* Maine's "Ancient Law," 158.
It has always been uphill work fighting the Church. So long as it had sword and fagot at its command, and the will to use them; so long as it pretended to have, and people believed that it had, power to mete out damnation to its opposers; just so long were science, justice, and thought fatally crippled.
But when Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet and the great encyclopedist circle of France got their hands on the throat of the Church, and dipped their pens in the fire of eloquence, wit, ridicule, reason, and justice, then, and not till then, began to dawn a day of honor toward women, of humanity and justice and truth. They drew back the curtain, the world saw, the cloud lifted, and life began on a new plane. Under Pagan rule woman had begun, as we have seen, to receive recognition apart from sex. She was a human being. A general law of "persons" applied to and shielded her. But from the first the Christian Church refused to consider her apart from her capacity for reproduction; and this one ground of consideration it pronounced a curse, a crime, and a shame to her. Her only claim to recognition at all was a curse. She was not a person, she was only a function.*
* See Lea's "Sacerdotal Celibacy."
Man it pronounced a person first, with rights, privileges, and protection as such. Incidentally he might also be a husband, a father, or a son. His welfare, duties, and rights as a person, as a human being, were apart from and superior to those that were special and incidental. He received consideration always as a person. Hemightbe dealt with as husband or father.
But ignoring all her mental life and denying that she had any, and ignoring all her physical possibilities, ambitions, desires, and capabilities as a person, the Church narrowed woman's life and restricted her energies into a compass where its power over her became absolute and her subjection certain. Nor has the loss been wholly to woman, for any influence which cripples the mother's capacity of endowment takes cruel revenge on the race.*
* "It is not impossible but that a more correctunderstanding of the laws of life and heredity may establishthe fact that because of the subjection of woman, the entirerace has been mentally dwarfed and physically weakened."—Gamble.
From this outlook the debt of civilization to the Church is heavy indeed. Is it a debt of gratitude?
Under this head there is space for but one point farther, out of the great store at hand.
The clergy were licensed to commit crime. They got up a neat little scheme called "benefit of clergy" by which they were secure from the punishment meted out to other criminals. The relief offered did sometimes reach other men, but as learning was largely confined to the clergy they were the chief beneficiaries, as the name implies and as was the intent of the law. Any man who could read was allowed "benefit of clergy;" in other words, his punishment was lightened or entirely omitted. But a woman, though she were a perfect mine of wisdom and could read in any number of languages, could receive no such benefit,because she could not take holy orders. They first enacted that she should not take orders, and then they denied to her the relief which only that ability could give. So great a favorite was woman with the Church!
The ordinary male criminal received the ordinary punishment, the clergy received none; and in order that the requisite gross amount of suffering for crime should be inflicted on somebody, the clergy enacted that woman should receivetheirshare vicariously in addition to her own, and then to this they added such interest as would make the twenty-per-cent-a-month men of Wall street ashamed of their stupid financiering.
Thus the Church arrogated to itself the exclusive right to commit crime with impunity, and also claimed and exercised the right to prevent women from learning to read. If she still persisted it could then punish her doubly,because she had no right to learn.
For offenses for which ordinary men were hanged, women were burned alive, and priests were glorified. For larceny a man was branded in the hand or imprisoned for a few months; whilefor a first offenceof the kind a woman was kindly permitted to be hanged or beheadedwithout benefit of clergy; and the clergy went scot free.* The Church did then as it does now, it claimed all the benefits of citizenship and paid none of the penalties and bore none of the burdens.**
* Blackstone. Christian.** It still claims exemption from taxation, thus throwingits burden on others; and it also claims immunity from thevery gambling laws which it so rigidly enforces againstother institutions.
The Church did then just as it does now, in principle, in setting up certain great benefits whichonly priests might hope to obtain, and then enacting that certain persons were forever ineligible to the priesthood; and the same or quite as good reasons were given for denying women such relief from the penalties of the law as was freely extended to men, as are given to-day for refusing her the liberty, emoluments, and benefits that are freely accorded to the most imbecile little theological student who is educated by the needle of a sister and supported by money wrung from the fears of shop or factory girls, to whom he paints the terrors of hell, and freely threatens the same to those who disobey him. Salvation comes high, but no preacher ever gets so poor that he cannot distribute hell free of charge to the multitude without the least diminution of his stock-in-trade.
