It was impossible for woman to remain permanently content with a position like this; but it is only of late that a favorable conjuncture of affairs has enabled her to quit it for a more obtrusive one. The great Church movement which the Apologia has made so familiar to us in its earlier progress came some ten years ago to a stand. Some of its most eminent leaders had seceded to another communion, it had been weakened by the Gorham decision, and by its own internal dissensions. Whether on the side of dogma or ritual, it seemed to have lost for the moment its old impulse—to have lost heart and life.
It was in this emergency that woman came to the front. She claimed to revive the old religious position which had been assigned to her by the monasticism of the middle ages, but to revive it under different conditions and with a different end. The mediæval Church had, indeed, glorified, as much as words could glorify, the devotion of woman; but once become a devotee, it had locked her in the cloister. As far as action on the world without was concerned, the veil served simply as a species of suicide, and the impulses of woman, after all the crowns and pretty speeches of her religious counsellors, found themselves bottled up within stout stone walls and as inactive as before. From this strait, woman, at the time we speak of, delivered herself by the organization of charity.
In lines of a certain beauty, though somewhat difficult in their grammatical construction, she has been described as a ministering angel when pain and anguish wring the brow; and it was in her capacity of ministering angel that she now placed herself at the Church movement and advanced upon the world. It was impossible to lock these beneficent beings up, for the whole scope of their existence lay in the outer world; but every day, as it developed their ecclesiastical position, made even their admirers recognise the wise discretion of the middle ages. Long before the Ritualists themselves, they, with a feminine instinct, had discerned the value of costume. The district visitor, whom nobody had paid the smallest attention to in the common vestments of the world, became a sacred being as she donned the crape and hideous bonnet of the "Sister."
Within the new establishment there was all the excitement of a perfectly novel existence, of time broken up as women like it to be broken up in perpetual services and minute obligation of rules, the dramatic change of name, and the romantic self-abnegation of obedience. The "Mother Superior" took the place of the tyrant of another sex who had hitherto claimed the submission of woman, but she was something more to her "children" than the husband or father whom they had left in the world without. In all matters, ecclesiastical as well as civil, she claimed within her dominions to be supreme. The quasi-sacerdotal dignity, the pure religious ministration which ages have stolen from her, was quietly reassumed. She received confessions, she imposed penances, she drew up offices of devotion. Wherever the community settled, it settled as a new spiritual power.
If the clergyman of the parish ventured on advice or suggestion, he was told that the Sisterhood must preserve its own independence of action, and was snubbed home again for his pains. The Mother Superior, in fact, soon towered into a greatness far beyond the reach of ordinary parsons. She kept her own tame chaplain, and she kept him in very edifying subjection. From a realm completely her own, the influence of woman began now to tell upon the world without. Little colonies of Sisters planted here and there annexed parish after parish. Sometimes the parson was worried into submission by incessant calls of the most justifiable nature on his time and patience. Sometimes he was bribed into submission by the removal from his shoulders of the burden of alms. It was only when he was thoroughly tamed that he was rewarded by pretty stoles and gorgeous vestments.
Astonished congregations saw their church blossom in purple and red, and frontal and hanging told of the silent energy of the group of Sisters. The parson found himself nowhere in his own parish; every detail managed for him, every care removed, and all independence gone. If it suited the ministering angels to make a legal splash, he found himself landed in the Law Courts. If they took it into their heads to seek another fold, every one assumed, as a matter of course, that their pastor would go too. At such a rate of progress the great object of woman's ambition must soon come in view, and the silent control over the priest will merge in the open claim to the priesthood.
It may be in silent preparation for such a claim that the ecclesiastical hierarchy are taking, year by year, a more feminine position. The Houses of Convocation, for instance, present us with a lively image of what the bitterest censor of woman would be delighted to predict as the result of her admission to senatorial honors. There is the same interminable flow of mellifluous talk, the same utter inability to devise or to understand an argument, the same bitterness and hard words, the same skill in little tricks and diplomacies, the same practical incompetence, which have been denounced as characteristics of woman. The caution, the finesse, the sly decorum, the inability to take a large view of any question, the patience, the masterly inaction, the vicious outbreaks of temper which now and then break the inaction of a Bishop, may sometimes lead us to ask whether the Episcopal office is not one admirably suited for the genius of woman.
But she must stoop to conquer heights like these, and it is probable with a view to a slow ascent towards them through the ages to come that she is now moulding the mind of the curate at her will. He, we have been told, is commonly the first lady of the parish; and what he now is in theory, a century hence may find him in fact. It would be difficult even now to detect any difference of sex in the triviality of purpose, the love of gossip, the petty interests, the feeble talk, the ignorance, the vanity, the love of personal display, the white hand dangled over the pulpit, the becoming vestment and the embroidered stole, which we are learning gradually to look upon as attributes of the British curate. So perfect, indeed, is the imitation that the excellence of her work may perhaps defeat its own purpose; and the lacquered imitation of woman, "dilettante, delicate-handed," as Tennyson saw and sang of him, may satisfy the world, and for long ages prevent any anxious inquiry after the real feminine Brummagem.
