Will women preach sermons of this order and filled with thoughts like these? It is impossible to foretell with certainty; yet here, if anywhere, may we expect to find the special gifts of women brought out at last from their hidden treasuries. It has been said of almost every great spiritual teacher that there has been something feminine in his nature, something more of tenderness and purity, more of insight into and sympathy with others, than belongs to lesser men. In Jesus Christ, the ideal characters of both sexes seem almost equally blended. Of course there are other qualities besides the characteristically feminine ones needed to form the highest kind of religious teacher; but the sterner qualities are no more invariably deficient in women than are the softer ones always lacking in men, and it seems the reverse of improbable that women may arise uniting both in hitherto almost unexampled degree. Let us remember that, after all, the one great Force of the spiritual world—its correlated Gravitation, Light, Electricity, Magnetism, and Vital Force, all in one—is pure Divine Love. This alone, radiating from the Sun of Love in the heavens, moves and vivifies the soul; and to it alone it responds as the flower to the orb of day—we know not how. The human spirit which receives from on high the largest influx of this divine light and warmth thereby becomes a focus of reflected power and fervor for all those who can be brought into spiritual contact with it. It is the “love of God shed abroad” in the heart,—the love of that goodness which God is, and for which man is made, whose germs even now the illumined eye of love discerns deep-latent in every human soul,—in a word, the love of God and love of man, in whose might all spiritual miracles are done, all leprous souls cleansed, all demon passions cast out, all blind eyes opened, all maimed and crippled faculties made whole. If we could but find the most profoundly-loving, the most unselfishly, nobly, purely loving of men or women now living upon earth, and set him or her in the midst of us to be our teacher, our friend, our guide into the ways of peace and blessedness, we should have gained a help better than all the philosophers and theologians, the monks and the hermits, could ever give. I will not take on myself to affirm that such most loving heart beats in a woman’s breast. It may well be that there are men as tender in feeling as any mother whose spirit ever yearned over her infant’s cradle. But there is at least an equal chance of a woman’s supremacy, and almost a certainty that, on a secondary level of loving-kindness and unselfishness, we should find many more women than men. It is quite impossible, I think, that this difference should not make itself felt, and a new impulse be made to flow through all the channels of spiritual life whenever the influence of women may be brought to bear directly and largely on the religious feelings of the community.
Lastly, and chiefly. It is a truism to say that the character of our religion depends on our idea of God; but who has taken note of this familiar fact sufficiently to recognize that all the traditional part of that solemn idea has come to us uniformly in a way deplorably one-sided, and that side the least lovable? I do not overestimate the importance of any idea of God which comes to us through our fellow-men. It seems to me that, from the first dawn of the religious life, the child has a dim sense (apart from his teacher’s lessons) of some beneficent and righteous Power around and within him; and that when the Sun rises on any soul in the awful hour which saints have likened to a new birth, there is obtained, even through all the mists of earth, a direct vision of the ineffable glory, which evermore causes the words of other mortals, and even the man’s own attempt to render in language his sense of that great Love and Holiness, to seem unreal and worse than inadequate. When that stage is reached, it is probably of little consequence what a man’s pastor may tell him about God’s character. All he says is only like a book which describes a person we ourselves have known or a place we have visited. Nobody can make the man believe (at least so long as his own living faith and open vision endure) that the Being whom he meets in the hour of prayer is less than All-good, unutterably Holy, even though the dogmas he accepts practically attribute to him a totally different character. The only injury he can suffer is a negative one: he is denied the help and sympathy which he needs, and which it is the proper office of his minister to supply to him. But at an earlier stage, when all religious experience is yet vague and dim, when faith must of necessity be provisional and taken on trust at second hand,—at that period there can be no question of the misfortune of receiving cold, hard, narrow notions about God, instilled by teachers who themselves have little love or no direct spiritual knowledge, and have chiefly borrowed their ideas from the confessedly imperfect rendering, age after age, of other men’s experience. How is a young soul ever to turn to God, when God is represented to it as One from whom it would far more naturally turn away? And let it be remembered that the attributes of God which call out the spontaneous love and adoration of the heart are precisely those whose meaning is most completely lost and evaporated in the dry formularies of the intellect, and can never be truly conveyed except by one whose own heart responds to them through all its depths. Power, Wisdom, Justice, are divine characteristics, of which the meaning may be indicated by any teacher with a clear head and command of language. But I disbelieve that any one who is not himself full of love and tenderness has ever, since the world began, yet transmitted to another soul the truth that God is Love.
