Part 11

The necessity for this theological training, so far as it concerns the insurance of orthodox doctrine from the acolyte when he becomes a preacher, of course falls to the ground when we contemplate an order of things quite outside the orthodox churches, and such as it is not to be anticipated they will sanction for many a day. Our female preacher is by the hypothesis, for the present at all events, either quite irregularly connected with the orthodox sects, a Minister Unattached or Amateur Pastor (and some such there are at this moment doing a vast deal of good work, _e.g._, Miss Catherine Marsh and the sister of Mr. Spurgeon); or if ever officially recognized, and a professional minister, then as belonging to some heterodox communion, such as the Salvation Army; or those in America, which profit by the services of the Rev. Phœbe Hanaford, the Rev. Antoinette Brown, and the late Rev. Celia Burleigh; and the Unitarian congregation at Melbourne, which honored itself by choosing for their pastor Martha Turner, a lady whose great abilities and noble spiritual feeling seem to me to hold out the very example we seek of what a woman in the pulpit may and ought to be.[32] No necessity exists compelling a female preacher who enlists under the banner of religious freedom to undergo the particular mental drill which qualifies the Romanist or Anglo-Catholic clergyman for the performance of all the peculiar intellectual labors and combats necessary to his office, and included in the duty of honestly believing exactly all which his Church believes, and being equipped to do battle with anybody who believes anything less or anything more. But is there on this account less reason that the candidate for another kind of ministry should undertake less severe studies and go through a less complete mental training than the embryo priest, Latin or Anglican? The reverse has been most wisely maintained by the Unitarian body in this country, whose scheme of theological culture (if the present writer may presume to estimate it) is wider and deeper than that which is demanded to qualify the possessor for the See of Canterbury. The teacher of religion who is to be something more than the expounder of a ready-prepared catechism,--who is to lead his flock not merely into one particular paddock, and to water them exclusively at one particular pond, but into every field of sweet and wholesome herbage, and beside every stream of living waters,--whose duty it will be to pluck up the cruel brambles, and clear away the piles of stones of doubts and difficulties which grow and are flung by careless hands along the path of faith and life,--such a teacher ought to be furnished with every aid which learning can offer. Above all, I should hold that a woman who should venture to assume this high and arduous task specially needs such equipment, since, for a long time to come, she must expect to be more than others the mark of question and criticism; and the very eagerness of her own mind may (unless weighted by solid erudition) carry her more quickly and more remotely astray. Every one must have noticed how there are some persons full of originality and mother-wit, who continually fancy they are making fresh observations and theories, while their next neighbor, who has never had an idea properly his own, can tell them off on his fingers what ancient sage first made their observation, and when and by whom in the Middle Ages their theory was broached, and how it was refuted and abandoned by all thinking people several centuries ago. The merely original man makes himself ridiculous for want of learning, and is, in fact, always beginning _de novo_ at the bottom of the ladder of human thought. The mere scholar is nothing better than a Conversations-Lexicon, and never exercises any influence except that of a useful drag on the ideas of his friends when they are going down-hill. The true teacher must indispensably combine both the gift of originality and the acquirement of such stores of knowledge as shall enable him to trace doctrines and hypotheses to their sources,--to know what has been said for and against them by the greater thinkers of the world who have dealt with them,--and, in a word, to know exactly how far he is or is not a heretic, and not be (as is the commonest of cases) a heinous heretic while he believes himself strictly orthodox, and strictly orthodox and even commonplace when he enunciates what he fondly conceives to be a bold and startling heresy. All this applies (for reasons too obvious to need animadversion) pre-eminently to teachers of the more impulsive sex. Accordingly, we must admit that the argument against female ministers of religion, founded on the lower educational _status_ of women at present, is, so far as it goes, perfectly valid.

Lastly, there is an argument which I imagine would half-consciously influence many serious-minded people against the admission of women to such an office. Women are (thanks to all sorts of causes, historical, political, personal, with which we need not concern ourselves) actually much _deconsidered_ by men. Would not their deconsideration be reflected on Religion itself, were they to become its authorized ministers? With enormous labor, the Broad Church school has been trying to efface the stamp of effeminacy from their order, to cultivate “muscular Christianity,” and make laymen of the order of the author of _Sword and Gown_ remember that a priest is not necessarily an old woman. If many women, old or young, enter the ministry, will not this effort to redeem the character of the order be entirely thrown away, and the impression become quite ineffaceable that Manliness and Godliness are two orbs always seen in opposition, and never in conjunction? I confess I should feel such a fear as this to form a very cogent argument, were it altogether well founded.

