can receive the same solid and extensive training as male theological
students (rather more strict and rigid than less so), to make up for
what may have been wanting of exactness in their girlish school-room
education, the appearance in our pulpits of a number of female heads
lightly stored with learning or logic would be to the last degree
ill-omened. But is there the smallest necessity why this should be?
If the desire of a woman to devote herself to religious work were of
any depth or worth consideration, she would not only be willing, but
_crave_, to pass through the severest studies, to fit herself to the
utmost of her abilities for so high and sacred a task; and it is no
longer an hypothesis, but a demonstrated fact, that if women choose to
study and have the fair opportunity of doing so, there are not a few of
them capable at all events of attaining to those levels whereon men of
the learned professions habitually take their stand. If a few fickle or
weak-minded women were to enter as students such an institution, let
us say, as Manchester New College, they would be very speedily “choked
off,” and no more harm would be done than by the scores of youths
“plucked” at Oxford and Cambridge, and led to change their programme
of life. Those women, on the contrary, who should pass successfully
through such an intellectual and moral sieve, might thenceforth be very
safely trusted.
Again: the fear that Religion itself might come to be deconsidered, as
a result of the deconsideration of the sex of its ministers, must prove
groundless, if, instead of bringing a fresh element of weakness into
preaching and prayer, it should prove that (as I shall hope presently
to show) women are likely to pour a new stream of life into what has
so often become dry and unprofitable. After all, the inner heart of
humanity honors in its very core spiritual graces, over the physical,
the intellectual, and even the moral. Not the conquerors, not the
philosophers, not even those who have displayed most _virtue_ apart
from religion, have been adored and deified among men, but the prophets
and saints who have ascended the mountain-peaks of Prayer and thrown
open the windows of Heaven.
Now, as we look back over the Christian centuries during which the
spiritual, God-loving, anti-carnal impulse sent forth from Judæa
has passed on, transmitted in waves of emotion from age to age and
land to land, does it not seem probable that among those who have
received it most fully, and might have helped its transmission most
effectually, there have been thousands of women? In effect, history
notoriously shows that, in the apostolic time and at the period of the
conversion of Europe, at least half the work achieved was due to the
ardor wherewith noble ladies not a few took up the task of introducing
and disseminating Christian ideas through courts and camps. But, when
the age for this kind of female patronage was over, the powers of
women to aid the cause which so many of them have had next to their
innermost hearts have been narrowed within the walls of the home or
even of the cloister. I do not doubt that this home influence of
women has indeed been incalculably great and beneficent. It is hard
to conceive what would be the sort of religion remaining in an island
colonized by men only, and with a population recruited only by boys
too young to remember a mother’s care. The chances might lie between a
society of Trappists, or a herd such as the gold-diggers of a “Roaring
Camp” in a Californian gulch. But, because the religious influence of
women in their homes has been inestimably beneficial, is it, I ask,
any reason for resting satisfied that they should exercise no such
influence outside their doors? Surely there might have been prevision
of just such a state of things as has existed now for more than a
thousand years in Christendom, in the warning of the great Founder of
Christianity that a light (when we are so happy as to possess a light)
should be set on a candlestick and not under a bushel. If ever the
time comes when the spiritual home influence of women is allowed to
radiate into the outer circle of public life, there is every reason to
believe that the inestimable element of spirituality will make itself
felt, touching the hearts of men with new softness, awakening their
consciences with the power of mother-like gentleness, and inspiring
quite a new reverence, alike for women and for religion.
“Ah!” it will be said, “this is all very well, if women should, by
some happy chance, succeed well as preachers and ministers. If, on the
contrary, they fail, and make a miserable _fiasco_ of their attempt,
what ridicule will they not draw on the most sacred things! Is it wise,
is it allowable, to incur such a risk?”
Feeling a good deal of sympathy with such an alarm as this, having a
terror (possibly exaggerated) of some day undergoing the frightful
experience of listening, in a place of worship from which I could
not decently escape, to the ignorant, shallow, dogmatic folly which
it has been my occasional penance to hear from women elsewhere, and
which has, undoubtedly, a character of its own still more ignorant,
more shallow, and more dogmatic than any folly commonly to be heard
from men, I here humbly confess that for many years such a possibility
has with me almost outweighed the actual probability that women would
in general fulfil the duties of the ministry exceptionally well.
