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.