which some of Adam’s descendants have proved to their wives, is
scarcely to be ranked as elevated. The paramount influence of St.
Paul’s mind in generating (as Rowland Williams expresses it) the
religious atmosphere which Protestants breathe, and the great
celibate Apostle’s semi-ascetic feelings about women, have seemingly
counteracted the hereditary predisposition of Saxondom to reverence
them. His treatment of Marriage (reproduced in the exordium of the
Solemnization of Holy Matrimony in the English Book of Common Prayer,
and apparently intended to show how _un_holy are the sentiments
assumed to form the usual basis of that alliance) has certainly tended
to preserve the prestige of Scriptural dignity and authority for
sentiments on such subjects derived from Southern races and coarser
times, and which might else have died out ere now in Teutonized Europe.
That, considering the hysterical behavior of his male converts, when
“every one hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a
revelation, hath an interpretation,”[30] prudence justified St. Paul in
prohibiting female locutions in public worship may be fully conceded.
But the unhappy petrifaction of his current directions, whereby (like
so many other Biblical utterances) they have become laws for all time
and every divergency of circumstance, has been attended with lamentable
consequences. No Jewish law-giver ever bade the Miriams and Deborahs,
the Esthers and Judiths, of his race, “keep silence,” and hide their
diminished heads from regard, to “the angels,” or to anybody else
in or out of temple or camp; and the consequence has been (as a very
remarkable paper by a Jewish lady has pointed out)[31] that female
patriots, judges, and prophetesses have played a noble and conspicuous
part through the whole history of Judaism. But (not to speak profanely)
St. Paul has been supposed to act like Louis XIV., when he forbade that
any more healing wonders should be done at the tomb of the Abbé Paris:--
“De par le Roi--Défense a Dieu,
De faire miracle en ce lieu.”
If it were to please Providence to inspire a woman with any of the
gifts of the prophetic or ministerial offices, if ever the promise
should be fulfilled to the letter that “your sons and _your daughters_
shall prophesy,” and that the impulse to speak holy words were to
seize her in the most natural and appropriate place, to wit, in
church, St. Paul is quoted as authority to check any such irregular
and unsuitable proceeding: “I suffer not a woman to speak in church.”
The result has been that, except among the Quakers (who have coolly
set the prohibition aside, and seemingly profited not a little by so
doing), Christian rivals to the heroines of Judaism are not producible.
During these last eighteen centuries, among all the millions of women
in whose hearts the precepts of Christ have been sown and borne rich
fruit, there may well have been a few whose eloquence and fervor of
piety would have influenced the heart of men as much as a St. Bernard
or a Peter the Hermit, and whose words, like those of a Tauler, a
Fénelon, or an à Kempis, would have remained a spiritual treasure for
all time. But if such have lived and felt and thought, and longed
perhaps to speak to their fellow-men out of the abundance of their
hearts, their mouths have been effectually stopped. Order has reigned
in the Churches so far as they were concerned, and whatever light they
might perchance have borne into the dark places of the earth, instead
of being set on a candlestick, has been carefully covered up under a
bushel.
Such are, I venture to think, the bad reasons for the exclusion of
women from the ministry. Good ones, however, are certainly forthcoming,
if perchance, when weighed in the scale against the arguments in favor
of such an innovation, they prove less heavy. They are drawn from
circumstances, some of which pertain to the order of nature, and can
never be altered; while others might be, or are already in process of
change.
The functions of a minister of religion, as understood in modern times
(apart from priestly claims to administer sacraments by special divine
commission, with which we need not concern ourselves here), are,
roughly speaking, twofold: 1st, public prayer and preaching; and, 2d,
pastoral ministrations in the homes of the members of the congregation.
Regarding the first, women labor under several disadvantages, sometimes
amounting to disabilities. Though women’s voices, _when good_, reach
farther than those of men, a considerable number are deficient in the
physical vocal power indispensable to make themselves heard in an
assembly numbering above one or two hundred persons. Nothing would be
more pitiable and ridiculous than for one of these ladies, whatever
might be her mental gifts, to mount a pulpit and, with feeble voice
rising only to crack in an occasional screech, to attempt to pour forth
exhortations which three-fourths of her audience could not hear, and
under which the remainder would writhe in an auditorial purgatory.