I should think that an orthodox pulpit would be about the last place a self-respecting woman would wish to fill; but I am glad, since there are some who do so wish, that the issue has again been forced upon the Church, and that in 1884, true to her history, she was again compelled to acknowledge herself a respecter of persons, a degrader of women, and a clog to progress and individual liberty, equality, and conscience.
I am glad that women have recently forced the Methodist and Presbyterian Churches to declare their principles of class preference and partial legislation. I am glad that in 1884 these Churches were compelled to say in effect to women, so that the world could hear: "You are not and you never can be our equals. We are holy. You are unclean. We will hold you back and down to the ancient level we made for you just as long as the life is in us; and if you ever receive recognition as a human being, it must be at the hands of those who defy the Church and hate creeds that are not big enough to go all round. Our creeds are only large enough to give each sex half. But we won't be stingy, we only want our share. You are entirely welcome to all the degradation here and all the damnation hereafter; and any man who attempts to deprive you of these blessings is a heretic and a sinner. Let us pray."
In dealing with this point the humor of the situation is too plain to require comment, and I need only cite a few facts in order to place the beautiful little fiction where it belongs.*
* See Appendix T.
As to general education it is well known that the Church has fought investigation and persecuted science. From the third century to Bruno, and from Bruno to Darwin and Tyndall there is an unbroken chain of evidence as to her position in these matters and her opposition to the diffusion of knowledge. When, however, it became impossible for her to resist the demand of the people for education; when she could no longer retard liberty and prevent the recognition of individual rights; then she modestly demanded the right to do the teaching herself and to control its extent and scope.*
With a brain stultified by faith** she proposed to regulate investigations in which the habit of faith would necessarily prove fatal to the discovery of truth.*** She proposed to teach nothing but the dead languages and theology, and to confine knowledge to these fields, and she succeeded for many generations in so doing. Every time she found a man who had discovered something, or who had a theory he was trying to test by some little scientific investigations, she cried "heretic" and suppressed that man. She stuck to the dead languages, and the only thing she is not afraid of to-day is something dead. Any other kind of knowledge is a dangerous acquaintance for her to make. ****
If you meet a clergyman to-day who has devoted his time to the dead languages you need not be afraid that he is a heretic; but if he is studying the sciences, arts, literature, and history of the living world in earnest you can get your fagot ready. His orthodoxy is a dead doxy. It is only a question of time and bravery when he will swear off.*****
* See Appendix G, 1-4.** See Appendix U.*** See Clifford's "Scientific Basis of Morals," p. 25**** See Morley's "Diderot," p. 190.
In the Church schools and "universities" to-day it is quite pathetic to hear the professors wrestle with geology and Genesis, and cut their astronomy to fit Joshua. If in one of these institutions for the petrifaction of the human mind there is a teacher who is either not nimble enough to escape the conclusions of a bright pupil or too honest to try, he is at once found to be "incompetent as an instructor," and is dropped from the faculty. I know one case where it took twenty years to discover that a professor was not able to teach geology—and it took a heresy-hunter with a Bible to do it then.
But it is the claim of the Church in regard to the education of women with which I have to do here.
Women in Greece and Rome under Pagan rule had become learned and influential to an unparalleled degree.*
The early Fathers of the Church found women thirsty for knowledge and eager for opportunities to learn. They thereupon set about making it disreputable for a woman to know anything,** and in order to clinch their prohibition the Church asserted that woman was unable to learn, had not the mental capacity,*** was created without mental power and for purely physical purposes.
