THE FITNESS OF WOMEN FOR THE MINISTRY OF RELIGION.
Among the anomalies of our social state may be counted the fact that, while it is generally admitted that women are more religious than men, it is to men that in our age and country the Ministry of Religion is (with infinitesimal exceptions) exclusively committed. While nine persons out of ten are conscious that their earliest sentiments of piety have been derived from a mother, and that a sister or a wife has alone enabled the troubled faith of their latter years to survive the shocks of worldliness and doubt, there is yet not one recognized channel by which these waters of life, stored in the fountain of women’s hearts, can flow beyond the narrowest borders; while, on the contrary, it is not too much to surmise that to a very large number of clergymen, well-meaning, learned, and conscientious, the sense of dryness of soul in all that concerns the more spiritual part of their office is a perpetual self-reproach. Habitans in Sicco writes every autumn in the newspapers to complain he can obtain no refreshment from his weekly sermon at any church in his neighborhood, while around him all the time are private wells and underground rivers of the purest element of feeling for which he thirsts. It is a case of
“Water, water, everywhere,
But not a drop to drink.”
What we want first and above all things in our ministers of religion is that they should be intensely religious; and knowing this, and that all other gifts and acquirements are comparatively of small avail for the purpose, we deliberately exclude from the sacred office that moiety of the community among whom this special and most precious grace is, at all events, least rare.[27]
The reasons for this exclusion are, however, amply sufficient to account, historically, for the anomaly. They are of two kinds, which I shall take leave to characterize as the Bad and the Good. There is a very deep-rooted prejudice, inherited from the ascetics of early Christianity, whereby the idea of womanhood is connected with very base associations. It is impossible to ignore this fact in any review of the religious position of the sex; and it is therefore better to say bluntly that, from this point of view, a woman is looked upon rather as an emissary from the pit than a “daughter of the Lord Almighty,” rather a temptation to earthly passion than a helpmate to heavenly purity. Springing up when the old classical world had sunk into a corruption and foulness which we can now probably little realize in imagination, the frenzy of asceticism which was nourished among the deserts of the Thebaid and attained its full growth in the monasteries of Greece and Italy,—the origin of all the legends of which the “Temptation of St. Anthony” is the type,[28]—has left almost ineffaceable traces throughout the nations of Europe; of course much more sharply marked in the Latin and Greek Churches, which have canonized these poor fanatics, and still set apotheosized virginity on one of the thrones of heaven, than among Protestant communities, wherein marriage has been always placed on a moral level with celibacy, and Martin Luther has been thoroughly absolved for his conjugal affection for the singularly plain old lady whose portrait by Lucas Cranach we beheld some years ago in the Exhibition of Old Masters in Burlington House.[29] Nevertheless, even among Protestant Christians, a certain impression has remained, the reverse of the faith of their old Teuton forefathers, that women were nearer to the mind of the Divinity than men. The highest religious status a woman could attain in Milton’s opinion was a sort of deputy piety,—
“He for God only, she for God in him”;
a type which, considering the kind of representatives of the Deity 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 unholy 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.
As to education, the case is much more serious. Certainly, unless women 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. Englishwomen, 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.”
It has been often remarked that the most profound difference between modern and classical civilization lies in the contrast between the value attached by each to private morals. The virtue of the individual was of old treated as altogether subordinate in importance to the interests of the State. In our time, we have almost come to recognize that states and churches—nay, society itself—exist for the sake of building up individual souls to their perfection; and there is every reason to expect that this sense of the supreme importance of morals over every other human concern will rather increase than dwindle through all time to come.