Secondly, there can be no question that the average female intellect is
below the average male intellect, and consequently that there are fewer
women than men up to the mark of intellectual competence, below which
preaching, however well intended, and even inspired by genuine and true
feeling, is apt rather to “give occasion to the enemy to blaspheme”
than to tend to edifying. If the foolish things of the world often
confound the wise, the foolish people in it provoke and distract them;
and, even to their humblest hearers, many such well-meaning silly ones
would be little else than the blind leading the blind into a ditch.
Lamentable as it would be to hear a shrill feminine squeak delivering
from the desk the majestic periods of Job and Isaiah, it would be
doubly deplorable to listen to a thin and only too distinctly audible
soprano enouncing alternately from the pulpit platitudes, ineptitudes,
and blunders, such as memory recalls only too keenly to many of us as
among the severest trials of the domestic circle. A special peril in
this matter also lies in the ill-omened circumstance that the greater
the folly of the woman, so much greater, alas! is generally to be found
her propensity to preach in private, and therefore, it may presumably
be dreaded, her proclivity to extend to a larger sphere the benefit of
her exhortations. It has been the observation of the present writer,
through a long experience, that masculine and feminine folly usually
differ in this essential particular. A man fool dimly perceives he is
a fool, and holds his tongue accordingly; or (if the vanity of his
sex prevent him from arriving consciously at any such conviction or
conclusion) he deems that as prudence is the better part of valor, so
is silence the proper garb of wisdom, and that the less he wastes on
an ungrateful world the precious jewels of his ideas, the more credit
shall he have for those supposed to remain in the casket of his mind.
A man who talks much is nine times out of ten a clever and brilliant
person, and may possibly be the most profound of thinkers, who brings
out of the inexhaustible treasury of his imagination things new and
old. A woman fool, on the contrary, usually does not find out, till
she is old and ugly and the habit of silly chatter is irretrievably
settled, that she is a fool at all: probably for the simple reason
that the more folly she talks, the more delighted her male admirers
generally show themselves with her discourse. Even if she does not
happen to think herself particularly clever or well-informed, she has
been taught to believe that ability in a woman is rather a defect to
be concealed than a gift to be exhibited, and that, as the sagacious
Chinese proverb has it, “The glory of a man is knowledge, but the
glory of a woman is to renounce knowledge.” Accordingly, without the
slightest reticence or dread of exposure, she tumbles out of her untidy
brain notions as trivial and _mesquin_ as the contents of her own
disorderly work-basket,--here a button and there a spangle, a thimble,
a bit of crochet, a string of beads, a tangled skein of silk, and a
little ribbon marked with inches wherewith to measure the universe.
The result of this difference in the display of folly is naturally to
lend color to a somewhat exaggerated estimate of that surplusage of
feebleness and frivolity in the feminine scale, of the existence of
which, alas! there can be no doubt, but which is perhaps less than is
supposed out of proportion with the correlative dulness and stupidity
in the masculine balance. As the immortal Mrs. Poyser sums up the
matter, “Women _are_ fools. God Almighty made them so to match the men.”
