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The Legal Rights: Liabilities & Duties of Women (Free Love in America Series)
The Legal Rights Liabilities Duties of Women - Free Love in America Series Author:Edward D. Mansfield Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Condition of the Pagan Nations around the Hebrews. the dispensation of early ages that which the light of Christianity alone could give. The Hebrew system ... more »itself improved, in respect to its legal condition, from the days of Abraham to those of the last Prophets. Some of its customs descended from the primitive patriarchs; most of its laws were given through Moses, and some were changed in after ages. The body of those, however, which denote the state of Hebrew society, are found in the books of Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy. They are those which were declared by an inspired prophet of the Lord; and, compared by any standard of morals, laws, or society extant among other nations, were far beyond what any human lawgiver had then discovered. The civilization of the entire world was then rude, and the marks of that comparative barbarism, as judged by the Christian standard, may be found even in the social state of the Hebrews. It is exhibited, in a most marked degree, in the condition of women, who were not exempt, even in the righteous families of patriarch fathers, from the hard and degrading laws of polygamy ; and who, in respect to property and legal rights, were little removed from slaves. This, however, was the universal state of society at that time; and, with the exception of the few Christians who have let in some scattered rays of light on oriental manners, has been the moral and legal state of Asiatic nations through all ages of the world. In our later day, (approaching, as we may reasonably hope, the " fulness of time," when the dispensation of Christianity shall have made its complete progress through the world,) Condition of the Pagan Nations around the Hebrews. the conquest of India, the removal of commercial interdiction from China, and the colonizatio...« less