Now, it would certainly appear that this Hebraism, as Mr. Arnold calls it, is rather characteristic of the higher sort of women. The moment a woman rises above the passion for personal admiration and the struggle for petty social ambition or sordid matrimonial scheming, to which so large a number of unhappy ones are trained and consigned from girlhood, on the principle of “keeping women in their proper sphere,”—the moment, I say, that a woman has been lifted by education or her natural force of character above all this frivolity and baseness, we almost invariably find in her a degree of earnestness about ethical and ethico-religious questions which is far more rarely traceable among men. It is true that her exclusion from a great many fields of masculine interest naturally centres her thoughts more on such subjects, and that, when those exclusions are more or less removed, we must expect to see more frequently women absorbed in the same worldly interests as men, and perhaps some who now think night and day of a ball will be equally eager about a bill in Parliament. Still, I believe that, independently of circumstances, women have a special tendency (as Renan avers of the Celtic race) to “long after the infinite,” and to yearn to bring an element of sacredness and nobleness into the transactions of daily life such as their moral aspect alone affords. I believe that nine women out of ten (of the better sort, of whom I have spoken) would, if they had the choice, oftener speak of duty and religion than of any other themes.[35] If this be so, it would follow that, as time goes on, instead of women falling behind in the progress of humanity, that progress will constantly tend to bring women more to the front as students and expounders of morality.
There is another aspect of this matter also, which fairly deserves consideration. Many good Christians have remarked that, while they would fain take Jesus Christ as their “Great Exemplar,” they find nothing in his life indicating what his example would have been in the very closest and most important of human relations of husband or father. Surely there is no less reason for women to be conscious of a lacune in their moral instructions, when they are received exclusively either from mothers and governesses who may be utterly unfit for such an office, and who often merely pass on traditional moral heresies, or else from masculine pastors whose whole moral parallax is necessarily different from that of a woman, and who practically know next to nothing of the trials, temptations, and duties of her lot. We have had of recent years in many of our churches, and notably in St. Paul’s Cathedral, courses of sermons addressed by various clergymen to men alone, from which women have been rigidly excluded. Would it be too much to hope that some time or other, in some humble chapel (since no one would dream of devoting the national religious edifices to the exclusive use of women for a single hour), women may enjoy the privilege of being especially addressed by pastors of their own sex, who may talk to them at once with cultured minds and experienced hearts?
And, lastly, besides the Intellectual and the Moral classes of thoughts to be offered from the pulpit, there is a third,—of which, alas! we know far too little,—the Spiritual. The store of this latter class of thoughts is probably extremely small even in minds of richest experience. They seem rather to distil slowly in precious drops from the wounds in the tree of life than to be capable of manufacture by the help of culture and reflection. They are the thoughts which concern the baseness, the loathsomeness, the misery of sin (felt and considered as Sin, not as Error or Vice), the glory and beauty and joy of Holiness, felt as Holiness, not as Prudence or Virtue. They teach the laws of our spiritual existence; the hygienics of the soul; the “Way toward the Blessed Life.” In some sense, sermons which contain thoughts like these may be called Moral Discourses; for they touch the very springs of our moral nature, and send us forth heart-smitten for the past, heart-strengthened with resolutions for the future. They are the most powerful moral levers which human agency ever applies to our souls. But they are the reverse of didactic, ethical disquisitions, or expositions of the detailed code of virtue. They lie in another region of feeling and appeal to another class of our faculties than the ratiocinative. We do not sit and judge them, but they come from above and judge us. When they strike us most forcibly, we never feel the temptation (as we are so often inclined to do at the best bits in the critical or the moral discourse) to express our approbation by the familiar tokens of public applause. On the contrary, it is our own breasts we are fain to beat; while, if our lips move, it is to murmur the prayer of the publican.
