Chapter IV

Summary

In a time so fraught with national confusion, foreign alliances, treacherous peace, or destructive war, as the period which our sketch comprises, history reveals but little to aid us in our attempt to delineate the character and condition of our female ancestors. Yet that little is most important, tending unanswerably to prove the exaltation of our social position, the elevation of our individual character, and also to convince us that there was not a single law then in force that could, either morally, physically, or socially debase us. We shall find the influence of woman actuating man, in more than one instance, for the evil unhappily, also with the good; but the very power of the evil is, as we have before said, an argument in favour of our equality and freedom.

During the persecution under Antiochus Epiphanes, the sufferings of the women of Israel must have been as fearful, as their constancy and fidelity were powerful proofs, of the perfect adaptation of the Law of the Eternal, to their temporal and spiritual wants. Never could a religion which made them soul less slaves, have become so dear, so part of their very hearts, that it was easier to endure torture, and slavery, and death rather than depart from it themselves, or refuse its privileges to their infant sons. Eighty thousand persons, men, women, and children, slain in the forcible entrance of Antiochus within Jerusalem, and forty thousand of both sexes sold into slavery was the horrible preface to the misery which followed.