* See Lecky, Milman, Diderot, Morley, Christian, and others.** "In the fourth century we find that holy men in councilgravely argued the question, and that too with abundantconfidence in their ability and power to decide the wholematter: 'Ought women to be called human beings?' A wiseand pious father in the Church, after deliberating solemnlyand long on the vexed question of women, finally concluded:'The female sex is not a fault in itself, but a fact innature for which women themselves are not to blame;' but hegraciously cherished the opinion that women will bepermitted to rise as men, at the resurrection. A fewcenturies later the masculine mind underwent great agitationover the question: 'Would it be consistent with the dutiesand uses of women for them to learn the alphabet?' And inAmerica, after Bridget Gaffort had donated the first plot ofground for a public school, girls were still denied theadvantages of such schools. The questions—'Shall women beallowed to enter colleges?' and 'Shall they be admittedinto the professions?' have been as hotly contested as hasbeen the question of their humanity."—Gamble.*** "There existed at the same time in this celebrated city aclass of women, the glory of whose intellectual brilliancystill survives; and when Alcibiades drew around him thefirst philosophers and statesmen of Greece, 'it was a virtueto applaud Aspasia;' of whom it has been said that shelectured publicly on rhetoric and philosophy with suchability that Socrates and Alcibiades gathered wisdom fromher lips, and so marked was her genius for statesmanshipthat Pericles afterward married her and allowed her togovern Athens, then at the height of its glory and power.Numerous examples might be cited in which Athenian womenrendered material aid to the state."—Gamble.
It was maintained that her "sphere" was clearly defined, and that it was purely and solely an animal one; and worst of all it was stoutly asserted that her greatest crime had always been a desire for wisdom, and that it was this desire which brought the penalty of labor and death into this world.*
With such a belief it is hardly strange that the education of girls was looked upon as a crime; and with such a record it is almost incredible effrontery that enables the Church to-day to claim credit for the education of women,** If she were to educate every woman living, free of charge, in every branch of known knowledge, she could not repay woman for what she has deprived her of in the past, or efface the indignity she has already offered.***
* See Morley's "Diderot," p. 76; Lea's "SacerdotalCelibacy;" Lecky's "European Morals."** See Appendix H, 1 to 4.*** Lecky, "European Morals," p. 310.
A prominent clergyman of the Church of England, who was recently much honored in this country, lately said, in a sermon to women: "There are those who think a woman can be taught logic. This is a mistake. Men are logical, women are not." He was too modest to give his proofs. It seemed to me strange that he did not mention the doctrines of the trinity and vicarious atonement, or a few of the miracles, as the result of logic in the masculine mind. And I could not help thinking at the time that a man whose mental furniture was chiefly composed of the thirty-nine articles and the Westminster Catechism would naturally be a profound authority on logic. An orthodox preacher talking about logic is a sight to arouse the compassion of a demon. Next to the natural sciences, logic can give the Church the colic quicker than any other kind of a green apple. And so it is not strange that the clergy should be afraid that it would disagree with the more delicate constitution of a woman. They always did maintain that any diet that was a trifle too heavy for them couldn't be digested by anybody else; and they would be perfectly right in their supposition if intellectual dyspepsia or softening of the brain were contagious.
The "sphere" of no other creature is wholly determined and bounded byone physicalcharacteristic or capacity. To every other creature is conceded without question the right to use more than one talent.
But the Fathers decided in holy and solemn council that it would be "unbecoming" for a woman to learn the alphabet, and that she could have no possible use for such information. They said that she would be a better mother without distracting her dear little brain with the a, b, c's, and that therefore she should not learn them. They also decided that she who was so far lost to modesty as to become acquainted with the multiplication table "was an unfit associate for our wives and mothers." There was something wrong with such a woman. She was either a "witch" or else she was "married to the devil."
That is the way the Church encouraged education for women. This was done, the holy Fathers said, to "protect women from the awful temptations of life to which the Lord in his infinite wisdom had subjected man." They had too much respect for their wives and mothers to permit them to come in contact with the wickedness of long division or cube root, and they hoped while life lasted that no man would be so negligent of duty as to allow his sister to soil her pure mind with conic sections.
Well, in time there were a few women brave enough, and a few men honorable and moral enough, to set aside the letter of this prohibition; but much of its spirit still blossoms in all its splendor in Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and various other institutions of learning, where women are either not permitted to enter at all or are required to learn and accomplish unaided that which it takes a large faculty of instructors and every known or obtainable educational device (together with future business stimulus) to enable the young men to do the same thing!