Will women preach sermons of this order and filled with thoughts like these? It is impossible to foretell with certainty; yet here, if anywhere, may we expect to find the special gifts of women brought out at last from their hidden treasuries. It has been said of almost every great spiritual teacher that there has been something feminine in his nature, something more of tenderness and purity, more of insight into and sympathy with others, than belongs to lesser men. In Jesus Christ, the ideal characters of both sexes seem almost equally blended. Of course there are other qualities besides the characteristically feminine ones needed to form the highest kind of religious teacher; but the sterner qualities are no more invariably deficient in women than are the softer ones always lacking in men, and it seems the reverse of improbable that women may arise uniting both in hitherto almost unexampled degree. Let us remember that, after all, the one great Force of the spiritual world—its correlated Gravitation, Light, Electricity, Magnetism, and Vital Force, all in one—is pure Divine Love. This alone, radiating from the Sun of Love in the heavens, moves and vivifies the soul; and to it alone it responds as the flower to the orb of day—we know not how. The human spirit which receives from on high the largest influx of this divine light and warmth thereby becomes a focus of reflected power and fervor for all those who can be brought into spiritual contact with it. It is the “love of God shed abroad” in the heart,—the love of that goodness which God is, and for which man is made, whose germs even now the illumined eye of love discerns deep-latent in every human soul,—in a word, the love of God and love of man, in whose might all spiritual miracles are done, all leprous souls cleansed, all demon passions cast out, all blind eyes opened, all maimed and crippled faculties made whole. If we could but find the most profoundly-loving, the most unselfishly, nobly, purely loving of men or women now living upon earth, and set him or her in the midst of us to be our teacher, our friend, our guide into the ways of peace and blessedness, we should have gained a help better than all the philosophers and theologians, the monks and the hermits, could ever give. I will not take on myself to affirm that such most loving heart beats in a woman’s breast. It may well be that there are men as tender in feeling as any mother whose spirit ever yearned over her infant’s cradle. But there is at least an equal chance of a woman’s supremacy, and almost a certainty that, on a secondary level of loving-kindness and unselfishness, we should find many more women than men. It is quite impossible, I think, that this difference should not make itself felt, and a new impulse be made to flow through all the channels of spiritual life whenever the influence of women may be brought to bear directly and largely on the religious feelings of the community.
Lastly, and chiefly. It is a truism to say that the character of our religion depends on our idea of God; but who has taken note of this familiar fact sufficiently to recognize that all the traditional part of that solemn idea has come to us uniformly in a way deplorably one-sided, and that side the least lovable? I do not overestimate the importance of any idea of God which comes to us through our fellow-men. It seems to me that, from the first dawn of the religious life, the child has a dim sense (apart from his teacher’s lessons) of some beneficent and righteous Power around and within him; and that when the Sun rises on any soul in the awful hour which saints have likened to a new birth, there is obtained, even through all the mists of earth, a direct vision of the ineffable glory, which evermore causes the words of other mortals, and even the man’s own attempt to render in language his sense of that great Love and Holiness, to seem unreal and worse than inadequate. When that stage is reached, it is probably of little consequence what a man’s pastor may tell him about God’s character. All he says is only like a book which describes a person we ourselves have known or a place we have visited. Nobody can make the man believe (at least so long as his own living faith and open vision endure) that the Being whom he meets in the hour of prayer is less than All-good, unutterably Holy, even though the dogmas he accepts practically attribute to him a totally different character. The only injury he can suffer is a negative one: he is denied the help and sympathy which he needs, and which it is the proper office of his minister to supply to him. But at an earlier stage, when all religious experience is yet vague and dim, when faith must of necessity be provisional and taken on trust at second hand,—at that period there can be no question of the misfortune of receiving cold, hard, narrow notions about God, instilled by teachers who themselves have little love or no direct spiritual knowledge, and have chiefly borrowed their ideas from the confessedly imperfect rendering, age after age, of other men’s experience. How is a young soul ever to turn to God, when God is represented to it as One from whom it would far more naturally turn away? And let it be remembered that the attributes of God which call out the spontaneous love and adoration of the heart are precisely those whose meaning is most completely lost and evaporated in the dry formularies of the intellect, and can never be truly conveyed except by one whose own heart responds to them through all its depths. Power, Wisdom, Justice, are divine characteristics, of which the meaning may be indicated by any teacher with a clear head and command of language. But I disbelieve that any one who is not himself full of love and tenderness has ever, since the world began, yet transmitted to another soul the truth that God is Love.