Thus, then, two arguments at least against admitting women to the
ministry rest on natural and inevitable grounds: some women are
physically, some other women mentally, incapable of adequately
fulfilling its duties. And to these adverse reasons others are added
by the actual though not inevitable conditions of society. Women, up
to the present time, have been almost indefinitely less well educated
than men, and only their superior quickness and tact prevented this
inequality from telling disastrously in common life; while nothing
could hinder it from doing so, were they to undertake the office of
public teachers. By hook or crook, with little teaching (and that
teaching generally fourth or fifth rate of its kind), women have
managed pretty generally to scrape together and store up in their
memories in a happy-go-lucky way a certain quantity of knowledge,
useful and ornamental enough to pass muster. Women’s culture, when
women are cultivated, sometimes (perhaps we may say often) possesses
rather more breadth than that of men, and includes a good many topics
rarely included in the masculine curriculum. It is therefore well
suited to furnish pleasure to the possessor and entertainment to
her acquaintance and readers; but the accuracy and definiteness of
knowledge which men obtain, thanks to their much abused classical and
mathematical training, are what every ordinarily educated woman with
a grain of sense sighed for, till the day when the great movement for
the Higher Education of Women reared a more fortunate generation. Now,
it is clearly highly desirable, if not absolutely indispensable, that
a person who may be called upon to treat publicly and didactically,
if not controversially--and let us hope and pray that women will not
generally take to controversy!--almost every subject in the range of
the higher interests of man, who at least ought not to regard any
such interest as foreign ground, should possess not merely wide, but
accurate information, and be as far as possible above the liability to
commit any gross blunders. This is of course viewing the subject apart
from any special theological training such as the older Churches have
deemed almost the first qualification for the ministerial office. Even
the poor Capuccini preaching friars, whose astounding ignorance of
profane history and science affords inexhaustible tales of merriment
in Italy, who talk of “the great St. Augustine of Hippo, who crowned
King Alfred, who signed Magna Charta,” and are wont to indulge in such
figures of rhetoric as imaginary sniffs round the pulpit at the smell
of the roasting flesh of St. Lawrence on his gridiron,--even these
poor old fellows have received adequate instruction in the doctrines,
the legends, and the moral and penitential systems of their Church.
Proverbially ignorant as are the Greek Popes and the Nestorian, Coptic,
and Maronite priests, they, too, are perfectly well “up” in all those
recondite dogmas which are supposed to be their peculiar concern, and
can tell with unerring certainty whether the Second Divine Person
had two natures or two wills, or only one of each, or whether the
Third positively proceeded from the First only, according to Greek
orthodoxy, or from the First and Second, according to that of Rome and
Canterbury. Nearer home, of course, theological education is a wider
and more serious matter. If young priests at Maynooth are taught the
astronomical system which makes the sun go round the earth, and the
moral system of Peter Dens, which is nearly as completely the reverse
of truth, they still receive an enormous amount of something which goes
by the name of instruction, and in the matters of scholastic theology
and casuistry are probably qualified to beat a great many eminent
D.D.’s of Oxford and Cambridge. Here in England, and in Scotland
also, every Church, Established and Dissenting, has its college or
colleges for training its clergy, either apart from or together with
students intended for lay professions; and, without the degree or
certificate afforded by such institution, the entry into the ministry
is barred. Christendom, in short, has, like Judaism, its “Schools of
the Prophets”; and nobody is invited to prophesy, even if he be pious
and gifted as John Bunyan, who has not passed through them and learned
his lesson.
The necessity for this theological training, so far as it concerns
the insurance of orthodox doctrine from the acolyte when he becomes a
preacher, of course falls to the ground when we contemplate an order of
things quite outside the orthodox churches, and such as it is not to
be anticipated they will sanction for many a day. Our female preacher
is by the hypothesis, for the present at all events, either quite
irregularly connected with the orthodox sects, a Minister Unattached
or Amateur Pastor (and some such there are at this moment doing a
vast deal of good work, _e.g._, Miss Catherine Marsh and the sister of
Mr. Spurgeon); or if ever officially recognized, and a professional
minister, then as belonging to some heterodox communion, such as the
Salvation Army; or those in America, which profit by the services of
the Rev. Phœbe Hanaford, the Rev. Antoinette Brown, and the late Rev.
Celia Burleigh; and the Unitarian congregation at Melbourne, which
honored itself by choosing for their pastor Martha Turner, a lady whose
great abilities and noble spiritual feeling seem to me to hold out the
very example we seek of what a woman in the pulpit may and ought to
be.[32] No necessity exists compelling a female preacher who enlists
under the banner of religious freedom to undergo the particular mental
drill which qualifies the Romanist or Anglo-Catholic clergyman for
the performance of all the peculiar intellectual labors and combats
necessary to his office, and included in the duty of honestly believing
exactly all which his Church believes, and being equipped to do battle
with anybody who believes anything less or anything more. But is there
on this account less reason that the candidate for another kind of
ministry should undertake less severe studies and go through a less
complete mental training than the embryo priest, Latin or Anglican?
