Part 10

Another appalling device was that of the renowned English physician, John of Gaddesden, who introduced the practice of treating the small-pox by wrapping up the patient in scarlet, hanging his room in scarlet, and in fact compelling him to rest his feverish eyes only on that flaring hue. John tried this notable device, according to his own showing, on one of the sons of King Edward I. (it does not appear to which he refers), and complacently adds to his report, “_et est bona cura_.” In those days, however, doors and windows were not made air-tight, and up the capacious chimneys a considerable portion of fresh air must always have rushed. It was reserved for a later generation to perfect the ingenious system for aggravating and intensifying fever by pasting down the modern window, closing the registers, and (as a climax) engaging nurses to lie beside the sufferer to keep up the heat! The writer heard some years ago from the lips of a Member of Parliament, now deceased, the recital of his own treatment as a boy, in or near London, under a severe attack of small-pox. His life being specially valuable as that of an only son, his affectionate parents, by the advice of a distinguished physician, obtained the services of _two fat women_, who were established permanently in bed on each side of the child during the whole course of the disease! What stipend was offered to tempt these poor obese females to perform this awful service has escaped from the record.

Reading over all these marvellous prescriptions, it is a refreshing exercise to picture the fashionable “leech,” the Gull or Jenner of the period, physician in ordinary to the King or Queen, suave and solemn, filled to the brim with all the conscious dignity of Science, standing beside the sick-bed of some mighty prince or peer, and giving to the awe-stricken attendants his high commands to hang the room with scarlet cloth, or to bring to the patient one of the horrid messes prepared with such infinite pains under his direction, in his own laboratory. We can almost hear him condescendingly explaining to the chief persons present what occult relationship exists between the small-pox and the scarlet cloth, or how the Arcanum of Toads comes to be specially valuable, having been composed of the fattest old toads, selected precisely at the right season,--_videlicet_ midsummer. Of course, in each successive generation there was nothing for the unlearned laity to do but to bow submissively to the dicta of the exponent of Science as it existed at the time. People may always laugh at what is past and gone; but to suspect that living men may be mistaken, or that new systems of medicine, philosophy, or theology, may be destined, like the old, to “have their day and cease to be,” is audacity to which no one should advance. We dare not, therefore, suggest that, to our grandsons, half our modern nostrums (of which the fashion comes in freshly one season and usually falls into disrepute a few years after) may possibly appear scarcely a degree less ridiculous than the Arcanum of Toads or the Mummiall Quintessence. It was not much worse, after all, to make a patient drink a dead man’s blood than to rob him of his own, in the _Sangrado_ style to which (in the memory of us all) the world owes the loss of Cavour. It would have been a mercy to a poor Florentine lady, lately deceased, had her physician counselled her merely to eat earth-worms pickled in vinegar, or green lizards boiled alive in oil, as recommended by Dr. Salmon, instead of bleeding her from the arm nineteen times in the fortnight following her confinement and (as may be readily understood) preceding her untimely death.

Sacrificial Medicine, however, in its simpler and more easily recognizable forms, is undoubtedly on the wane, though a good deal of its spirit may still be traced in our behavior to the sick. To homœopathy (as to many another kind of heresy), we probably owe somewhat of the mitigation of orthodoxy; and children, noticing the busts of Hahnemann in the shop windows, may be properly taught to bless that great deliverer who banished from the nursery those huge and hateful mugs of misery,--black founts of so many infantine tears,--mugs of sobs and sighs and gasps and struggles unutterable, from one of which Madame Roland drew the first inspiration of that martyr spirit which led her onward to the guillotine, when she suffered herself to be whipped six times running, sooner than swallow the abominable contents.

FOOTNOTES:

[26] As the modern mind may be a little puzzled as to the mode in which some of these substances can be introduced into our internal economy, the following extract from the _Family Dictionary_ of Dr. Salmon (1696) may throw light on the subject: “CORAL, to prepare,--Take such a quantity as ye think convenient. Make it into a fine powder by grinding it upon a Porphyry or an Iron Mortar. Drop on it by degrees a little rosewater, and form it into balls for use. After this manner, Crabs’-Eyes, Pearls, Oister shells, and Precious stones are prepared to make up Cordials compounded of them and other suitable materials for the strengthening of the heart in fevers, or such like violent diseases, and to restore the Decays of nature.” Ebony is swallowed by rasping it in shavings and making a decoction.

THE FITNESS OF WOMEN FOR THE MINISTRY OF RELIGION.

