Man’s Duty to Women by Rev. F. D. Huntington

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Mar 30, 1876

Man’s Duty to Women.

By Rev. F. D. Huntington

Let him learn to be grateful to woman for this undoubted achievement of her sex, that it is she, she far more than he, and she, too, in spite of him, who has kept Christendom from lapsing into barbarism—kept mercy and truth from being utterly overborne by those two greedy monsters, money, and war. Let him be grateful for this, that almost every great soul that has led forward or lifted up the race, has been furnished for each noble deed, and inspired with each patriotic and holy aspiration, by the retiring fortitude of some Spartan or more than Spartan—some Christian mother.

Moses, the deliverer of his people, drawn out of the Nile by the king’s daughter, some one has hinted, is only a symbol of the way that woman’s better instinct always outwits the tyrannical diplomacy of man. Let him cheerfully remember that though the sinewy sex achieves enterprises on public theaters, it is the nerve and sensibility of the other that arm the mind and inflame the soul in secret. “A man discovered America, but a woman equipped the voyage.” So everywhere; man executes the performance, but woman trains the man. Every effectual person, leaving his mark on the world, is but another Columbus, for whose furnishing, some Isabella, in the form of his mother, lays down her jewelry, her vanities, her comfort.—Rev. F. D. Huntington.