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.