Let us now, before attempting to discuss the possible advantages to be set against all these objections to the religious ministry of women, briefly run back over the heads we have passed, and see if there be not some answer to each objection, or at least some hope that its force might with time and care be neutralized.

First, there was noticed the ascetic feeling, inherited from the old monks, of the essential _unholiness_ of women, and their consequent unworthiness to meddle with sacred things. This idea has probably occurred for the first time to many an English lady when she has penetrated by chance into some hallowed precinct, some tempting and shadowy cloister, of a monastery in Italy or Syria, and has been driven out tumultuously by a whole flock of cowled and sandalled brethren, cackling like so many geese at the intrusion of a cat into a hen-house. Perhaps, as at Vallombrosa among the Apennines, or St. Saba in the desert, she has seen the gentlemen of her party courteously received and comfortably lodged within the noble walls of the convent, while she has been left to such nocturnal repose as might be found in a flea-haunted pavilion outside, or in her tent pitched in a valley of centipedes. She has been accustomed to think of women generally as of the types common in decent English society, a little strait-laced, or perhaps a little “gushing,” as the case may be; and she has very honestly taken it for granted that, if there be any serious harm in the world, it is the opposite sex who are principally to blame. Suddenly, it is revealed to her that, by a large number of her fellow-creatures, she herself and all her female belongings,--her eminently respectable governesses, the Misses Prunes and Prism; her dear old grandmother, Mrs. Goody-Good; and her majestic aunt, Lady Bountiful,--all are looked upon as little better than so many Succubi of Satan, sent to lure the souls of those ridiculous old monks to destruction. The shock has not rarely produced a peal of ungovernable laughter such as those hoary cloisters had never echoed ere profane Saxon Balmorals trod their pavement; but, when _la pazza Signorina Inglese_ has retired to her hotel or her tent, she finds that a new and very unpleasant light has been thrown on matters whereon she had never reflected before. Modern English Ritualism and Monasticism are doing their best, in more ways than need now be specified, to introduce into English life these Oriental and gross ideas about women, that pseudo-purity which is most impure. In so far as they prevail, they will do us an injury quite incalculable. Needless to say that, to people trained in such a school, a female minister of religion would be a monstrous thing. _Almost_ as well might the creature trill out the melodies of _La Traviata_ or _La Grande Duchesse_, or perform her part in a ballet in the costume of a sylph! The view of womanhood taken by these ultra-sanctified persons and by the most cynical and profligate old _roués_ is practically the same. Surely, it is to be hoped that all this worse than folly will be swept away in the blast of public impatience and indignation which sooner or later must burst, like a breath of wholesome autumn storm, through the incense-laden atmosphere of Ritualism, and consign to the four winds all its trumpery of millinery, chandlery, and upholstery, and the thoroughly base and materialistic ideas which have come in along with them!

Secondly, among the bad reasons for the exclusion of women from the pulpit, we have referred to St. Paul’s dictum, “I suffer not a woman to speak in church.” Whatever high degree of human wisdom we must all attribute to the greatest of the apostles, or even divine authority, as the orthodox hypothesis of inspiration would give to his words, there is absolutely no ground at all for the assumption that, _because_ he forbade women to affront public opprobrium by preaching when women lived habitually shut up, each in her _gynaeceum_, he would, likewise have forbidden them to offer religious exhortations in a sacred place, when public sentiment has become reconciled to their appearance in the streets, on the stage, in the lecture-room, and even on the platform. The coolness, indeed, wherewith the most orthodox persons always _do_ practically take for granted that Scriptural precepts, however rigid in form and seemingly intended by their authors for perpetual observance, are to be set aside without scruple, as applying to a bygone state of things, when they do _not_ chime in with their own inclinations and prejudices, is only to be paralleled by the tenacity wherewith they maintain their authority under every vicissitude, when they happen to coincide with them. Let any one who quotes St. Paul’s incidental remark about women speaking in church be called on to avow how far he has taken to heart the solemn decree issued in the Encyclical Letter of the one great Council of the assembled apostles, in the awfully mysterious words, “It seemed good unto the Holy Ghost _and to us_” (as if these were two separate opinions) “to lay upon you (the Gentile world) no greater burden than these necessary things,--to abstain from meats offered to idols, ... and from things strangled, and from blood.” Lives there a modern Christian whose conscience would in the smallest degree be troubled by taking the rice and ghee from a Hindu temple, eating a rabbit strangled in a snare, or partaking of a black-pudding or a Bologna sausage?

