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.