But longer reflection has tended much to remove my fears, while it
has strengthened my hopes. In the first place, I look with extreme
confidence to such a sifting process as a good theological college
course would inevitably effect, to exclude from concurrence all the
frivolous, the half-hearted, the weak-minded,--all those women, in
short, who should not prove capable of strong and steady mental labor,
and willing to undergo it for several consecutive years. From such
as should pass triumphantly through an ordeal of this kind, nothing
very outrageous in the way of folly or contemptible in the way of
feminine “twaddle” would need to be apprehended. And, again, there
is a second and very satisfactory ground for reassurance. Female
ministers will certainly not (at all events for a very long time to
come) be appointed to lecture us by any despotic authority. They
cannot, indeed, be ministers at all, unless some of us distinctly
desire them to minister for our particular benefit. By a happy decree
of fate, it takes at least two or three persons at any time to form a
congregation. There must be the hearers of the discourse as well as the
speaker; and, as even the sternest sticklers for the rights of women
are not likely to proceed so far as to demand compulsory attendance at
female preachments, there will always remain open a door of hope and
refuge whereby the oppressed may go free. The same argument applies
in this case as to the everlastingly reproduced fallacy about the
franchise; namely, that, if their political disabilities be removed,
women will invade the benches of St. Stephen’s. As nobody can ever be
elected an M.P., unless he or she find a majority of some constituency
to choose him or her as the best candidate, so neither can anybody
become a minister in one of the free churches, unless he or she find a
congregation ready to “sit under” him or her, as a tolerable preacher.
In either case, the woman who could so singularly impress the majority
of electors[33] or of parishioners with the conviction of her supreme
fitness as to induce them to choose her for the political or religious
office would be, undoubtedly, so very remarkable a person that it would
be ten thousand pities the world should be deprived of her services.
Let us now turn to the other side of the shield. Having discussed
the validity of the arguments against the admission of women to the
ministry, let us see what is to be said directly in favor of such an
innovation.
In the first place, it is obvious that women have certain special
aptitudes and qualifications (as well as the above-named inaptitudes)
for such an office. We have been hitherto speaking as if the work of a
minister lay almost exclusively in the pulpit and reading-desk; but we
must remember that a very large and very important part of it lies also
in the homes of the members of the congregation, in the hour of their
sorrows and difficulties, their sicknesses, doubts, repentances, death.
Can any one doubt that the tender and ready sympathies of women,
and their superior tact and discernment of character, their natural
tendency to soothe and exhort rather than to upbraid or threaten, are
qualities more valuable for such service than any which men, however
pious, well-meaning, and learned in casuistry, usually bring to such
tasks? As a matter of fact, women do, instinctively, perform the
office of ministering angels on these occasions all over the land,
without waiting for any license or consecration; while many of the
best of the clergy either suffer all their days from unconquerable
shyness and the sense of their own want of tact, or run speedily into
the ruts of professional consolations and exhortations in formal
phraseology, meaning little or nothing to speaker or hearer. Of all
the irritating--I might say maddening--things in human life, there
is nothing worse than to be addressed in the hour of mortal agony
and despair, when our hearts, riven to the core, could scarcely bear
an angel’s touch, by a smug, self-satisfied personage, who inflicts
on us his cut-and-dried consolations and exhortations to perfect
quiescence and cheerful resignation; all the time revealing, by every
word and gesture, how utterly incapable he is of comprehending even
the shadow of our grief. It would be difficult to estimate how many
people (especially the intelligent men of the humbler classes, who
are the principal victims of these tormentors),--men who would have
suffered themselves to be led with childlike submission by any wise and
loving hand, even through the wicket-gate of prayer and repentance,
to the heavenly way,--have been, on the contrary, goaded by tactless
parsons into hardness and rebellion. It is real, genuine, spontaneous
_sympathy_ which alone can authorize any one to approach the sacred
borders of a great sorrow. Can any one doubt that women would, as a
general rule, feel this more tenderly, more genuinely than men? The
fear would be that the strain on the heart of a good woman, minister of
a large congregation, would be so great as very sensibly to tell upon
health and life.
Further, outside the region of sentiment, and even in the intellectual
way, so far as it concerns social influence, a woman has special
facilities. If she have extensive knowledge (and I am presuming she
will have acquired a good deal before entering the ministry), it will
generally be more _ready to hand_ than that of a man. Her humor, if
she possesses a grain of that precious quality, will have the great
advantage, in all wordy skirmishing, of being playful, quick as
lightning, and always at command,--not like the ponderous satire which
takes an hour to get out of its sheath, or the peculiarly masculine
type of wit which the owner--
“Beareth not about,
As if afraid to use it out,
Except on holidays or so,
As men their best apparel do.”
Her logic--if by happy circumstance she has really trained her mind to
work logically--will not lose the famous feminine faculty for springing
to the top of the stairs while the man is steadily walking up the
steps, because she has acquired the power of recognizing whether she be
on the right landing or the wrong.
Regarding the rhetorical faculties of women, I may first remark that,
by a well-known law of acoustics, a female voice will, if equally
strong, reach further and be audible more clearly at a distance than
that of a man; and, for some kinds of eloquence, at all events, its
softer and purer tones will probably find their way most easily to the
heart. What her actual powers of oratory may be is one of the problems
of the future; but the experience of feminine public speaking during
the last few years seems to point to a curious but not inexplicable
fact,--namely, that, given the same _ideas_, a woman will generally
_express_ them more easily than a man, at least than an Englishman.
