiority is indubitably yours; you are by nature formed for our protectors; we pretend not to vie with you in bodily strength; upon this point we will never contend for victory. Shield us then, we beseech you, from external evils, and in return we will transact your domestick affairs. Yes, your, for are you not equally interested in those matters with ourselves? Is not the elegancy of neatness as agreeable to your sight as to ours; is not the well favoured viand equally delightful to your taste; and doth not your sense of hearing suffer as much, from the discordant sounds prevalent in an ill regulated family, produced by the voices of children and many et ceteras?
CONSTANTIA.
By way of supplement to the foregoing pages, I subjoin the following extract from a letter, wrote to a friend in the December of 1780
AND now assist me, O thou genius of my sex, while I undertake the arduous task of endeavouring to combat that vulgar, that almost universal errour, which hath, it seems, enlisted even Mr. P— under its banners. The superiority of your sex hath, I grant, been time out of mind esteemed a truth incontrovertible; in consequence of which persuasion, every plan of education hath been calculated to establish this favourite tenet. Not long since, weak and presuming as I was, I amused myself with selecting some arguments from nature, reason, and experience; against this so generally received idea, I confess that to sacred testimonies I had not recourse. I held them to be merely metaphorical, and thus regarding them, I could not persuade myself that there was any propriety in bringing them to decide in this very important debate. However, as you, sir, confine yourself entirely to the sacred oracles, I mean to bend the whole of my artillery against those supposed proofs, which you have from thence provided, and from which you have formed an intrenchment apparently so invulnerable. And first, to begin with our great progenitors; but here, suffer me to premise, that it is for mental strength I mean to contend, for with respect to animal powers, I yield them undisputed to that sex, which enjoys them in common with the lion, the tyger, and many other beasts of prey; therefore your observations respecting the rib under the arm, at a distance from the head, &c.&c. in no sort militate against my view. Well, but the woman was first in the transgression. Strange how blind self love renders you men; were you not wholly absorbed in a partial admiration of your own abilities, you would long since have acknowledged the force of what I am now going to urge. It is true some ignoramuses have absurdly enough informed us, that the beauteous fair of paradise, was seduced from her obedience, by a malignant demon, in the guise of a baleful serpent; but we, who are better informed, know that the fallen spirit presented himself to her view, a shining angel still; for thus, saith the criticks in the Hebrew tongue, ought the word to be rendered. Let us examine her motive—Hark! the seraph declares that she shall attain a perfection of knowledge; for is there aught which is not comprehended under one or other of the terms good and evil. It doth not appear that she was governed by any one sensual appetite; but merely by a desire of adorning her mind; a laudable ambition fired her soul, and a thirst for knowledge impelled the predilection so fatal in its consequences. Adam could not plead the same deception; assuredly he was not deceived; nor ought we to admire his superiour strength, or wonder at his sagacity, when we so often confess that example is much more influential than precept. His gentle partner stood before him, a melancholy instance of the direful effects of disobedience; he saw her not possessed of that wisdom which she had fondly hoped to obtain, but he beheld the once blooming female, disrobed of that innocence, which had heretofore rendered her so lovely. To him then deception became impossible, as he had proof positive of the fallacy of the argument, which the deceiver had suggested. What then could be his inducement to burst the barriers, and to fly directly in the face of that command, which immediately from the mouth of deity he had received, since, I say, he could not plead that fascinating stimulous, the accumulation of knowledge, as indisputable conviction was so visibly portrayed before him. What mighty cause impelled him to sacrifice myriads of beings yet unborn, and by one impious act, which he saw would be productive of such fatal effects, entail undistinguished ruin upon a race of beings, which he was yet to produce. Blush, ye vaunters of fortitude; ye boasters of resolution; ye haughty lords of the creation; blush when ye remember, that he was influenced by no other motive than a bare pusilianimous attachment to a woman! by sentiments so exquisitely soft, that all his sons have, from that period, when they have designed to degrade them, described as highly feminine. Thus it should seem, that all the arts of the grand deceiver (since means adequate to the purpose are, I conceive, invariably pursued) were requisite to mislead our general mother, while the father of mankind forfeited his own, and relinquished the happiness of posterity, merely in compliance with the blandishments of a female. The subsequent subjection the apostle Paul explains as a figure; after enlarging upon the subject, he adds, “This is a great mystery; but I speak concerning Christ and the church.” Now we know with what consummate wisdom the unerring father of eternity hath formed his plans; all the types which he hath displayed, he hath permitted materially to fail, in the very virtue for which they were famed. The reason for this is obvious, we might otherwise mistake his economy, and render that honour to the creature, which is due only to the creator. I know that Adam was a figure of him who was to come. The grace contained in this figure, is the reason of my rejoicing, and while I am very far from prostrating before the shadow, I yield joyfully in all things the preeminence to the second federal head. Confiding faith is prefigured by Abraham, yet he exhibits a contrast to affiance, when he says of his fair companion, she is my sister. Gentleness was the characteristick of Moses, yet he hesitated not to reply to Jehovah himself, with unsaintlike tongue he murmured at the waters of strife, and with rash hands he break the tables, which were inscribed by the finger of divinity. David, dignified with the title of the man after God’s own heart, and yet how stained was his life. Solomon was celebrated for wisdom, but folly is write in legible characters upon his almost every action. Lastly, let us turn our eyes to man in the aggregate. He is manifested as the figure of strength, but that we may not regard him as any thing more than a figure, his soul is formed in no sort superiour, but every way equal to the mind of her who is the emblem of weakness and whom he hails the gentle companion of his better days.