The Peak in Darien, With Some Other Inquiries Touching Concerns of the Soul and the Body / An Octave of Essays

by Frances Power Cobbe

Joke or no joke, it is quite certain that women are even exceptionally endowed with several, if not all, of the qualities necessary to oratory. The originality and depth of their ideas and the culture they have received may in many cases be open questions; but there can be no doubt at all that, when they have got the ideas, they will find out remarkably well how to express them.

It is time now to pass to the graver part of our subject,—the value which may attach to women’s thoughts about Religion; for, if that value be trifling, it will be all the more unfortunate, should they possess any facilities for imposing them upon us by wordy fluency,—that “fatal fluency” which the best men in America have deplored as among the gifts of their countrymen.

Thoughts of the class which are properly expressed in pulpits are, of course, of various kinds. There are thoughts which are purely reflections and speculations of the intellect on critical and philosophical problems, and which an able lawyer, an acute critic, or a profound metaphysician can make as well, or better, than a prophet or a saint; nay, in which a Mephistopheles might excel a Tauler. It is no doubt sometimes necessary (though surely by no means so frequently as some preachers seem to take for granted) to offer thoughts of this class to a congregation, and, in short, to read out in church an article which minus the text might have appeared in a Review. If it be a very lofty and religious mind from which such thoughts emanate, they will of course possess an elevating power proportioned to the momentum of such a mind brought to bear on ordinary intellects. To be lifted by sermons of this class into the serene and purified atmosphere of noble speculation will of itself effect a quasi-religious result, independently of any conviction of theological truths which may or may not be brought away. The hearers who have followed for half an hour the upward flight of one of these eagle souls will return to the petty concerns, interests, pleasures, anxieties of common life, calmed and ennobled, and able to see all things in more just proportions. On the other hand, if the preacher be merely a clever critic or metaphysician, who deals with sacred themes as a counsel with the case in his brief, the result of his sermons, however brilliant and interesting they may be found by an intellectual audience, and triumphantly satisfactory to those who find their cherished opinions clinched by his arguments, will be the reverse of religious. The listeners will go away, not awed and calmed, but eager for controversy and confirmed in self-confidence, having lost any benefit which they might have derived from the previous acts of worship. They have been made to rise from their knees to sit down instantly in the seat of the critical, always very closely contiguous to that of the scornful.

Of this intellectual and theoretical class of sermons it is not to be anticipated that women will preach many. I should rather say that one of the good things which may be hoped from the introduction of women into the ministry may prove to be the falling out of fashion of a class of discourses which can only be beneficial or desirable in the case of exceptional mental greatness, combined with a piety warm and powerful enough to hallow every region of thought into which it may pass.

Again, there is an order of thought more practical than this, and surely more suitable to form the sequel of a service of prayer; namely, ideas concerning duty in all its forms, religious, social, and personal. It is amazing, considering the place which Christianity in every phase assigns to obedience to the will of God, how exceedingly small a space lessons and discussions concerning what is that Divine Will, as regards every-day conduct, ever take in Christian instruction. We are eternally exhorted to repent; but what are the sins and failures which ought to be included in our penitence, few preachers take the pains to inform us. We are exhorted to “renounce the devil and all his works”; but what those “works” may be, as distinguished from works of righteousness in the shop, the camp, the bar, the exchange, the interior of our homes, we are left to find out for ourselves. Sermons treating carefully and thoughtfully any subject of the kind are among the most rare of clerical addresses. Bishop South confesses, indeed, that two-thirds of Christianity are a Christian temper. But how many times have any of us heard rebuked from the pulpit that odious sullenness which makes the unhappy inmates of the same home with the sulky person live in a perpetual November, or yet the despotic violence and anger which threaten them like a perpetual thunder-storm brewing in the distance? What master of a household is told, by the only man who dare tell him, that his tyranny, his harshness, perhaps his cruelty, exercised hourly on wife or child or any luckless dependant, make up a sum total of misery to them and of offence on his part, worse than the results of many a sudden crime, and certainly involving no less guilt? What wife and mother is told that her selfishness, her bickerings, her discontent, her spitefulnesses, are sins for which no prate of high religious feeling or incessant fussing about church-going can possibly atone? And, again, as regards other offences,—let us say, lying and dishonesty,—when have we heard wise and just definitions of them from our pastors, or fitting exhortations to nobler standards of veracity and probity than are common in the world? In the upper classes of society, a certain slipshod rule of thumb on these subjects is pretty generally received. But where did we learn it? Certainly not when we occupied our seats in church, but rather at the dinner-table, in the playground at school, at the club, or in the drawing-room. Among the lower ranks, where this traditional code, of honor rather than of morality, does not hold equal sway, the ignorance which prevails concerning the very rudimentary principles of truth and probity is often no less startling than deplorable. The neglect of the clergy of all denominations to draw clear definitions on these matters of hourly concern, so that their flocks may at least know what is right, supposing they are so fortunate as to be able to inspire them with a resolution to do it when known, is of a piece with the indifference of all the churches to moral heresies of the most soul-debasing kind, while they punish to the utmost of their powers the faintest divergence from theological orthodoxy.

