Every earnest thought, like every earnest thinker, adds something to
the wealth of the world. Blind belief in the thought of another produces
only hopeless mediocrity. Individual effort, not mere acceptance, marks
the growth of the mind. The most fatal blow to progress is slavery of
the intellect. The most sacred right of humanity is the right to think,
and next to the right to think is the right to express that thought
without fear.
Fear is the nearest approach to the ball and chain that this age will
permit, and it should be the glorious aim of the thinkers of to-day that
so refined and cruel a form of tyranny shall not be left for those who
come after us. We owe physical freedom to the intellectual giants of the
past; let us leave mental freedom to the intellectual children of the
future.
Fear scatters the blossoms of genius to the winds, and superstition
buries truth beneath the incrustation of inherited mediocrity. Fear
puts the fetters of religious stagnation on every child of the brain. It
covers the form of purity and truth with the contagion of contumely and
distrust. It warps and dwarfs every character that it touches. It is the
father, mother, and nurse of hypocrisy. It is the one great disgrace
of our day, the one incalculable curse of our time; and its nurse and
hot-bed is the Church.
Because I, a woman, have dared to speak publicly against the
dictatorship of the Church, the Church, with its usual force and honor,
answers argument with personal abuse. One reply it gives. It is this. If
a woman did not find comfort and happiness in the Church, she would not
cling to it. If it were not good for her, she in her purity and truth
would not uphold it in the face of the undeniable fact that the present
generation of thinking men have left it utterly.
You will find, however, that in every land, under every form of faith,
in each phase of credulity, it is the woman who clings closest and
longest to the religion she has been taught; yet no Christian will
maintain that this fact establishes the truth of any other belief.*
* "Exactly the same thing may be said of the women in the
harem of an Oriental They do not complain.... They think
our women insufferably unfeminine."
--Mill.
They will not argue from this that women know more of and have a
clearer insight into the divine will! If she knows more about it, if she
understands it all better than men, why does she not occupy the pulpit?
Why does she not hold the official positions in the Churches? Why has
she not received even recognition in our system of religion? Who ever
heard of a minister being surprised that God did not reveal any of the
forms of belief through a woman? If she knows and does the will of God
so much better than man, why did he not reveal himself to her and place
his earthly kingdom in her hands?
That argument won't do! As long as creed and Church held absolute
power there was no question but that woman was a curse, that she was an
inferior being, an after-thought. No Church but the Roman Catholic has
the decency to recognize even the so-called mother of God! The Church
has never offered women equality or justice. Its test of excellence
is force. The closer a Church or creed clings to its spirit, the more
surely does it assume to dictate to and control woman and to degrade
her. The more liberal the creed the nearer does it come to offering
individual justice and liberty.
The testimony of our own missionaries, as well as that of many others,
assures us that it is not the Turk but his wives who hold fastest
to their faith. The women of the harem, whom we pity because of the
injustice of their religious training, are the last to relinquish
their god, the most bitter opponents of the infidel or sceptic in their
Church, the most devout and constant believers of the faith, and the
most content with its requirements. They are the ones who cling to the
form even when the substance has departed--and it is so with us!
Among the "heathen" it is the women who are most shocked and offended
by the attacks made upon their superstitions by the missionaries whom we
pay to go to them and blaspheme their gods and destroy their idols.
Go where you will, read history as you may, and you will find that it
is the men who invented religion, and the women who believed in it.
They are the last to give it up. _The physically weak dread change_.
Inexperience fears the unknown. Ignorance shuns thought or development.
The dependent cannot be brave.
We are all prepared to admit, I think, that, with but few marked
exceptions here and there, the women of most countries are physically
and mentally undeveloped. They have had fear and dependence, the dread
enemies of progress and growth, constantly to retard them. Fear of
physical harm, fear of social ostracism, fear of eternal damnation. With
rare exceptions a child with a weak body, or any other dependent, will
do as he is told; and women have believed to order. They have done so
not only in Christianity but in Buddhism, Mohammedanism, Mormonism,
and Fetichism--in each and all of them. Each and all of these religions
being matter of faith, religion was the one subject in which every
Church alike claimed ignorance as a virtue; and the women understood
that the men understood it as little as they did. It was a field
where credulity and a solemn countenance placed all on an intellectual
level--and the altitude of the level was immaterial.
Women have never been expected to understand anything; hence jargon
about the "testimony of the spirit," the "three in one" absurdity, the
"horns of the altar," or the widow's oil miracle was not more empty or
unmeaning to her than a conversation about Bonds and Stocks, Political
Economy, or Medical Science. She swallowed her religion just as she did
her pills, because the doctor told her to, and said there was something
wrong with her head--and usually there was.