The Fathers said, in effect, "It was through woman wanting to know something that sin came into this world; therefore let her hereafter want to know nothing." They taught that a desire for knowledge on the part of woman was the greatest crime ever committed on this earth, and that it so enraged God that he punished it by death and by every curse known to man. When it was pointed out that animals had lived anddiedon this earth long before man could have lived, they said that God knew Adam was going to live and Eve was going to sin, so hemade death retroactivebecause Adam would represent all animals when he should be created!
All this was thought and done and taught in order to agree with the silly story of the "fall of man in the Garden of Eden," which every one acquainted with the simple rudiments of science or the history of the races knows to be a childish legend of an undeveloped people. Instead of a "fall" from perfect beginnings, there has been and is a constant rise in the moral as well as in the mental and physical conditions of man. The type is higher, the race nobler and nearer perfection than it ever was before; and the stories of our Bible are the same as those of all other Bibles, simply the effort of ignorant or imaginative men to account for the origin and destiny of things of which they had no accurate knowledge.*
* One of the simplest and most interesting explanations ofthis latter point will be found in "The Childhood ofReligions," by Edward Clodd, F.R.A.S., where the Christianreader may be surprised to find that the "ten-commandment"idea (with a number of them which apply to general morals,as "Thou shalt not kill," etc.) is not confined to ourBible, but is found also in the Buddhist Bible in the sameform; that the "golden rule" was given by Confucius 500years before Christ; and that Christianity, when taken as itshould be with the other great religions and examined in thesame way, presents no problem, no claim, and no proofs whichare not found in equal strength in one or more of the otherforms of faith. In the matters of morality, miracles, andpower to attract and "comfort" multitudes of people, itranks neither first nor last. It is simply one of several,and in no essential matter is it different from them.
St. Paul said, "If they [women] will learnanything, let them ask their husbands at home;" and the colossal ignorance of most women would seem to indicate that they have obeyed the command to the letter. But fortunately for women the civilization of freedom has outgrown St. Paul as it has the dictates of the Church, and one by one the doors of information,and hence the doors to honest labor, have been opened, and the possibility of living with dignity and honor has replaced the forced degradation of the days when the power of the Church enabled it to reduce women to the animal existence it so long forced upon her.
So long as the Church allowed woman but one avenue of support, so long did it force her to use that single means of livelihood. So long as it made her believe that she could bring to this world nothing of value but her capacity to minister to the lower animal wants of man, so long did it force upon her that single alternative—or starvation.
So long as it is able to make multitudes of women believe themselves of value for but one purpose, just that long will it continue to insure the degradation of many of those women who are helpless, or weak, or loving, or ignorant of the motives of those in whose power they are. So long as it teaches woman that she can repay her debt to the world in but one way, so long will it promote commerce in vice and revenue in shame.
Every man is taught that he can repay his debt to this world in many ways. He has open to him many avenues of happiness, many paths to honorable employment. If he fails in one there is still hope. If he misses supreme happiness in marriage he has still left ambition, labor, study, fame; if the one failure overtakes him, no matter how sad, he still can turn aside and find, if not joy, at least occupation and rest.
But the Church has always taught woman that there is but one "sphere," one hope, one occupation, one life for her. If she fails in that, what wonder that with broken hope comes broken virtue or despair? Every woman who has fallen or lost her way has been previously taught by the Church that she had and has but one resource; that there is open to her in life but one path; that whether that path be legally crooked or straight, she was created for but one purpose; thatman is to decide for her what that purpose is; and that she must under no circumstances set her own judgment up against his.
The legitimate fruits of such an education are too horribly apparent to need explanation. Every fallen woman is a perpetual monument to the infamy of a religion and a social custom that narrow her life to the possibilities of but one function, and provide her no escape—a system that trains her to depend wholly on one physical characteristic of her being, and to neglect all else.