This gift of facile and appropriate expression is obviously one
dependent on a special faculty of the brain (the loss of which
constitutes _aphasia_), and is very variously distributed among races,
and also, I think, between the sexes. Oratory, which is dependent upon
it for its machinery, as a pianist on his fingering, is proverbially
rare among men of our nation, though, when it does exist, it seems to
reach sometimes to the climax of power and grandeur. English_women_,
on the contrary (so far as we yet may guess), possess more often the
ready-wordedness, the fluency and _verve_ of speech, of the Celt or
the Italian. Either the feminine nervous temperament is favorable to
this faculty, or (as I would rather imagine to be the case) the root
of the difference lies in the region of sentiment, and women speak
more fluently because they are more apt to be carried away by interest
in their subject or sympathy with their audience. The dread of making
himself ridiculous by stammering, by talking injudiciously, or making a
mistake of any kind, is so deeply ingrained in the mind of the ordinary
English gentleman that, if one--not a barrister or clergyman, and
consequently not inured to the sound of his own voice--be called on
suddenly to return thanks at a wedding-breakfast, he will, nine times
out of ten, stutter and hum-and-haw, and, after putting every one on
thorns, will end by making some extraordinarily _malapropos_ joke, like
the celebrated one of Lord Feenix in _Dombey and Son_. Or, if he be
aware overnight that he will be called on to address his own tenants on
the morrow, his slumbers will be considerably less sound than if he had
been warned he must go out and fight a duel at sixteen paces. As to an
Englishman taking kindly to public speaking when advanced in life, so
miraculous an event, I believe, is scarcely on record.
Nearly the contrary of all this holds true as regards women. Those
among them who are willing to speak in public seem to be carried
away the moment they begin by feelings which leave little room for
self-reflection, whatever pangs of shyness and diffidence they may have
endured beforehand.[34] But is it not very superfluous to expatiate on
the special gifts of speech assigned by nature to womankind, since in
all ages their proneness to over-exert them has been the theme of jest
and satire, and at no very remote date hostelries were adorned by the
sign of the “Good Woman,” meaning a woman with no tongue; penal laws
were in force against the creature (now happily classified among the
Extinct Mammalia), the Common Scold; and even tombstones were enlivened
by a sort of dig at the sleeper beneath, as in the case of the
celebrated Arabella Young, whose death is specified as the date when
she “began to hold her tongue”? Perhaps it is not unjust to entertain
the suspicion that masculine wit may sometimes have proved rather tardy
in parrying the thrusts of that “little member,” which we all know is
sharpened in so terrible a furnace, and that the ponderous sarcasms
recorded against its misuse may be likened to the boulder-stones thrown
by Polyphemus after the retreating and exultant Greeks.
Joke or no joke, it is quite certain that women are even exceptionally
endowed with several, if not all, of the qualities necessary to
oratory. The originality and depth of their ideas and the culture they
have received may in many cases be open questions; but there can be no
doubt at all that, when they have got the ideas, they will find out
remarkably well how to express them.
It is time now to pass to the graver part of our subject,--the
value which may attach to women’s thoughts about Religion; for, if
that value be trifling, it will be all the more unfortunate, should
they possess any facilities for imposing them upon us by wordy
fluency,--that “fatal fluency” which the best men in America have
deplored as among the gifts of their countrymen.
Thoughts of the class which are properly expressed in pulpits are,
of course, of various kinds. There are thoughts which are purely
reflections and speculations of the intellect on critical and
philosophical problems, and which an able lawyer, an acute critic, or
a profound metaphysician can make as well, or better, than a prophet
or a saint; nay, in which a Mephistopheles might excel a Tauler. It is
no doubt sometimes necessary (though surely by no means so frequently
as some preachers seem to take for granted) to offer thoughts of this
class to a congregation, and, in short, to read out in church an
article which _minus_ the text might have appeared in a Review. If it
be a very lofty and religious mind from which such thoughts emanate,
they will of course possess an elevating power proportioned to the
momentum of such a mind brought to bear on ordinary intellects. To be
lifted by sermons of this class into the serene and purified atmosphere
of noble speculation will of itself effect a quasi-religious result,
independently of any conviction of theological truths which may or may
not be brought away. The hearers who have followed for half an hour
the upward flight of one of these eagle souls will return to the petty
concerns, interests, pleasures, anxieties of common life, calmed and
ennobled, and able to see all things in more just proportions. On the
other hand, if the preacher be merely a clever critic or metaphysician,
who deals with sacred themes as a counsel with the case in his brief,
the result of his sermons, however brilliant and interesting they may
be found by an intellectual audience, and triumphantly satisfactory to
those who find their cherished opinions clinched by his arguments, will
be the reverse of religious. The listeners will go away, not awed and
calmed, but eager for controversy and confirmed in self-confidence,
having lost any benefit which they might have derived from the previous
acts of worship. They have been made to rise from their knees to
sit down instantly in the seat of the critical, always very closely
contiguous to that of the scornful.
