The spiritual and temporal superiority of man over woman is affirmed by clergymen of the present day as strongly as by those of the dark ages, and sermons in opposition to her equality of rights are as frequently preached. The entrance of woman into remunerative industries is as energetically opposed as is her demand for governmental and religious freedom. Rev. Morgan Dix, rector of Trinity church, New York, in a series of “Lenten Lectures”[15] a few years since, made woman the subject of violent attacks as an inferior and subordinate being, now attempting to pass beyond the bounds set by God for her restraint.
There is a more emphatic, a more hopeless degradation for her. It is seen when she seeks to reverse the laws of her nature and upset the economy of the universe, pushing her way out of her own sphere into a rivalry with men in their sphere and in their proper pursuits. On that must follow a degradation, greatly to be feared. When the claim for rights seems to be taking the form of a competition with man, on a field which God has reserved for man only, in a work not suited to the woman, and in professions already overstocked that must end, not in enhancing the merit of woman in his eye but in making her offensive and detestable. There is a point beyond which patience will not hold out; and of this let the woman be sure: that if she go too far the end will arise; and man having long borne her manners and finding that she is becoming a social nuisance and a general tormentor, will finally lose all respect for her and thrust her away with loathing and disgust and bid her behave herself and go back to her old inferiority.
In this series of lectures, Dr. Dix emphatically declared man’s spiritual supremacy even in the household.
The father is by God’s law, priest over his household; to him should they look as a witness for that God who gave him his rank and title.[16]
The sects agree in their teachings regarding woman; Rev. A. Sherman, at one time president of Bacon College, Kentucky, declaring that woman was first in transgression, that she beguiled man and was therefore put in bondage under his authority, said:
The wide spreading contempt for this truth exhibited by the political-religious fashion and infidelity of the age, is one of the most alarming symptoms of approaching anarchy and the overthrow of our liberties. The attempt which is being made in these United States to elevate the wife to a perfect equality with the husband, or to change in any respect the relation between them, established by God himself, is rank infidelity, no matter what specious disguise it may assume.
In a sermon of his Lenten series, entitled “The Calling of a Christian Woman, and her Training to Fulfill it,” Dr. Dix said:
We, priests, who whatever our personal short comings, have a commission from above and a message to man from God, and are the mouthpiece of that church to which his hand-maidens belong, may be and ought to be able to help occasionally, by merely stating what the Bible and the church declare on certain great matters, on which many lower ones depend.... What did Almighty God, the Creator, the wise Father of all, make woman for? What did he intend her to do? What did he not mean her to do or try to do?
He answered these questions in a lecture entitled, “A Mission for Woman,” of the same series.