That system teaches her that her mind is to be of but slight use to her; that her hands may not learn the cunning of a trade nor her brain the bearings of a profession; that mentally she is nothing; and that physically she is worse than nothing only in so far as she may minister to one appetite. I hold that the most legitimate outcome of such an education is to be found in the class that makes merchandise of all that woman is taught that she possesses that is of worth to herself or to this world. No system could be more perfectly devised to accomplish this purpose.*
* See Lea's "Sacerdotal Celibacy."
We are told that women owe honorable marriage to Christianity;* that the more beautiful and tender relations of husband and wife find their root there; that Christianity protects and elevates the mother as no other law or religion ever has. Let us see.
* See Appendix I, 1-2.
On this subject I find in Maine's "Ancient Law" these facts:
"Although women had been objects of barter and sale,according to barbaric usages, between their male relatives,the later Roman [Pagan] law having assumed,on the theoryof Natural Law, the equality of the sexes, control of thepersonof women was quite obsolete when Christianity wasborn. Her situation had become one of great personal libertyand proprietary independence, even when married, and thearbitrary power over her of her male relations, or herguardian, was reduced to a nullity, while the form ofmarriage conferred on the husband no superiority."Thus as a daughter and as a wife had she grown to be honoredand recognized as an equal under Pagan rule."But Christianity tended from the first to narrow thisremarkable liberty....The latest Roman [Pagan] law,sofar as touched by the constitutions of the Christianemperors, bears marks of reaction against these greatliberal doctrines."—Maine.And again began the sale of women. Christianity held her asunclean and in all respects inferior; and "during the erawhich begins modern history the women of dominant races areseen everywhere under various forms of archaic guardianship,andthe husband pays a money price to her male relationsfor her. The prevalent state ofreligioussentiment mayexplain why it is thatmodernjurisprudence has absorbedamong its rudimentsmuch more than usual of those rules[archaic]concerning the position of women which belongpeculiarly to an imperfect civilization."—Ibid.
Thus it will be seen that from the first, and extending down to the present, the Church did all she could to cast woman back into the night of the race from which in a great measure she had been rescued through the ages when Natural Law and not "revelation" was the guide of man. The laws which the Church found liberal and just toward women it discarded, and it searched back in the ages of night for such as it saw fit to re-enact for her. Of this Maine says: "The husband now draws to himself the power which formerly belonged to his wife's male relatives, the only difference being that he no longer pays anything for the privilege."
As Christians grew economical wives came cheaper than formerly, and it became a dogma that wives were not worth much anyhow, and then, too, it enabled persons of limited means to have more of them. Of a somewhat later date Maine says: "At this point heavy disabilities begin to be imposed upon wives."
That was to make marriage honorable and attractive, no doubt, and, says Maine: "It was very long before the subordination entailed on women by marriage was sensibly diminished." And what diminution it received came from men who fought against Church law.*
*See Lecky, Maine, Lea, Milman, Christian, Blackstone,Morley, and others for ample proof of this fact
It was only the crumbs of liberty, honor, and justice extorted by men who fought the Church on behalf of wives, that lightened their most oppressive burdens. It was true then, and it is true to-day, that women owe what justice and freedom and power they possess to the fact that the best and clearest-headed men are more honorable than our religion, and that they have invited Moses and St. Paul to take a back seat Moses has complied, and St. Paul is half-way down the aisle.
Some of the clergy now explain that although Paul may have written certain things inimical to women, he did notmeanthem, so it is all right. Such passages as 1 Cor. xi. 3-9; xiv. 34-35; and Eph. v. 22-24, are now explained to be intended in a purely Pickwickian sense; and a Rev. Mr. Boyd, of St. Louis, has even gone so far as to produce the doughty apostle before a woman-suffrage society, as on their side of that argument. This second conversion of St. Paul impresses one as even more remarkable than his first. It took an "angel of God" to show him the error of his ways in Ephesus, but one little Baptist preacher did it this time—all by himself. Truly St. Paul is getting easier to deal with than he used to be.