The reverse has been most wisely maintained by the Unitarian body in
this country, whose scheme of theological culture (if the present
writer may presume to estimate it) is wider and deeper than that which
is demanded to qualify the possessor for the See of Canterbury. The
teacher of religion who is to be something more than the expounder of
a ready-prepared catechism,--who is to lead his flock not merely into
one particular paddock, and to water them exclusively at one particular
pond, but into every field of sweet and wholesome herbage, and beside
every stream of living waters,--whose duty it will be to pluck up
the cruel brambles, and clear away the piles of stones of doubts and
difficulties which grow and are flung by careless hands along the path
of faith and life,--such a teacher ought to be furnished with every aid
which learning can offer. Above all, I should hold that a woman who
should venture to assume this high and arduous task specially needs
such equipment, since, for a long time to come, she must expect to
be more than others the mark of question and criticism; and the very
eagerness of her own mind may (unless weighted by solid erudition)
carry her more quickly and more remotely astray. Every one must have
noticed how there are some persons full of originality and mother-wit,
who continually fancy they are making fresh observations and theories,
while their next neighbor, who has never had an idea properly his own,
can tell them off on his fingers what ancient sage first made their
observation, and when and by whom in the Middle Ages their theory
was broached, and how it was refuted and abandoned by all thinking
people several centuries ago. The merely original man makes himself
ridiculous for want of learning, and is, in fact, always beginning _de
novo_ at the bottom of the ladder of human thought. The mere scholar
is nothing better than a Conversations-Lexicon, and never exercises
any influence except that of a useful drag on the ideas of his friends
when they are going down-hill. The true teacher must indispensably
combine both the gift of originality and the acquirement of such stores
of knowledge as shall enable him to trace doctrines and hypotheses to
their sources,--to know what has been said for and against them by the
greater thinkers of the world who have dealt with them,--and, in a
word, to know exactly how far he is or is not a heretic, and not be (as
is the commonest of cases) a heinous heretic while he believes himself
strictly orthodox, and strictly orthodox and even commonplace when he
enunciates what he fondly conceives to be a bold and startling heresy.
All this applies (for reasons too obvious to need animadversion)
pre-eminently to teachers of the more impulsive sex. Accordingly, we
must admit that the argument against female ministers of religion,
founded on the lower educational _status_ of women at present, is, so
far as it goes, perfectly valid.
Lastly, there is an argument which I imagine would half-consciously
influence many serious-minded people against the admission of women to
such an office. Women are (thanks to all sorts of causes, historical,
political, personal, with which we need not concern ourselves)
actually much _deconsidered_ by men. Would not their deconsideration
be reflected on Religion itself, were they to become its authorized
ministers? With enormous labor, the Broad Church school has been trying
to efface the stamp of effeminacy from their order, to cultivate
“muscular Christianity,” and make laymen of the order of the author
of _Sword and Gown_ remember that a priest is not necessarily an old
woman. If many women, old or young, enter the ministry, will not
this effort to redeem the character of the order be entirely thrown
away, and the impression become quite ineffaceable that Manliness
and Godliness are two orbs always seen in opposition, and never in
conjunction? I confess I should feel such a fear as this to form a
very cogent argument, were it altogether well founded.
Let us now, before attempting to discuss the possible advantages to be
set against all these objections to the religious ministry of women,
briefly run back over the heads we have passed, and see if there be not
some answer to each objection, or at least some hope that its force
might with time and care be neutralized.
