"Yes--Nance--that was right. No moral law but mine. I carried out my
threat to make them all find their authority in me."

"Then you still believe yours is the only authority?"

"Yes; it sounds licentious and horrible, doesn't it; but there are two
queer things about it--the first is that man quite naturally _wishes_ to
be decent, and the second is that, when he does come to rely wholly upon
the authority within himself, he finds it a stricter disciplinarian than
ever the decalogue was. One needs only ordinary good taste to keep the
ten commandments--the moral ones. A man may observe them all and still
be morally rotten! But it's no joke to live by one's own law, and yet
that's all anybody has to keep him right, if we only knew it,
Nance--barring a few human statutes against things like murder and
keeping one's barber-shop open on the Sabbath--the ruder offenses which
no gentleman ever wishes to commit.

"And must poor woman be ruled by her own God, too?"

"Why not?"

"Well, it's not so long ago that the fathers of the Church were debating
in council whether she had a soul or not, charging her with bringing
sin, sickness and death into the world."

"Exactly. St. John Damascene called her 'a daughter of falsehood and a
sentinel of hell'; St. Jerome came in with 'Woman is the gate of the
devil, the road to iniquity, the sting of the scorpion'; St. Gregory, I
believe, considered her to have no comprehension of goodness; pious old