Among the anomalies of our social state may be counted the fact that, while it is generally admitted that women are more religious than men, it is to men that in our age and country the Ministry of Religion is (with infinitesimal exceptions) exclusively committed. While nine persons out of ten are conscious that their earliest sentiments of piety have been derived from a mother, and that a sister or a wife has alone enabled the troubled faith of their latter years to survive the shocks of worldliness and doubt, there is yet not one recognized channel by which these waters of life, stored in the fountain of women’s hearts, can flow beyond the narrowest borders; while, on the contrary, it is not too much to surmise that to a very large number of clergymen, well-meaning, learned, and conscientious, the sense of dryness of soul in all that concerns the more spiritual part of their office is a perpetual self-reproach. _Habitans in Sicco_ writes every autumn in the newspapers to complain he can obtain no refreshment from his weekly sermon at any church in his neighborhood, while around him all the time are private wells and underground rivers of the purest element of feeling for which he thirsts. It is a case of

“Water, water, everywhere, But not a drop to drink.”

What we want first and above all things in our ministers of religion is _that they should be intensely religious_; and knowing this, and that all other gifts and acquirements are comparatively of small avail for the purpose, we deliberately exclude from the sacred office that moiety of the community among whom this special and most precious grace is, at all events, least rare.[27]

The reasons for this exclusion are, however, amply sufficient to account, historically, for the anomaly. They are of two kinds, which I shall take leave to characterize as the Bad and the Good. There is a very deep-rooted prejudice, inherited from the ascetics of early Christianity, whereby the idea of womanhood is connected with very base associations. It is impossible to ignore this fact in any review of the religious position of the sex; and it is therefore better to say bluntly that, from this point of view, a woman is looked upon rather as an emissary from the pit than a “daughter of the Lord Almighty,” rather a temptation to earthly passion than a helpmate to heavenly purity. Springing up when the old classical world had sunk into a corruption and foulness which we can now probably little realize in imagination, the frenzy of asceticism which was nourished among the deserts of the Thebaid and attained its full growth in the monasteries of Greece and Italy,--the origin of all the legends of which the “Temptation of St. Anthony” is the type,[28]--has left almost ineffaceable traces throughout the nations of Europe; of course much more sharply marked in the Latin and Greek Churches, which have canonized these poor fanatics, and still set apotheosized virginity on one of the thrones of heaven, than among Protestant communities, wherein marriage has been always placed on a moral level with celibacy, and Martin Luther has been thoroughly absolved for his conjugal affection for the singularly plain old lady whose portrait by Lucas Cranach we beheld some years ago in the Exhibition of Old Masters in Burlington House.[29] Nevertheless, even among Protestant Christians, a certain impression has remained, the reverse of the faith of their old Teuton forefathers, that women were nearer to the mind of the Divinity than men. The highest religious _status_ a woman could attain in Milton’s opinion was a sort of deputy piety,--

“He for God only, she for God in him”;

a type which, considering the kind of representatives of the Deity which some of Adam’s descendants have proved to their wives, is scarcely to be ranked as elevated. The paramount influence of St. Paul’s mind in generating (as Rowland Williams expresses it) the religious atmosphere which Protestants breathe, and the great celibate Apostle’s semi-ascetic feelings about women, have seemingly counteracted the hereditary predisposition of Saxondom to reverence them. His treatment of Marriage (reproduced in the exordium of the Solemnization of Holy Matrimony in the English Book of Common Prayer, and apparently intended to show how _un_holy are the sentiments assumed to form the usual basis of that alliance) has certainly tended to preserve the prestige of Scriptural dignity and authority for sentiments on such subjects derived from Southern races and coarser times, and which might else have died out ere now in Teutonized Europe. That, considering the hysterical behavior of his male converts, when “every one hath a psalm, hath a doctrine, hath a tongue, hath a revelation, hath an interpretation,”[30] prudence justified St. Paul in prohibiting female locutions in public worship may be fully conceded. But the unhappy petrifaction of his current directions, whereby (like so many other Biblical utterances) they have become laws for all time and every divergency of circumstance, has been attended with lamentable consequences. No Jewish law-giver ever bade the Miriams and Deborahs, the Esthers and Judiths, of his race, “keep silence,” and hide their diminished heads from regard, to “the angels,” or to anybody else in or out of temple or camp; and the consequence has been (as a very remarkable paper by a Jewish lady has pointed out)[31] that female patriots, judges, and prophetesses have played a noble and conspicuous part through the whole history of Judaism. But (not to speak profanely) St. Paul has been supposed to act like Louis XIV., when he forbade that any more healing wonders should be done at the tomb of the Abbé Paris:--

“De par le Roi--Défense a Dieu, De faire miracle en ce lieu.”

