The Christianity of to-day thus continues to teach the existence of a superior and an inferior sex within the Church, possessing different rights, and held accountable to a different code of morals, when even woman's dress is held as typical of her inferiority. Not alone did Dr. Craven express this idea, but the Right Rev. Dr. Coxe refused the sacrament to the lady patients at the Clifton Springs Sanitarium in 1868, whose heads were uncovered. This same Right Rev. Dr. Coxe, in a speech at his installation as first President of Ingham Seminary for young ladies, declared "the laws of God to be plainly Salic."
Rev. Knox-Little, a High-Church clergyman of England, spent a few weeks in the United States during the fall of 1880. In the course of his stay in Philadelphia he preached a "Sermon to Women," in the large church of St. Clements. The following extract from the report in the Times of that city shows its teachings:
"God made himself to be born of a woman to sanctify the virtue of endurance; loving submission is an attribute of woman; men are logical, but women lacking this quality, have an intricacy of thought. There are those who think women can be taught logic; this is a mistake. They can never by any power of education arrive at the same mental status as that enjoyed by men, but they have a quickness of apprehension, which is usually called leaping at conclusions, that is astonishing. There, then, we have distinctive traits of a woman, namely, endurance, loving submission, and quickness of apprehension. Wifehood is the crowning glory of a woman. In it she is bound for all time. To her husband she owes the duty of unqualified obedience. There is no crime which a man can commit which justifies his wife in leaving him or applying for that monstrous thing, divorce. It is her duty to subject herself to him always, and no crime that he can commit can justify her lack of obedience. If he be a bad or wicked man she may gently remonstrate with him, but refuse him never. Let divorce be anathema; curse it; curse this accursed thing, divorce; curse it, curse it! Think of the blessedness of having children. I am the father of many children and there have been those who have ventured to pity me, 'Keep your pity for yourself,' I have replied. 'They never cost me a single pang.' In this matter let woman exercise that endurance and loving submission which with intricacy of thought are their only characteristics."
Such a sermon as the above, preached to woman, under the fall blaze of nineteenth century civilization, needs few comments. In it woman's inferiority and subordination are as openly asserted as at any time during the dark ages. According to Rev. Knox-Little, woman possesses no responsibility; she is deprived of conscience, intelligent thought, self-respect, and is simply an appendage to man, a thing. As the clergy in the middle ages divided rights into those of persons and things, themselves being the persons, the laity, things, so the Rev. Knox-Little and his ilk of to-day divide the world into persons and things,—men being the persons and women the things.
It should require but little thought upon woman's part to see how closely her disabilities are interwoven with present religious belief as to her inferiority and pre-destined subordination. If she needs aid to thought, the Knox-Littles will help her. Have protests against his blasphemous doctrine been made by his brother clergymen? Not one. Has a single church denied his degrading theory? Not one. He has been allowed in this sermon to stand as the representative, not only of High-Church theology in regard to woman, but as expressing the belief of all churches in her creation and existence as an inferior and appendage to man.
There is scarcely a Protestant sect that has not, within a few years, in some way, placed itself upon record in regard to woman's subordination. The Pan-Presbyterian Council that assembled in Edinburgh a few years since, refused to admit a woman even as a listener to its proceedings, although women constitute at least two-thirds of the membership of that Church. A solitary woman who persisted in remaining to listen to the discussions of this body, was removed by force; "six stalwart Presbyterians" lending their ungentle aid to her ejection. The same Pan-Presbyterian body when in session in Philadelphia in the summer of 1880, laughed to scorn the suggestion of a liberal member, that the status of woman in the Church should receive some consideration. The speaker referred to the Sisters of Charity in the Catholic Church, and to the position of woman among the Quakers; but although the question was twice introduced, it was as often met with derisive laughter, and no action was taken upon it. A vote of the New England Society of Friends at their meeting in Newport, 1878, proves that as liberal as they have been considered toward woman, even they have not in the past held her as upon a plane of perfect equality. This body voted that hereafter "women shall be eligible to office in the management of the Society, shall sign all conveyances of real estate made by the Society, and shall be considered equal to the opposite sex."
The Congregational Church is placed upon record through laws governing certain of its bodies:
"By the word 'church' is meant the adult males duly admitted and retained in the First Evangelical Congregational Church in Cambridgeport, present at any regular meeting of said church and voting by a majority."[214]
In the Unitarian and Universalist churches, which ordain women to preach and administer the ordinances, these women pastors are made to feel that the innovation is not universally acceptable.