Passing now to the more reasonable reasons against admitting women to the ministry,--the natural and incurable disabilities, physical and mental, under which not a few of them labor,--the answer comes at once to hand. Those among them who are unfitted for the office must not undertake it, any more than dumb or stuttering or imbecile men. There is no more difficulty in exclusion in one case than in the other, though there may be a few more persons necessarily excluded.

As to education, the case is much more serious. Certainly, unless women can receive the same solid and extensive training as male theological students (rather more strict and rigid than less so), to make up for what may have been wanting of exactness in their girlish school-room education, the appearance in our pulpits of a number of female heads lightly stored with learning or logic would be to the last degree ill-omened. But is there the smallest necessity why this should be? If the desire of a woman to devote herself to religious work were of any depth or worth consideration, she would not only be willing, but _crave_, to pass through the severest studies, to fit herself to the utmost of her abilities for so high and sacred a task; and it is no longer an hypothesis, but a demonstrated fact, that if women choose to study and have the fair opportunity of doing so, there are not a few of them capable at all events of attaining to those levels whereon men of the learned professions habitually take their stand. If a few fickle or weak-minded women were to enter as students such an institution, let us say, as Manchester New College, they would be very speedily “choked off,” and no more harm would be done than by the scores of youths “plucked” at Oxford and Cambridge, and led to change their programme of life. Those women, on the contrary, who should pass successfully through such an intellectual and moral sieve, might thenceforth be very safely trusted.

Again: the fear that Religion itself might come to be deconsidered, as a result of the deconsideration of the sex of its ministers, must prove groundless, if, instead of bringing a fresh element of weakness into preaching and prayer, it should prove that (as I shall hope presently to show) women are likely to pour a new stream of life into what has so often become dry and unprofitable. After all, the inner heart of humanity honors in its very core spiritual graces, over the physical, the intellectual, and even the moral. Not the conquerors, not the philosophers, not even those who have displayed most _virtue_ apart from religion, have been adored and deified among men, but the prophets and saints who have ascended the mountain-peaks of Prayer and thrown open the windows of Heaven.

Now, as we look back over the Christian centuries during which the spiritual, God-loving, anti-carnal impulse sent forth from Judæa has passed on, transmitted in waves of emotion from age to age and land to land, does it not seem probable that among those who have received it most fully, and might have helped its transmission most effectually, there have been thousands of women? In effect, history notoriously shows that, in the apostolic time and at the period of the conversion of Europe, at least half the work achieved was due to the ardor wherewith noble ladies not a few took up the task of introducing and disseminating Christian ideas through courts and camps. But, when the age for this kind of female patronage was over, the powers of women to aid the cause which so many of them have had next to their innermost hearts have been narrowed within the walls of the home or even of the cloister. I do not doubt that this home influence of women has indeed been incalculably great and beneficent. It is hard to conceive what would be the sort of religion remaining in an island colonized by men only, and with a population recruited only by boys too young to remember a mother’s care. The chances might lie between a society of Trappists, or a herd such as the gold-diggers of a “Roaring Camp” in a Californian gulch. But, because the religious influence of women in their homes has been inestimably beneficial, is it, I ask, any reason for resting satisfied that they should exercise no such influence outside their doors? Surely there might have been prevision of just such a state of things as has existed now for more than a thousand years in Christendom, in the warning of the great Founder of Christianity that a light (when we are so happy as to possess a light) should be set on a candlestick and not under a bushel. If ever the time comes when the spiritual home influence of women is allowed to radiate into the outer circle of public life, there is every reason to believe that the inestimable element of spirituality will make itself felt, touching the hearts of men with new softness, awakening their consciences with the power of mother-like gentleness, and inspiring quite a new reverence, alike for women and for religion.

“Ah!” it will be said, “this is all very well, if women should, by some happy chance, succeed well as preachers and ministers. If, on the contrary, they fail, and make a miserable _fiasco_ of their attempt, what ridicule will they not draw on the most sacred things! Is it wise, is it allowable, to incur such a risk?”