First, there was noticed the ascetic feeling, inherited from the old
monks, of the essential _unholiness_ of women, and their consequent
unworthiness to meddle with sacred things. This idea has probably
occurred for the first time to many an English lady when she has
penetrated by chance into some hallowed precinct, some tempting and
shadowy cloister, of a monastery in Italy or Syria, and has been
driven out tumultuously by a whole flock of cowled and sandalled
brethren, cackling like so many geese at the intrusion of a cat
into a hen-house. Perhaps, as at Vallombrosa among the Apennines,
or St. Saba in the desert, she has seen the gentlemen of her party
courteously received and comfortably lodged within the noble walls of
the convent, while she has been left to such nocturnal repose as might
be found in a flea-haunted pavilion outside, or in her tent pitched
in a valley of centipedes. She has been accustomed to think of women
generally as of the types common in decent English society, a little
strait-laced, or perhaps a little “gushing,” as the case may be; and
she has very honestly taken it for granted that, if there be any
serious harm in the world, it is the opposite sex who are principally
to blame. Suddenly, it is revealed to her that, by a large number of
her fellow-creatures, she herself and all her female belongings,--her
eminently respectable governesses, the Misses Prunes and Prism; her
dear old grandmother, Mrs. Goody-Good; and her majestic aunt, Lady
Bountiful,--all are looked upon as little better than so many Succubi
of Satan, sent to lure the souls of those ridiculous old monks to
destruction. The shock has not rarely produced a peal of ungovernable
laughter such as those hoary cloisters had never echoed ere profane
Saxon Balmorals trod their pavement; but, when _la pazza Signorina
Inglese_ has retired to her hotel or her tent, she finds that a new
and very unpleasant light has been thrown on matters whereon she had
never reflected before. Modern English Ritualism and Monasticism are
doing their best, in more ways than need now be specified, to introduce
into English life these Oriental and gross ideas about women, that
pseudo-purity which is most impure. In so far as they prevail, they
will do us an injury quite incalculable. Needless to say that, to
people trained in such a school, a female minister of religion would
be a monstrous thing. _Almost_ as well might the creature trill out
the melodies of _La Traviata_ or _La Grande Duchesse_, or perform her
part in a ballet in the costume of a sylph! The view of womanhood
taken by these ultra-sanctified persons and by the most cynical and
profligate old _roués_ is practically the same. Surely, it is to be
hoped that all this worse than folly will be swept away in the blast
of public impatience and indignation which sooner or later must burst,
like a breath of wholesome autumn storm, through the incense-laden
atmosphere of Ritualism, and consign to the four winds all its trumpery
of millinery, chandlery, and upholstery, and the thoroughly base and
materialistic ideas which have come in along with them!
Secondly, among the bad reasons for the exclusion of women from the
pulpit, we have referred to St. Paul’s dictum, “I suffer not a woman
to speak in church.” Whatever high degree of human wisdom we must all
attribute to the greatest of the apostles, or even divine authority, as
the orthodox hypothesis of inspiration would give to his words, there
is absolutely no ground at all for the assumption that, _because_ he
forbade women to affront public opprobrium by preaching when women
lived habitually shut up, each in her _gynaeceum_, he would, likewise
have forbidden them to offer religious exhortations in a sacred place,
when public sentiment has become reconciled to their appearance in the
streets, on the stage, in the lecture-room, and even on the platform.
The coolness, indeed, wherewith the most orthodox persons always _do_
practically take for granted that Scriptural precepts, however rigid in
form and seemingly intended by their authors for perpetual observance,
are to be set aside without scruple, as applying to a bygone state of
things, when they do _not_ chime in with their own inclinations and
prejudices, is only to be paralleled by the tenacity wherewith they
maintain their authority under every vicissitude, when they happen to
coincide with them. Let any one who quotes St. Paul’s incidental remark
about women speaking in church be called on to avow how far he has
taken to heart the solemn decree issued in the Encyclical Letter of the
one great Council of the assembled apostles, in the awfully mysterious
words, “It seemed good unto the Holy Ghost _and to us_” (as if these
were two separate opinions) “to lay upon you (the Gentile world) no
greater burden than these necessary things,--to abstain from meats
offered to idols, ... and from things strangled, and from blood.” Lives
there a modern Christian whose conscience would in the smallest degree
be troubled by taking the rice and ghee from a Hindu temple, eating
a rabbit strangled in a snare, or partaking of a black-pudding or a
Bologna sausage?
Passing now to the more reasonable reasons against admitting women to
the ministry,--the natural and incurable disabilities, physical and
mental, under which not a few of them labor,--the answer comes at once
to hand. Those among them who are unfitted for the office must not
undertake it, any more than dumb or stuttering or imbecile men. There
is no more difficulty in exclusion in one case than in the other,
though there may be a few more persons necessarily excluded.