The Papacy seems determined to carry out its concordat with Woman. If we are to credit the latest rumors from the Vatican, Rome has grown impatient of the class who now present themselves at her doors as candidates for canonization, and has fallen back from the obscure Italian beggars and Cochin Chinese martyrs whom she has recently delighted to honor on the more illustrious names of Christopher Columbus and Joan of Arc. A little courage must have been needed for this retreat upon the past, for neither the great navigator nor the heroine found much support or appreciation in the prelates of their day; and the somewhat uncomfortable fact might be urged by the devil's advocate, in the case of the latter, that if Joan was sent to the martyr's stake, it was by a spiritual tribunal.
On the other hand, there is the obvious desirableness of showing how perfectly at one the Papacy is with the spirit of the age in this double compliment to the two primary forces of modern civilization—the democratic force of the New World, and the feminine force of the Old. The beatification of the Maid of Orleans in its most simple aspect is the official recognition, by the Papacy, of the claims of her sex to a far larger sphere of human action than has as yet been accorded to them. Woman may fairly meet the domestic admonitions of Papal briefs by this newly discovered instance of extra-domestic holiness, and may front the taunts of cynical objectors with a saintly patron who was the first to break through the outer conventionalities of womanhood.
But the figure of Joan of Arc is far more than a convenient answer to objections such as these; it is, as we have said, in itself a cogent argument for a better use of feminine energies. No life gives one such a notion as hers of the vast forces which lie hidden, and as it would seem wasted, in the present mass of women. It is impossible to be content with little projects of utilization such as those which throw open to her the telegraph-office or the printing-press, or even with the more ambitious claims for her admission to the Bench or the dissecting-room, when one gets a glimpse such as this of energies latent within the female breast which are strong enough to change the face of the world.
It is difficult to suppose that the woman of our day is less energetic than the woman of the fifteenth century, or that her piano and her workbag sum up the whole of her possibilities any more than her spinning-wheel or her sheep-tending exhausted those of the Maid of Domremy. The ordinary occupations of woman strike us in this light as mere jets of vapor, useful indeed as a relief to the volcanic pressure within, but insufficient to remove the peril of an eruption. There must be some truth in the spasmodic utterances of the fevered sibyls who occasionally bare the female heart to us in three-volume novels, and the gaiety and frivolity of the life of woman is a mere mask for the wild, tossing emotions within. It is a standing danger, we own; and besides the danger there is, as we have said, the waste and the pity of it.
A little closer examination, however, may suggest some doubt whether this waste of power is not more apparent than real. In the physical world, Mr. Grove has told us that the apparent destruction of a force is only its transformation into a force which is correlative to it; that motion, for instance, when lost is again detected in the new form of heat, and heat in that of light. But the theory is far from being true of the physical world only, and, had we space here, nothing would be easier than to trace the same correlation of forces through the moral nature of man. For waste, then, in the particular instance which is before us, we may perhaps substitute transformation.
Professing herself the most rigid of conservatives, woman gives vent to this heroic energy for which the times offer no natural outlet in the radical modifications which she is continually introducing into modern society. We overlook the manifold ways in which she is acting on and changing the state of things around us, just because we are deceived by the apparent unity with which the whole sex advances toward marriage. We forget the large margin of those who fail in attaining their end, and we act as if the great mass of unmarried women simply represented a waste and lost force. And yet it is just this waste force which tells on society more powerfully than all.
The energies which fail in finding a human object of domestic adoration become the devotional energies of the world. The force which would have made the home makes the Church. It is really amazing to watch, if we look back through the ages, the silent steady working of this feminine impulse, and to see how bit by bit it has recovered the ground of which Christianity robbed Woman. We wonder that no woman poet has ever turned, like Schiller, to the gods of old.
In every heathen religion of the Western world woman occupied a prominent place. Priestess or prophetess, she stood in all ministerial offices on an equality with man. It was only the irruption of religions from the East, the faiths of Isis or Mithras, which swept woman from the temple. Christianity shared the Oriental antipathy to the ministerial service of woman; it banished her from altar and from choir; in darker times it drove her to the very porch of its shrines. The Church of after ages dealt with woman as the Empire dealt with its Cæsars; it was ready to grant her apotheosis, but only when she was safely out of the world. It gave her canonization, and it gives it to her still, but not the priesthood. No rout could seem more complete, but woman is never greater than when she is routed.
The newly-instituted parson of to-day, brimming over with apostolic texts which forbid woman to speak in church, no sooner arrives at his parish than he finds himself in a spiritual world whose impulse and guidance is wholly in the hands of woman. Expel woman as you will, tamen usque recurrit. Woman is, in fact, the parish. Within, in her lowest spiritual form, as the parson's wife, she inspires and sometimes writes his sermons. Without, as the bulk of his congregation, she watches over his orthodoxy, verifies his texts, visits his schools, and harasses his sick. "Ah, Betsy!" said a sick woman to a wealthier sister the other day, "it's of some use being well off; you won't be obliged when you die to have a district-lady worriting you with a chapter." But the district-lady has others to "worrit" in life besides the sick.
Mrs. Hannah More tells us exultantly in her journal how successful were her raids upon the parsons, and in what dread all unspiritual ministers stood of her visitations. And the same rigid censorship prevails in many quarters still. The preacher who thunders so defiantly against spiritual foes is trembling all the time beneath the critical eye that is watching him from the dim recesses of an unworldly bonnet, and the critical finger which follows him with so merciless an accuracy in his texts. Impelled, guided, censured by woman, we can hardly wonder if in nine cases out of ten the parson turns woman himself, and if the usurpation of woman's rights in the services of religion has been deftly avenged by the subjugation of the usurpers. Expelled from the Temple, woman has simply put her priesthood into commission, and discharges her ministerial duties by deputy.