Fourth: Any woman who admits men into her house by night shall be treated as a criminal and delivered to the courts.
Fifth: Any woman who is disobedient to her husband, any common scold or drunkard, shall not be permitted to enter the church, except by permission of the priest.
It will be noted that these statutes forbid the sacrament to the woman who is separated from her husband, not even permitting her an accustomed seat in church. She must remain in the porch during the summer and in a back seat during the winter, except “the bishop” otherwise permits. Also the woman not rendering obedience to her husband, is denied permission to enter the church except under priestly permit. The Christian theory of woman’s inferiority and subordination to man, is as fully endorsed by these statutes as in the mediaeval priestly instruction to husbands.[32]
No profession as constantly appeals to the lower nature as the priestly, the emotions rather than reason, are constantly invoked; ambition, love of power, hope of reward, fear of punishment, are the incentives presented and in no instance are such incentives more fully made use of than for purposes of sustaining the supremacy of man over woman. The teaching of the church cannot fail to impress woman with the feeling that if she expects education, or even opportunity of full entrance into business, she must not heed the admonitions of the priesthood, when, as by Dr. Dix, she is contemptuously forbidden to enter the professions on the ground that God designed these offices alone for man. When women sought university honors at Oxford, a few years since, many “incredibly foolish” letters, said London Truth, were written by its opponents who were chiefly clergymen. Canon Liddon’s influence was against the statute; the Dean of Norwich referred to it as “an attempt to defeat divine Providence and Holy Scripture.” Dr. Gouldbourne thought it would “unsex woman.”[33]
“There is no sin,” said Buddha, “but ignorance,” yet according to Rector Dix, Rev. S. W. Turnstall, Dr. Craven and the priesthood of the present day, in common with the earlier church, woman’s normal condition is that of ignorance, and education is the prerogative of man alone; and yet the dangers of ignorance have by no means been fathomed, although the latest investigations show the close relation between knowledge and life. That as intelligence is diffused, there is a corresponding increase of longevity, is proven; the most uneducated communities showing the greatest proportion of deaths. Ignorance and the death rate are parts of the same question; education and length of life are proportionately synonymous. Statistics gathered in England, Wales and Ireland a few years since showed the percentage of infantile deaths to be much greater in those portions where the mother could not read and write, than where the mother had sufficient education to read a newspaper and write her own name. In districts where there was no other appreciable difference except that of education, the mortality was the largest in the most ignorant districts.
In deprecating education for women, no organized body in the world has so clearly proven its own tyrannous ignorance as has the priesthood, and no body has shown itself so fully the enemy of mankind. Church teaching and centuries of repression acting through the laws of heredity have lessened woman’s physical size, depressed her mental action, subjugated her spirit, and crushed her belief in her right to herself and the proper training of her own children. The church, in its opposition to woman’s education through the ages, has literally killed off the inhabitants of the world with much greater rapidity than war, pestilence, or famine; more than one-half the children born into the world have soon died because of the tyranny and ignorance of the priesthood.[34] The potential physical energy of mankind thus destroyed can in a measure be estimated, but no one can fathom the infinitely greater loss of mental and moral force brought about through condemnation of knowledge to woman; only by induction can it even be surmised. Lecky points out the loss to the world because so many of its purest characters donned the garb of monk or nun. That injury was immediately perceptible, but in the denial of education and freedom to woman more than ninety per cent of the moral and physical energy of the world has literally been suffocated, and owing to ignorance and lack of independent thought this loss is as yet scarcely recognized. So dense the pall of ignorance still overshadowing the world that even woman herself does not yet conjecture the injury that has been done her, or of what she and her children have been deprived. Nor has the world yet roused to a full consciousness of the mischief to mankind that has been perpetrated through the falsehood and ignorant presumption of those claiming control over its dearest rights and interests. Resistance to the wrong thus done the world has been less possible because perpetrated in the name of God and religion. It has caused tens of thousands of women to doubt their equality of right with man in education, to disbelieve they possess the same authority to interpret the Bible or present its doctrines as man; neither, having been deprived of education, do they believe themselves to be man’s political equal, or that they possess equal rights with him in the household. This degradation of woman’s moral nature is the most direful result of the teaching of the church in regard to her. A loss of faith in one’s own self, disbelief in one’s own right to the fullest cultivation of one’s own powers, proceeds from a debasement of the moral sentiments. Self-reliance, self-respect, self-confidence, are acquired through that cultivation of the intellectual faculties which has been denied to woman. Rev. Dr. Charles Little, of the Syracuse University, says: “In the report of a sermon of a distinguished theologian which appeared not long ago, this striking passage occurred: If I were to choose between Christianity as a life and Christianity as a dogma, I would choose Christianity as a dogma.” Judging from its treatment of woman and the many recent trials for heresy, dogma rather than life is the general spirit of the churches everywhere. It is dogma that has wrecked true religion; it is dogma that has crushed humanity; it is dogma that has created two codes of morals; that has inculcated the doctrine of original sin; that has degraded womanhood; that has represented divinity as possessing every evil attribute.
From all these incontrovertible facts in church and state, we see that both religion and government are essentially masculine in their present forms and development. All the evils that have resulted from dignifying one sex and degrading the other may be traced to one central error, a belief in a trinity of masculine gods, in one from which the feminine element is wholly eliminated; and yet in the scriptural account of the simultaneous creation of man and woman, the text plainly recognizes the feminine as well as the masculine element in the God-head, and declares the equality of the sexes in goodness, wisdom and power. Genesis i, 26-27.
And God said, Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness, and so God created man in his own image; in the image of God created He him, male and female created He them, and gave them dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
In nothing has the ignorance and weakness of the church been more fully shown than in its controversies in regard to the creation. From time of the “Fathers” to the present hour, despite its assertion and its dogmas, the church has ever been engaged in discussions upon the Garden of Eden, the serpent, woman, man, and God as connected in one inseparable relation. Amid all the evils attributed to woman, her loss of Paradise, introduction of sin into the world and the consequent degradation of mankind, yet Eve, and through her, all women have found occasional defenders. A book printed in Amsterdam, 1700, in a series of eleven reasons, threw the greater culpability upon Adam, saying:
First: The serpent tempted her before she thought of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and suffered herself to be persuaded that not well understood his meaning.