There is little to wonder at, after all, in the mournful fact that the religion which as it rose from the heart of Christ was supremely the religion of Divine Love became, as the centuries went by, colder and harder and more cruel, till the irony was complete, and the doctrine of the Mount of Galilee was illustrated by the fires of the Spanish Inquisition. Who, we may ask, were the teachers of Christianity during the intervening ages? Who were they through whose lips and writings the lessons gathered from the lilies and the sparrows, and the story of the Prodigal, were transmitted to each new-born generation? They were men, exclusively men; nay, men who, in taking their office, renounced those ties of natural affection through which the Author of Nature has caused the human heart to grow tender, and to be taught the practice of unselfishness. To fit themselves to convey to the hearts of their brethren the gospel of the Fatherhood of God, they began by renouncing the experience of human fatherhood for themselves. The Apostolic Succession, of which the great Churches still boast, was for fifteen centuries a school for the transmission of ideas about a Divine Parent down a long chain of childless celibates. We Protestants have corrected this mistake, and the men who tell to us the story of the Prodigal are at least able to speak out of the abundance of their hearts when they say that, “like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord hath mercy on them that fear Him.” But is there not one step even further to be taken? Is not the compassion of “a mother for the son of her womb” a still profounder image of the Divine Love than the father’s pity? Ought it not also to be brought home to our comprehensions (if in any measure human words may so bring it) through the lips of mothers and motherly-hearted women?
The loss out of our religion of all those ideas which may be classed as the doctrine of the motherhood of God has been attended with evils innumerable. The Church of Rome, in obedience to a vehement popular instinct, has sought to make up for the defect by Mariolatry. The orthodox Protestant Churches, by sternly adhering to their masculine Trinity, have indeed preserved the awe and moral reverence which the Divine Kingship and Fatherhood demand, and which the paganism of virgin worship has obliterated. But how much have they not lost by excluding those sentiments which can only be given to One in whom we recognize not only justice, holiness, and beneficence, but also tenderness, sympathy, love? The truth is we are so constituted that great benefits received,—if we think of them as bestowed merely because it is right and good to give them, and not from love for ourselves,—so far from awakening in us spontaneous emotions of gratitude, have rather an opposite tendency, and seem to lay on us an obligation to be grateful, which is a sort of burden, and from which all minds save the most generous have a proclivity to escape. To hundreds of us, large donations from just and well-meaning but unaffectionate fathers have failed to waken the smallest throb of genuine gratefulness; while some mere trifle given by a loving mother—a flower from a well-remembered rose-tree, a scrap of her needlework—has filled our eyes with tears. In excluding, then, in a great degree from view that which I may presume to call the maternal side of religion, the Churches, so far as they have done it, have dropped the golden chain whereby human hearts may be drawn, and have kept in their hands the iron one which can only control the reason and the conscience. Is it possible to estimate the amount of loss to religion which this signifies, or how many thousands of souls might have been won by love to a life of piety and holiness who have refused to obey the bit and bridle of sterner motives, and have wandered off and been lost in the wilderness of practical atheism?
If there be, then, as I humbly believe and trust, in the nature of our great Parent above, certain characters of tenderness and sympathy with His creatures which are more perfectly shadowed, more vividly reflected, in the love of human mothers for their children than by aught else on earth; if there be, in short, a real meaning in the old lesson that God created woman as well as man in His own image,—the image being only complete in the complete humanity,—then I think it follows that there is urgent need that woman’s idea of God should have its due place in all our teaching of religion. I think that there must be truths in this direction which only a woman’s heart will conceive and only a woman’s lips can teach,—truths, perchance, which have come to her when baby-fingers have clung round her neck in the dark while infant trust overcame infant terror, and she has asked herself was there anything in heaven or earth which could make her cast down to destruction, or even let slip from her clasp of care and guardianship, the helpless little child thus lying in her arms,—a living parable of all our race in the everlasting arms of God.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] It will be seen that I differ toto caelo on this point from Mr. Mahaffy in his interesting recent essay on the Decay of Preaching. He seems to me only to recognize the moral and intellectual forces which move men, and these compared with the spiritual are only what mechanical ones are to the electric.
[28] Ingoldsby’s rendering of this world-famous story, the favorite theme of so many eminent painters, is probably no very exaggerated reading of the general impression of the monastic mind respecting the fair sex:—
“There are many devils which walk this world,
Devils great and devils small,
Devils short and devils tall;
Bold devils which go with their tails unfurled,
Sly devils which carry them quite upcurled;