" Food is to be given first in a house to "newly-married women,
to infants, to the sick, and to pregnant women". Yet the same Manu is
supposed to have taken the lowest and coarsest view of women: "It is
the nature of women to seduce men; for that reason the wise are never
unguarded with females ... One should not sit in a lonely place with
one's mother, sister or daughter; for the senses are powerful, and
master even a learned man." A woman must never act "independently, even
in her own house," she must be subject to father, husband or (on her
husband's death) sons. Women have allotted to them as qualities, "impure
desires, wrath, dishonesty, malice and bad conduct". The Sh[=u][d.]ra
servant is to be "regarded as a younger son"; a slave is to be looked
on "as one's shadow," and if a man is offended by him he "must bear it
without resentment"; yet the most ghastly punishments are ordered to be
inflicted on Sh[=u][d.]ras for intruding on certain sacred rites.
The net result is that ancient Revelations, being given for a certain
age and certain social conditions, often cannot and ought not to be
carried out in the present state of Society; that ancient documents are
difficult to verify--often impossible--as coming from those whose names
they bear; that there is no guarantee against forgeries, interpolations,
glosses, becoming part of the text, with a score of other imperfections;
that they contain contradictions, and often absurdities, to say nothing
of immoralities.
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