Feeling a good deal of sympathy with such an alarm as this, having a terror (possibly exaggerated) of some day undergoing the frightful experience of listening, in a place of worship from which I could not decently escape, to the ignorant, shallow, dogmatic folly which it has been my occasional penance to hear from women elsewhere, and which has, undoubtedly, a character of its own still more ignorant, more shallow, and more dogmatic than any folly commonly to be heard from men, I here humbly confess that for many years such a possibility has with me almost outweighed the actual probability that women would in general fulfil the duties of the ministry exceptionally well. But longer reflection has tended much to remove my fears, while it has strengthened my hopes. In the first place, I look with extreme confidence to such a sifting process as a good theological college course would inevitably effect, to exclude from concurrence all the frivolous, the half-hearted, the weak-minded,--all those women, in short, who should not prove capable of strong and steady mental labor, and willing to undergo it for several consecutive years. From such as should pass triumphantly through an ordeal of this kind, nothing very outrageous in the way of folly or contemptible in the way of feminine “twaddle” would need to be apprehended. And, again, there is a second and very satisfactory ground for reassurance. Female ministers will certainly not (at all events for a very long time to come) be appointed to lecture us by any despotic authority. They cannot, indeed, be ministers at all, unless some of us distinctly desire them to minister for our particular benefit. By a happy decree of fate, it takes at least two or three persons at any time to form a congregation. There must be the hearers of the discourse as well as the speaker; and, as even the sternest sticklers for the rights of women are not likely to proceed so far as to demand compulsory attendance at female preachments, there will always remain open a door of hope and refuge whereby the oppressed may go free. The same argument applies in this case as to the everlastingly reproduced fallacy about the franchise; namely, that, if their political disabilities be removed, women will invade the benches of St. Stephen’s. As nobody can ever be elected an M.P., unless he or she find a majority of some constituency to choose him or her as the best candidate, so neither can anybody become a minister in one of the free churches, unless he or she find a congregation ready to “sit under” him or her, as a tolerable preacher. In either case, the woman who could so singularly impress the majority of electors[33] or of parishioners with the conviction of her supreme fitness as to induce them to choose her for the political or religious office would be, undoubtedly, so very remarkable a person that it would be ten thousand pities the world should be deprived of her services.

Let us now turn to the other side of the shield. Having discussed the validity of the arguments against the admission of women to the ministry, let us see what is to be said directly in favor of such an innovation.

In the first place, it is obvious that women have certain special aptitudes and qualifications (as well as the above-named inaptitudes) for such an office. We have been hitherto speaking as if the work of a minister lay almost exclusively in the pulpit and reading-desk; but we must remember that a very large and very important part of it lies also in the homes of the members of the congregation, in the hour of their sorrows and difficulties, their sicknesses, doubts, repentances, death. Can any one doubt that the tender and ready sympathies of women, and their superior tact and discernment of character, their natural tendency to soothe and exhort rather than to upbraid or threaten, are qualities more valuable for such service than any which men, however pious, well-meaning, and learned in casuistry, usually bring to such tasks? As a matter of fact, women do, instinctively, perform the office of ministering angels on these occasions all over the land, without waiting for any license or consecration; while many of the best of the clergy either suffer all their days from unconquerable shyness and the sense of their own want of tact, or run speedily into the ruts of professional consolations and exhortations in formal phraseology, meaning little or nothing to speaker or hearer. Of all the irritating--I might say maddening--things in human life, there is nothing worse than to be addressed in the hour of mortal agony and despair, when our hearts, riven to the core, could scarcely bear an angel’s touch, by a smug, self-satisfied personage, who inflicts on us his cut-and-dried consolations and exhortations to perfect quiescence and cheerful resignation; all the time revealing, by every word and gesture, how utterly incapable he is of comprehending even the shadow of our grief. It would be difficult to estimate how many people (especially the intelligent men of the humbler classes, who are the principal victims of these tormentors),--men who would have suffered themselves to be led with childlike submission by any wise and loving hand, even through the wicket-gate of prayer and repentance, to the heavenly way,--have been, on the contrary, goaded by tactless parsons into hardness and rebellion. It is real, genuine, spontaneous _sympathy_ which alone can authorize any one to approach the sacred borders of a great sorrow. Can any one doubt that women would, as a general rule, feel this more tenderly, more genuinely than men? The fear would be that the strain on the heart of a good woman, minister of a large congregation, would be so great as very sensibly to tell upon health and life.

Further, outside the region of sentiment, and even in the intellectual way, so far as it concerns social influence, a woman has special facilities. If she have extensive knowledge (and I am presuming she will have acquired a good deal before entering the ministry), it will generally be more _ready to hand_ than that of a man. Her humor, if she possesses a grain of that precious quality, will have the great advantage, in all wordy skirmishing, of being playful, quick as lightning, and always at command,--not like the ponderous satire which takes an hour to get out of its sheath, or the peculiarly masculine type of wit which the owner--

“Beareth not about, As if afraid to use it out, Except on holidays or so, As men their best apparel do.”

Her logic--if by happy circumstance she has really trained her mind to work logically--will not lose the famous feminine faculty for springing to the top of the stairs while the man is steadily walking up the steps, because she has acquired the power of recognizing whether she be on the right landing or the wrong.