There is little to wonder at, after all, in the mournful fact that the religion which as it rose from the heart of Christ was supremely the religion of Divine Love became, as the centuries went by, colder and harder and more cruel, till the irony was complete, and the doctrine of the Mount of Galilee was illustrated by the fires of the Spanish Inquisition. Who, we may ask, were the teachers of Christianity during the intervening ages? Who were they through whose lips and writings the lessons gathered from the lilies and the sparrows, and the story of the Prodigal, were transmitted to each new-born generation? They were men, exclusively men; nay, men who, in taking their office, renounced those ties of natural affection through which the Author of Nature has caused the human heart to grow tender, and to be taught the practice of unselfishness. To fit themselves to convey to the hearts of their brethren the gospel of the Fatherhood of God, they began by renouncing the experience of human fatherhood for themselves. The Apostolic Succession, of which the great Churches still boast, was for fifteen centuries a school for the transmission of ideas about a Divine Parent down a long chain of childless celibates. We Protestants have corrected this mistake, and the men who tell to us the story of the Prodigal are at least able to speak out of the abundance of their hearts when they say that, “like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord hath mercy on them that fear Him.” But is there not one step even further to be taken? Is not the compassion of “a mother for the son of her womb” a still profounder image of the Divine Love than the father’s pity? Ought it not also to be brought home to our comprehensions (if in any measure human words may so bring it) through the lips of mothers and motherly-hearted women?
The loss out of our religion of all those ideas which may be classed as the doctrine of the motherhood of God has been attended with evils innumerable. The Church of Rome, in obedience to a vehement popular instinct, has sought to make up for the defect by Mariolatry. The orthodox Protestant Churches, by sternly adhering to their masculine Trinity, have indeed preserved the awe and moral reverence which the Divine Kingship and Fatherhood demand, and which the paganism of virgin worship has obliterated. But how much have they not lost by excluding those sentiments which can only be given to One in whom we recognize not only justice, holiness, and beneficence, but also tenderness, sympathy, love? The truth is we are so constituted that great benefits received,—if we think of them as bestowed merely because it is right and good to give them, and not from love for ourselves,—so far from awakening in us spontaneous emotions of gratitude, have rather an opposite tendency, and seem to lay on us an obligation to be grateful, which is a sort of burden, and from which all minds save the most generous have a proclivity to escape. To hundreds of us, large donations from just and well-meaning but unaffectionate fathers have failed to waken the smallest throb of genuine gratefulness; while some mere trifle given by a loving mother—a flower from a well-remembered rose-tree, a scrap of her needlework—has filled our eyes with tears. In excluding, then, in a great degree from view that which I may presume to call the maternal side of religion, the Churches, so far as they have done it, have dropped the golden chain whereby human hearts may be drawn, and have kept in their hands the iron one which can only control the reason and the conscience. Is it possible to estimate the amount of loss to religion which this signifies, or how many thousands of souls might have been won by love to a life of piety and holiness who have refused to obey the bit and bridle of sterner motives, and have wandered off and been lost in the wilderness of practical atheism?
If there be, then, as I humbly believe and trust, in the nature of our great Parent above, certain characters of tenderness and sympathy with His creatures which are more perfectly shadowed, more vividly reflected, in the love of human mothers for their children than by aught else on earth; if there be, in short, a real meaning in the old lesson that God created woman as well as man in His own image,—the image being only complete in the complete humanity,—then I think it follows that there is urgent need that woman’s idea of God should have its due place in all our teaching of religion. I think that there must be truths in this direction which only a woman’s heart will conceive and only a woman’s lips can teach,—truths, perchance, which have come to her when baby-fingers have clung round her neck in the dark while infant trust overcame infant terror, and she has asked herself was there anything in heaven or earth which could make her cast down to destruction, or even let slip from her clasp of care and guardianship, the helpless little child thus lying in her arms,—a living parable of all our race in the everlasting arms of God.