Of this intellectual and theoretical class of sermons it is not to be
anticipated that women will preach many. I should rather say that one
of the good things which may be hoped from the introduction of women
into the ministry may prove to be the falling out of fashion of a class
of discourses which can only be beneficial or desirable in the case of
exceptional mental greatness, combined with a piety warm and powerful
enough to hallow every region of thought into which it may pass.
Again, there is an order of thought more practical than this, and
surely more suitable to form the sequel of a service of prayer;
namely, ideas concerning duty in all its forms, religious, social, and
personal. It is amazing, considering the place which Christianity in
every phase assigns to obedience to the will of God, how exceedingly
small a space lessons and discussions concerning what _is_ that Divine
Will, as regards every-day conduct, ever take in Christian instruction.
We are eternally exhorted to repent; but what are the sins and failures
which ought to be included in our penitence, few preachers take the
pains to inform us. We are exhorted to “renounce the devil and all his
works”; but what those “works” may be, as distinguished from works
of righteousness in the shop, the camp, the bar, the exchange, the
interior of our homes, we are left to find out for ourselves. Sermons
treating carefully and thoughtfully any subject of the kind are among
the most rare of clerical addresses. Bishop South confesses, indeed,
that two-thirds of Christianity are a Christian temper. But how many
times have any of us heard rebuked from the pulpit that odious
sullenness which makes the unhappy inmates of the same home with the
sulky person live in a perpetual November, or yet the despotic violence
and anger which threaten them like a perpetual thunder-storm brewing in
the distance? What master of a household is told, by the only man who
_dare_ tell him, that his tyranny, his harshness, perhaps his cruelty,
exercised hourly on wife or child or any luckless dependant, make up a
sum total of misery to them and of offence on his part, worse than the
results of many a sudden crime, and certainly involving no less guilt?
What wife and mother is told that her selfishness, her bickerings, her
discontent, her spitefulnesses, are sins for which no prate of high
religious feeling or incessant fussing about church-going can possibly
atone? And, again, as regards other offences,--let us say, lying and
dishonesty,--when have we heard wise and just definitions of them from
our pastors, or fitting exhortations to nobler standards of veracity
and probity than are common in the world? In the upper classes of
society, a certain slipshod rule of thumb on these subjects is pretty
generally received. But where did we learn it? Certainly not when
we occupied our seats in church, but rather at the dinner-table, in
the playground at school, at the club, or in the drawing-room. Among
the lower ranks, where this traditional code, of honor rather than
of morality, does not hold equal sway, the ignorance which prevails
concerning the very rudimentary principles of truth and probity is
often no less startling than deplorable. The neglect of the clergy
of all denominations to draw clear definitions on these matters of
hourly concern, so that their flocks may at least _know_ what is right,
supposing they are so fortunate as to be able to inspire them with a
resolution to _do_ it when known, is of a piece with the indifference
of all the churches to moral heresies of the most soul-debasing kind,
while they punish to the utmost of their powers the faintest divergence
from theological orthodoxy.
I cannot but think that, if women now enter the pulpit, a great many
more sermons will be preached dealing with these points of practical
ethics. The concrete and the personal will probably always possess
keener interest for the majority of women than the abstract, the vague
and the universal; and there is, moreover, if I mistake not, a very
distinct superiority in the womanly propensity to translate ideas into
action, over the man-of-the-world habit of admitting high and rigid
principles in theory, while practising quite other rules in commerce,
politics, and social affairs. A very eminent thinker and scholar, a
leader of thought at Oxford, once remarked to me with characteristic
simplicity, “I do not know how to account for the fact, but I notice
that, when a good woman is convinced that something is true or
right, she tries immediately in some way to square her beliefs and
conduct accordingly; whereas when I have, perhaps by infinite labor,
succeeded in convincing a man of the same thing, he goes on just as
he did before, without altering his behavior a jot, and as if nothing
had happened!” Now, I think this practical tendency of the feminine
nature (though it will perhaps be less marked hereafter when women
submit more generally to the friction of contact with many minds) will
inevitably show itself in a preference for the inculcation of definite
duties rather than for the vague declamations about repentance and
regeneration which so often leave their hearers perfectly undisturbed
and on the high way (as they think) to heaven, leading lives of odious
selfishness, and combining profit and piety after the fashion of the
celebrated grocer, “Sand the sugar, John--and then come in to prayers.”