But to resume, Maine, in tracing the amalgamation of the later Roman (Pagan) law with the archaic laws of a lower civilization (the result of which was Christian law), shows that the Church, while it chose the Roman laws, which had arrived at so high a state, for others,retained for women, and particularly for wives, the least favorableof the Roman, eked out with the archaicPatria Potestasand the more degrading provisions of the earlier civilizations. Maine reluctantly says that the jurisconsults of the day contended for better laws for wives, but that the Church prevailed in most instances, and established the more oppressive ones.
With certain of these laws—the worst ones—I cannot deal here for obvious reasons; but a few of them I may be permitted to give without offence to the modesty of any one.
Blackstone says: "By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legalexistence of the woman is suspendedduring the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband. The husband becomes herbaron or lord—she hisservant. Upon this principle of the union of person in husband and wife depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities they acquire by marriage."
That is to say the husband acquires all the rights, and the wife all the disabilities; and the Church wishing to be fair has made the latter as many as possible.
"And therefore," continues Blackstone, "it is also generally true, that all compacts made between husband and wife,when single, are voided by the intermarriage." The working of this principle has been so often illustrated as to render comment unnecessary. A wife retains no rights which her husband is bound to respect, no matter how solemn the compact before marriage, nor what her belief in its strength might have been.
Fortunately for women, happily for wives, men are more decent than their religion; and the law of custom and public opinion has largely outgrown this enactment of the Church, made when she had the power to thus degrade women and brutalize men.
"If the wife be injured inher person or her property she can bring no action for redresswithout her husband's concurrenceand in his name," and on the basis of loss ofher servicesto himas a servant. "But in criminal prosecutions, it is true, the wife may be indicted and punished separately." *
* Blackstone.
In the case of punishment the Church was entirely willing to give the devil his due. It had no ambition to deprive women of any indictments and punishments that were to be had. In this case, although the husband and wife were one, she was that one. Where privileges or property-rights were to be considered, he was the "one." Such grand reversible doctrines were always on tap with the clergy, and their barrel was always full. Truly, wives do owe much to the Church.
Some of the provisions of these laws have, of late years, been modified by the efforts of men who were pronounced "infidels, destroyers of the Bible, the home, and the dignity of women," aided by women whom the orthodox deride as "strong—minded, ill-balanced, coarse, impious," etc., etc.,ad infinitum, ad nauseam. A strong mind, whether in man or woman, has always been to the clergy as a red rag to a bull.
"A woman may make a will,with the assent of her husband, by way of appointment of herpersonalproperty.She cannot even with his consent devise lands.... Although our law in general considers a man and wife as one person, yet there aresome instances where she is considered separately as his inferior," and for that trip only.
As I remarked before when it comes to penalties she is welcome to the whole lot.
"She may not make a deed."
"A man may administer moderate correction to his wife."
"These are the chief legal effects of marriage. Even the disabilities of the wife," Blackstone naively remarks, "are for the most partintended for her protection; so great a favorite is the female sex of the laws of England!"
I should think that if this latter point were not quite clear to a woman, "moderate correction" might convince her that she was quite an unreasonable favorite—beyond her most eager desires. Where the Pagan law recognized her as the equal of her husband, the Church discarded that law, and based the Canon Law upon an archaic invention.
Where Maine speaks of the later growth of Pagan law and of Christian influence upon it, he says: "But the chapter of law relating to married women was for the most part read by the light, not of Roman [or Pagan] but of Canon [or Church] Law,which in no one particular departs so widely from the [improved] spirit of the secular jurisprudence as in the view it takes of the relations created by marriage. This was in part inevitable,since no society which possesses any tincture of Christian institutions is likely to restore to married women the personal liberty conferred on them by the middle Roman law."
Women who support the clergy with one hand, and hold out the other for the ballot; who one day express indignation at the refusal to them of human recognition, and the next day intone the creeds, will have to learn that there is nothing which has so successfully stood, and still so powerfully stands, in the way of the individual liberty, human rights, and dignity of wives, as the Church which they support.
Blackstone says: "In times of popery a greatvarietyof impediments to marriage were made, which impediments might, however, bebought off with money."
