________________
150
JAINISM, CHRISTIANITY & SCIENCE
“For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmach as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of man."-1 Cor. xi, 7.
In some respects women are equal to men; in some, they are not; they have besides their own special privi. leges and functions. Generally, the woman is more sentimental,* emotional and modest; man is more steadfast and less sentimental. In matters demanding the extreme degree of coolness and self-control, women are more liable to be underved than men. It will be interesting to know that Philo Judæus, the great expounder of Jewish mysteries, also insisted on the inferiority in rank of the woman. He wrote:
"... for as the male always has the precedence, the female falls short, and is inferior in rank."-(Yonge's Philo Judæus, vol. ii. p. 204.) • But it is not the teaching of religion that a woman shall never obtain salvation, but only this that she will have to be reborn first as a man. When we remember that there are differences and inequalities among men themselves we shall cease to wonder at those between woman and man. The men of the days long gone by could attain Nirvana, those born during the last two and a half millennia and those who will be born on our earth during the remainder of the duration of the current cycle and the early part of the next one shall not be able to do so. (4) There is no happiness for embodied life.
"For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." Romans vii. 22.
* For instance, women are endowed with a greater capacity for pity than men.
