“Instead of the qualities of the world, he requires only three of her. First, training up of her children and maids in the fear of God; with prayers and catechising and all religious duties. Secondly, a curing and healing of all wounds and sores with her own hands; which skill either she brought with her, or he takes care she shall learn it of some religious neighbour. Thirdly, a providing for her family in some such sort, as that neither they want a competent sustentation, nor her husband be brought into debt.”
In modern times a section of the clergy in the English Church have shown a disposition to revert to the practice of earlier ages, and follow a celibate life. It is part of the ascetic movement which some years ago was rather a marked feature in the Church. But even among those Anglicans who recoil from the term “Protestant,” and endeavour to preserve as much as possible of the forms of Church government which prevailed in pre-Reformation times, there are few comparatively who adopt this species of monasticism.
No doubt marriage has greatly helped to break down the authority of the priest. A man with a wife and family living the domestic life of an ordinary citizen is brought at once to the level of common humanity, priest though he be. He loses that glamour which attached to him when he was cut off from his fellows and set apart on another plane by virtue of his office. Women, more than men, have been in all ages prone to superstitious reverence for ecclesiastical authority. They are still apt to look to the clergyman to guide them in the daily affairs of secular life, not because they consider him better qualified intellectually than other men, but because they have a lurking remnant of belief in priestly infallibility. There are many who make the clergyman a referee on all subjects, of whatever nature, and look upon him as the proper head of every movement, educational, philanthropic, or otherwise, irrespective of his qualifications for such a position. The deference paid to clerical opinion and the leaning on clerical authority are survivals of old habits of thought, weakened in the process of transmission, but having a strong principle of vitality.
The counterbalancing force to the influence of the Church on women is to be found not merely in its acknowledged rivals, intellectual development and the progress of secular knowledge, but in the motive-power of the religious sentiment. It has been justly observed that—
“the clergy of all ages, in concentrating the strength of woman on her religious nature, have summoned up a power that they could not control. When they had once lost the confidence of those ruled by this mighty religious sentiment, it was turned against them. In the Greek and Roman worship women were the most faithful to the altars of the gods; yet when Christianity arose, the foremost martyrs were women. In the Middle Ages women were the best Catholics, but they were afterwards the best Huguenots. It was a woman, not a man, that threw the stool at the offending minister’s head in a Scotch kirk; it was a woman who made the best Quaker martyr on Boston common. And from vixennish Jenny Geddes to high-minded Mary Dyer, the whole range of womanly temperament responds as well to the appeal of religious freedom as of religious slavery.”[35]
A French writer in the middle of the present century, describing England during the Ages of Faith, with its surname of the “Isle of Saints,” as “un spectacle digne des anges,” laments its coldness and lack of virtue under Protestantism. In what he styles this materialistic age—
“la femme est loin, bien loin d’être ce qu’elle fut pour l’opinion publique aux époques de foi vive et ardente.”
The expression of the religious sentiment has taken a different form. It may be less obvious and definite, but in the opinion of one of our modern thinkers it is the mainspring of all progress—
“Nothing can be more obvious,” writes Mr. Kidd,[36] “as soon as we begin to understand the nature of the process of evolution in progress around us, than that the moving force behind it is not the intellect, and that the development as a whole is not in any true sense an intellectual development.
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