If it were to please Providence to inspire a woman with any of the gifts of the prophetic or ministerial offices, if ever the promise should be fulfilled to the letter that “your sons and _your daughters_ shall prophesy,” and that the impulse to speak holy words were to seize her in the most natural and appropriate place, to wit, in church, St. Paul is quoted as authority to check any such irregular and unsuitable proceeding: “I suffer not a woman to speak in church.” The result has been that, except among the Quakers (who have coolly set the prohibition aside, and seemingly profited not a little by so doing), Christian rivals to the heroines of Judaism are not producible. During these last eighteen centuries, among all the millions of women in whose hearts the precepts of Christ have been sown and borne rich fruit, there may well have been a few whose eloquence and fervor of piety would have influenced the heart of men as much as a St. Bernard or a Peter the Hermit, and whose words, like those of a Tauler, a Fénelon, or an à Kempis, would have remained a spiritual treasure for all time. But if such have lived and felt and thought, and longed perhaps to speak to their fellow-men out of the abundance of their hearts, their mouths have been effectually stopped. Order has reigned in the Churches so far as they were concerned, and whatever light they might perchance have borne into the dark places of the earth, instead of being set on a candlestick, has been carefully covered up under a bushel.

Such are, I venture to think, the bad reasons for the exclusion of women from the ministry. Good ones, however, are certainly forthcoming, if perchance, when weighed in the scale against the arguments in favor of such an innovation, they prove less heavy. They are drawn from circumstances, some of which pertain to the order of nature, and can never be altered; while others might be, or are already in process of change.

The functions of a minister of religion, as understood in modern times (apart from priestly claims to administer sacraments by special divine commission, with which we need not concern ourselves here), are, roughly speaking, twofold: 1st, public prayer and preaching; and, 2d, pastoral ministrations in the homes of the members of the congregation. Regarding the first, women labor under several disadvantages, sometimes amounting to disabilities. Though women’s voices, _when good_, reach farther than those of men, a considerable number are deficient in the physical vocal power indispensable to make themselves heard in an assembly numbering above one or two hundred persons. Nothing would be more pitiable and ridiculous than for one of these ladies, whatever might be her mental gifts, to mount a pulpit and, with feeble voice rising only to crack in an occasional screech, to attempt to pour forth exhortations which three-fourths of her audience could not hear, and under which the remainder would writhe in an auditorial purgatory. Secondly, there can be no question that the average female intellect is below the average male intellect, and consequently that there are fewer women than men up to the mark of intellectual competence, below which preaching, however well intended, and even inspired by genuine and true feeling, is apt rather to “give occasion to the enemy to blaspheme” than to tend to edifying. If the foolish things of the world often confound the wise, the foolish people in it provoke and distract them; and, even to their humblest hearers, many such well-meaning silly ones would be little else than the blind leading the blind into a ditch. Lamentable as it would be to hear a shrill feminine squeak delivering from the desk the majestic periods of Job and Isaiah, it would be doubly deplorable to listen to a thin and only too distinctly audible soprano enouncing alternately from the pulpit platitudes, ineptitudes, and blunders, such as memory recalls only too keenly to many of us as among the severest trials of the domestic circle. A special peril in this matter also lies in the ill-omened circumstance that the greater the folly of the woman, so much greater, alas! is generally to be found her propensity to preach in private, and therefore, it may presumably be dreaded, her proclivity to extend to a larger sphere the benefit of her exhortations. It has been the observation of the present writer, through a long experience, that masculine and feminine folly usually differ in this essential particular. A man fool dimly perceives he is a fool, and holds his tongue accordingly; or (if the vanity of his sex prevent him from arriving consciously at any such conviction or conclusion) he deems that as prudence is the better part of valor, so is silence the proper garb of wisdom, and that the less he wastes on an ungrateful world the precious jewels of his ideas, the more credit shall he have for those supposed to remain in the casket of his mind. A man who talks much is nine times out of ten a clever and brilliant person, and may possibly be the most profound of thinkers, who brings out of the inexhaustible treasury of his imagination things new and old. A woman fool, on the contrary, usually does not find out, till she is old and ugly and the habit of silly chatter is irretrievably settled, that she is a fool at all: probably for the simple reason that the more folly she talks, the more delighted her male admirers generally show themselves with her discourse. Even if she does not happen to think herself particularly clever or well-informed, she has been taught to believe that ability in a woman is rather a defect to be concealed than a gift to be exhibited, and that, as the sagacious Chinese proverb has it, “The glory of a man is knowledge, but the glory of a woman is to renounce knowledge.” Accordingly, without the slightest reticence or dread of exposure, she tumbles out of her untidy brain notions as trivial and _mesquin_ as the contents of her own disorderly work-basket,--here a button and there a spangle, a thimble, a bit of crochet, a string of beads, a tangled skein of silk, and a little ribbon marked with inches wherewith to measure the universe. The result of this difference in the display of folly is naturally to lend color to a somewhat exaggerated estimate of that surplusage of feebleness and frivolity in the feminine scale, of the existence of which, alas! there can be no doubt, but which is perhaps less than is supposed out of proportion with the correlative dulness and stupidity in the masculine balance. As the immortal Mrs. Poyser sums up the matter, “Women _are_ fools. God Almighty made them so to match the men.”

