After all that has preceded this page I need hardly do more with this
count of the last claim of "Theological Fiction" than simply say, if the
Bible is woman's best friend, then the clergy, without authority and in
violation of the precepts of their own guide, have been her worst enemy,
either through malice or ignorance; in either of which cases they are
and have always been unfit to dictate, to lead opinion, or to receive a
following as reliable guides for this world or the next.
If they have been so ignorant or so malicious for nearly nineteen
hundred years as to thus systematically misconstrue their own
authority--their own "revelation"--to the constant disadvantage of women
(and the consequent enfeeblement of the race), surely they can claim no
respect for their opinions and no confidence in their divine calling.*
In trying to shield the Bible the clergy simply convict themselves.**
* See Appendix K.
** See Appendix L.
But I incline to the opinion that in the main this view of the case
is unfair to the clergy, and that they have followed, in spirit if not
literally, the dictates of the Bible as a whole. It is undoubtedly true
that the Bible throughout holds woman as an inferior in both mental and
moral characteristics; and upon this understanding of it the Fathers
built the Church and crystallized the laws.
The Fathers of the Church were as a rule a bad lot themselves. All
contemporaneous history and all internal evidence prove this fact: and
when we remember that the "Prophets" were almost to a man polygamists;
that their belief and practices in this regard were of the order and
type of Mormondom to-day, _and for the same reasons_; that they were
slave-holders and slave-stealers; that they believed in a God of
infinite cruelty and revenge--of arbitrary will and reasonless
barbarity; and that they were licentious and brutal beyond description;
it will be easy to understand the position which such men--with these
beliefs, practices, mentality, and moral degradation--would accord to
women. Every Bible of every people; every history of every race showing
like civilization, will show you like results.*
*See Appendix M.
In the New Testament we find an effort to readjust old clothes to a new
body, some of whose members had grown better and some worse in dogma and
belief. Where women are _especially_ dealt with we find them commanded
to "be under obedience," and always to subject their wills to the ways
and wills of men; while the general tone and treatment are always based
upon the assumption that she is an inferior, a secondary creation, and a
subject class.*
That this is the understanding of the Bible always recognized by the
Church (and to-day questioned by only a very small minority who are
shrewd enough to see the necessity of revamping it to fit the new public
morality and civilization), all history attests; but the vehemence
with which the doctrine has been asserted the foregoing pages can only
faintly indicate. **
But certainly, if for thousands of years the clergy have, as a body,
misconstrued or misunderstood the spirit of their own book (to which
they have always claimed to possess the only key), they should not blame
those who to-day take issue with them upon their information, their
dictates, their _basis of morality_, or their interpretations of the
rights of humanity.
If, as they claim to-day, the Bible is the friend of women and no
respecter of persons, a conclusion which it took them hundreds of years
to reach, it has taken them too long to discover the fact for their
guidance to be either a desirable or a safe one for humanity; and the
millions of women they have degraded and oppressed in the past are
certainly not an argument in favor of their infallibility now. ***
* See Appendix N.
** See Appendix O.
*** See Appendix P.
Let them give way to men who, claiming no right to divine authority or
superhuman wisdom, speak in the interest of all humanity the best they
know (always acknowledged to be subject to revision for the better); who
are not bound back and retarded by the outgrown toggery of the Jewish
civilization of David and his time or the Christian dictatorship of
Paul.* Acknowledging themselves as false and oppressive interpreters
of divine law for centuries past is but a poor recommendation of their
ability or integrity for the future.
* See Appendix Q.
Whichever horn of the dilemma they accept, there is but one honorable
course for the clergy to pursue, and that is to resign in favor of those
who have all along been on the right track, without a pretence of divine
guidance; who in despite of faith and fagot have made progress possible.