The glad tidings preached by Christ were obviously highly favourable to
women. He lifted them to equality before the Lord when their very
possession of souls was still doubted by the majority of rival
theologians. Moreover, He esteemed them socially and set value upon
their sagacity, and one of the most disdained of their sex, a lady
formerly in public life, was among His regular advisers. Mariolatry is
thus by no means the invention of the mediaeval popes, as Protestant
theologians would have us believe. On the contrary, it is plainly
discernible in the Four Gospels. What the mediaeval popes actually
invented (or, to be precise, reinvented, for they simply borrowed the
elements of it from St. Paul) was the doctrine of women’s inferiority,
the precise opposite of the thing credited to them. Committed, for
sound reasons of discipline, to the celibacy of the clergy, they had to
support it by depicting all traffic with women in the light of a
hazardous and ignominious business. The result was the deliberate
organization and development of the theory of female triviality, lack
of responsibility and general looseness of mind. Woman became a sort of
devil, but without the admired intelligence of the regular demons. The
appearance of women saints, however, offered a constant and
embarrassing criticism of this idiotic doctrine. If occasional women
were fit to sit upon the right hand of God—and they were often proving
it, and forcing the church to acknowledge it—then surely all women
could not be as bad as the books made them out. There thus arose the
concept of the angelic woman, the natural vestal; we see her at full
length in the romances of mediaeval chivalry. What emerged in the end
was a sort of double doctrine, first that women were devils and
secondly that they were angels. This preposterous dualism has merged,
as we have seen, into a compromise dogma in modern times. By that dogma
it is held, on the one hand, that women are unintelligent and immoral,
and on the other hand, that they are free from all those weaknesses of
the flesh which distinguish men. This, roughly speaking, is the notion
of the average male numskull today.
Christianity has thus both libelled women and flattered them, but with
the weight always on the side of the libel. It is therefore, at bottom,
their enemy, as the religion of Christ, now wholly extinct, was their
friend. And as they gradually throw off the shackles that have bound
them for a thousand years they show appreciation of the fact. Women,
indeed, are not naturally religious, and they are growing less and less
religious as year chases year. Their ordinary devotion has little if
any pious exaltation in it; it is a routine practice, force on them by
the masculine notion that an appearance of holiness is proper to their
lowly station, and a masculine feeling that church-going somehow keeps
them in order, and out of doings that would be less reassuring. When
they exhibit any genuine religious fervour, its sexual character is
usually so obvious that even the majority of men are cognizant of it.
Women never go flocking ecstatically to a church in which the agent of
God in the pulpit is an elderly asthmatic with a watchful wife. When
one finds them driven to frenzies by the merits of the saints, and
weeping over the sorrows of the heathen, and rushing out to haul the
whole vicinage up to grace, and spending hours on their knees in
hysterical abasement before the heavenly throne, it is quite safe to
assume, even without an actual visit, that the ecclesiastic who has
worked the miracle is a fair and toothsome fellow, and a good deal more
aphrodisiacal than learned. All the great preachers to women in modern
times have been men of suave and ingratiating habit, and the great
majority of them, from Henry Ward Beecher up and down, have been taken,
soon or late, in transactions far more suitable to the boudoir than to
the footstool of the Almighty. Their famous killings have always been
made among the silliest sort of women—the sort, in brief, who fall so
short of the normal acumen of their sex that they are bemused by mere
beauty in men.
Such women are in a minority, and so the sex shows a good deal fewer
religious enthusiasts per mille than the sex of sentiment and belief.
Attending, several years ago, the gladiatorial shows of the Rev. Dr.
Billy Sunday, the celebrated American pulpit-clown, I was constantly
struck by the great preponderance of males in the pen devoted to the
saved. Men of all ages and in enormous numbers came swarming to the
altar, loudly bawling for help against their sins, but the women were
anything but numerous, and the few who appeared were chiefly either
chlorotic adolescents or pathetic old Saufschwestern. For six nights
running I sat directly beneath the gifted exhorter without seeing a
single female convert of what statisticians call the child-bearing
age—that is, the age of maximum intelligence and charm. Among the male
simpletons bagged by his yells during this time were the president of a
railroad, half a dozen rich bankers and merchants, and the former
governor of an American state. But not a woman of comparable position
or dignity. Not a woman that any self-respecting bachelor would care to
chuck under the chin.
This cynical view of religious emotionalism, and with it of the whole
stock of ecclesiastical balderdash, is probably responsible, at least
in part, for the reluctance of women to enter upon the sacerdotal
career. In those Christian sects which still bar them from the
pulpit—usually on the imperfectly concealed ground that they are not
equal to its alleged demands upon the morals and the intellect—one
never hears of them protesting against the prohibition; they are quite
content to leave the degrading imposture to men, who are better fitted
for it by talent and conscience. And in those baroque sects, chiefly
American, which admit them they show no eagerness to put on the stole
and chasuble. When the first clergywoman appeared in the United States,
it was predicted by alarmists that men would be driven out of the
pulpit by the new competition. Nothing of the sort has occurred, nor is
it in prospect. The whole corps of female divines in the country might
be herded into one small room. Women, when literate at all, are far too
intelligent to make effective ecclesiastics. Their sharp sense of
reality is in endless opposition to the whole sacerdotal masquerade,
and their cynical humour stands against the snorting that is
inseparable from pulpit oratory.
Those women who enter upon the religious life are almost invariably
moved by some motive distinct from mere pious inflammation. It is a
commonplace, indeed, that, in Catholic countries, girls are driven into
convents by economic considerations or by disasters of amour far
oftener than they are drawn there by the hope of heaven. Read the lives
of the female saints, and you will see how many of them tried marriage
and failed at it before ever they turned to religion. In Protestant
lands very few women adopt it as a profession at all, and among the few
a secular impulse is almost always visible. The girl who is suddenly
overcome by a desire to minister to the heathen in foreign lands is
nearly invariably found, on inspection, to be a girl harbouring a
theory that it would be agreeable to marry some heroic missionary. In
point of fact, she duly marries him. At home, perhaps, she has found it
impossible to get a husband, but in the remoter marches of China,
Senegal and Somaliland, with no white competition present, it is
equally impossible to fail.