Thus, then, two arguments at least against admitting women to the ministry rest on natural and inevitable grounds: some women are physically, some other women mentally, incapable of adequately fulfilling its duties. And to these adverse reasons others are added by the actual though not inevitable conditions of society. Women, up to the present time, have been almost indefinitely less well educated than men, and only their superior quickness and tact prevented this inequality from telling disastrously in common life; while nothing could hinder it from doing so, were they to undertake the office of public teachers. By hook or crook, with little teaching (and that teaching generally fourth or fifth rate of its kind), women have managed pretty generally to scrape together and store up in their memories in a happy-go-lucky way a certain quantity of knowledge, useful and ornamental enough to pass muster. Women’s culture, when women are cultivated, sometimes (perhaps we may say often) possesses rather more breadth than that of men, and includes a good many topics rarely included in the masculine curriculum. It is therefore well suited to furnish pleasure to the possessor and entertainment to her acquaintance and readers; but the accuracy and definiteness of knowledge which men obtain, thanks to their much abused classical and mathematical training, are what every ordinarily educated woman with a grain of sense sighed for, till the day when the great movement for the Higher Education of Women reared a more fortunate generation. Now, it is clearly highly desirable, if not absolutely indispensable, that a person who may be called upon to treat publicly and didactically, if not controversially--and let us hope and pray that women will not generally take to controversy!--almost every subject in the range of the higher interests of man, who at least ought not to regard any such interest as foreign ground, should possess not merely wide, but accurate information, and be as far as possible above the liability to commit any gross blunders. This is of course viewing the subject apart from any special theological training such as the older Churches have deemed almost the first qualification for the ministerial office. Even the poor Capuccini preaching friars, whose astounding ignorance of profane history and science affords inexhaustible tales of merriment in Italy, who talk of “the great St. Augustine of Hippo, who crowned King Alfred, who signed Magna Charta,” and are wont to indulge in such figures of rhetoric as imaginary sniffs round the pulpit at the smell of the roasting flesh of St. Lawrence on his gridiron,--even these poor old fellows have received adequate instruction in the doctrines, the legends, and the moral and penitential systems of their Church. Proverbially ignorant as are the Greek Popes and the Nestorian, Coptic, and Maronite priests, they, too, are perfectly well “up” in all those recondite dogmas which are supposed to be their peculiar concern, and can tell with unerring certainty whether the Second Divine Person had two natures or two wills, or only one of each, or whether the Third positively proceeded from the First only, according to Greek orthodoxy, or from the First and Second, according to that of Rome and Canterbury. Nearer home, of course, theological education is a wider and more serious matter. If young priests at Maynooth are taught the astronomical system which makes the sun go round the earth, and the moral system of Peter Dens, which is nearly as completely the reverse of truth, they still receive an enormous amount of something which goes by the name of instruction, and in the matters of scholastic theology and casuistry are probably qualified to beat a great many eminent D.D.’s of Oxford and Cambridge. Here in England, and in Scotland also, every Church, Established and Dissenting, has its college or colleges for training its clergy, either apart from or together with students intended for lay professions; and, without the degree or certificate afforded by such institution, the entry into the ministry is barred. Christendom, in short, has, like Judaism, its “Schools of the Prophets”; and nobody is invited to prophesy, even if he be pious and gifted as John Bunyan, who has not passed through them and learned his lesson.