I cannot but think that, if women now enter the pulpit, a great many more sermons will be preached dealing with these points of practical ethics. The concrete and the personal will probably always possess keener interest for the majority of women than the abstract, the vague and the universal; and there is, moreover, if I mistake not, a very distinct superiority in the womanly propensity to translate ideas into action, over the man-of-the-world habit of admitting high and rigid principles in theory, while practising quite other rules in commerce, politics, and social affairs. A very eminent thinker and scholar, a leader of thought at Oxford, once remarked to me with characteristic simplicity, “I do not know how to account for the fact, but I notice that, when a good woman is convinced that something is true or right, she tries immediately in some way to square her beliefs and conduct accordingly; whereas when I have, perhaps by infinite labor, succeeded in convincing a man of the same thing, he goes on just as he did before, without altering his behavior a jot, and as if nothing had happened!” Now, I think this practical tendency of the feminine nature (though it will perhaps be less marked hereafter when women submit more generally to the friction of contact with many minds) will inevitably show itself in a preference for the inculcation of definite duties rather than for the vague declamations about repentance and regeneration which so often leave their hearers perfectly undisturbed and on the high way (as they think) to heaven, leading lives of odious selfishness, and combining profit and piety after the fashion of the celebrated grocer, “Sand the sugar, John—and then come in to prayers.”

It has been often remarked that the most profound difference between modern and classical civilization lies in the contrast between the value attached by each to private morals. The virtue of the individual was of old treated as altogether subordinate in importance to the interests of the State. In our time, we have almost come to recognize that states and churches—nay, society itself—exist for the sake of building up individual souls to their perfection; and there is every reason to expect that this sense of the supreme importance of morals over every other human concern will rather increase than dwindle through all time to come.

Now, it would certainly appear that this Hebraism, as Mr. Arnold calls it, is rather characteristic of the higher sort of women. The moment a woman rises above the passion for personal admiration and the struggle for petty social ambition or sordid matrimonial scheming, to which so large a number of unhappy ones are trained and consigned from girlhood, on the principle of “keeping women in their proper sphere,”—the moment, I say, that a woman has been lifted by education or her natural force of character above all this frivolity and baseness, we almost invariably find in her a degree of earnestness about ethical and ethico-religious questions which is far more rarely traceable among men. It is true that her exclusion from a great many fields of masculine interest naturally centres her thoughts more on such subjects, and that, when those exclusions are more or less removed, we must expect to see more frequently women absorbed in the same worldly interests as men, and perhaps some who now think night and day of a ball will be equally eager about a bill in Parliament. Still, I believe that, independently of circumstances, women have a special tendency (as Renan avers of the Celtic race) to “long after the infinite,” and to yearn to bring an element of sacredness and nobleness into the transactions of daily life such as their moral aspect alone affords. I believe that nine women out of ten (of the better sort, of whom I have spoken) would, if they had the choice, oftener speak of duty and religion than of any other themes.[35] If this be so, it would follow that, as time goes on, instead of women falling behind in the progress of humanity, that progress will constantly tend to bring women more to the front as students and expounders of morality.

There is another aspect of this matter also, which fairly deserves consideration. Many good Christians have remarked that, while they would fain take Jesus Christ as their “Great Exemplar,” they find nothing in his life indicating what his example would have been in the very closest and most important of human relations of husband or father. Surely there is no less reason for women to be conscious of a lacune in their moral instructions, when they are received exclusively either from mothers and governesses who may be utterly unfit for such an office, and who often merely pass on traditional moral heresies, or else from masculine pastors whose whole moral parallax is necessarily different from that of a woman, and who practically know next to nothing of the trials, temptations, and duties of her lot. We have had of recent years in many of our churches, and notably in St. Paul’s Cathedral, courses of sermons addressed by various clergymen to men alone, from which women have been rigidly excluded. Would it be too much to hope that some time or other, in some humble chapel (since no one would dream of devoting the national religious edifices to the exclusive use of women for a single hour), women may enjoy the privilege of being especially addressed by pastors of their own sex, who may talk to them at once with cultured minds and experienced hearts?

And, lastly, besides the Intellectual and the Moral classes of thoughts to be offered from the pulpit, there is a third,—of which, alas! we know far too little,—the Spiritual. The store of this latter class of thoughts is probably extremely small even in minds of richest experience. They seem rather to distil slowly in precious drops from the wounds in the tree of life than to be capable of manufacture by the help of culture and reflection. They are the thoughts which concern the baseness, the loathsomeness, the misery of sin (felt and considered as Sin, not as Error or Vice), the glory and beauty and joy of Holiness, felt as Holiness, not as Prudence or Virtue. They teach the laws of our spiritual existence; the hygienics of the soul; the “Way toward the Blessed Life.” In some sense, sermons which contain thoughts like these may be called Moral Discourses; for they touch the very springs of our moral nature, and send us forth heart-smitten for the past, heart-strengthened with resolutions for the future. They are the most powerful moral levers which human agency ever applies to our souls. But they are the reverse of didactic, ethical disquisitions, or expositions of the detailed code of virtue. They lie in another region of feeling and appeal to another class of our faculties than the ratiocinative. We do not sit and judge them, but they come from above and judge us. When they strike us most forcibly, we never feel the temptation (as we are so often inclined to do at the best bits in the critical or the moral discourse) to express our approbation by the familiar tokens of public applause. On the contrary, it is our own breasts we are fain to beat; while, if our lips move, it is to murmur the prayer of the publican.