You could, for instance, buy a more distant relationship to your future wife for so much cash down to the Church. If your inamorata were your first cousin, you could remove her several degrees with five hundred dollars, and make her no relation at all for a little more. Such little sleight-of-hand performances are as nothing to a well-trained clergyman. Slip a check into one hand, and a request to marry your aunt into the other, let a clergyman shake them up in the coffers of the Church, and when one comes out gold, the other will appear as a blushing bride not even related to her own father, and not more than third cousin to herself.
Of the claim made by the early Christian Fathers, that it was because of the mental inferiority and incapacity of women that the more unjust and binding laws were enacted for them, thus doing all they could to create and intensify by law the incapacity which they asserted was imposed by God, Maine says: "But the proprietary disabilities of married femalesstand on quite a different basis from personal incapacity, and it is by the tendency of their doctrines to keep alive and consolidate the former, that the expositors of theCanon Law have deeply injured civilization."
He adds that there are many evidences of a struggle betweensecular principles in favor of justice for wives, andecclesiastical principles against it, "but the Canon Law nearly everywhere prevailed. The systems which areleast indulgentto married women are invariably those which have followed theCanon Law exclusively.... It enforced the complete legal subjection of wives."
Lecky says: "Fierce invectives against the sex form a conspicuous and grotesque portion of the writings of the Fathers. Woman was represented as the door of hell, as the mother of all human ills. She should be ashamed at the very thought that she is a woman.... Women were even forbidden, in the sixth century, on account of their impurity, to receive the Eucharist into their naked hands. Their essentially subordinate position was continually maintained. This teaching in part determined the principles of legislation concerning the sex.* The Pagan laws during the empire had been continuallyrepealing the old disabilitiesof women, and the legislative movement in their favor continued with unabated force from Constantine to Justinian, and appeared also in some of the early laws of the barbarians.But in the whole feudal [Christian] legislation women were placed in a much lower legal position than in the Pagan empire."
* See Appendix J.
And he adds that the French revolutionists (the infidel party) established better laws for women, "and initiated a great reformation of both law and opinion,which sooner or later must traverse the world." And these reformations, being in Christendom, will be calmly claimed in the future, as in the present, as due to the beneficent influence of the Church. The Church always belongs to the conservative party, but after a good thing is established in despite of her, she says: "Just see what I have done! 'See what a good boy am I!"'
Not many years ago a few great-souled men who were "heretics" got a glimpse of a principle which has electrified the world. They said that individual liberty is a universal right; they maintained that humanity is a unit, with interests and aims indivisible, and that liberty to use to the utmost advantage all natural abilities cannot be denied one-half of the race without crippling both. A few even went so far as to suggest that the assumption of the inferiority of women, and the imposition of disabilities upon them, under the claim of divine authority, is the greatest crime in the great calendar of crime for which the Church has yet to render a reckoning to humanity.
To one who reads the history of Canon Law, it is not strange that Christian Judges still decide that women are "incompetent to practice law," and that they should not be allowed to study it. A woman well versed in the history of ancient and modern law might easily be an uncomfortable advocate for such a judge to face. He would probably feel the need of an umbrella.
It is not strange that Columbia College, with its corps of clergymen, "fails to see the propriety" of opening its doors to women. The few clergymen who have for some little time past taken the side of fair-play in this and like matters have simply deserted their colors and come over to the side they are worldly-wise enough to see is to be the side of the future. When it comes to diplomacy the Church is always on deck in time to gather in the spoils; but she stays safely below during the engagement, and simply holds back and anchors firm until she sees which way it is likely to end.
The moment there is an understanding on the part of women of what they owe to Church Law, that moment will educational clerical monopolists, such as the champion anchor of Columbia, be compelled to earn an honest living in some honest business pertaining to this world. It will be a great day for women when they refuse to longer support these pretenders to divine knowledge, who are willing, at so much a head, to tell what they do not know at the expense of the pale, tired needlewoman, who is in want of almost every comfort that money can buy in this world, together with the surplus gold of the fashionable devotees who minister to the vanity of the clergy, and give to the coffers of the Church that which would save thousands of young girls from degradation and crime, and put the roses of health on the cheek of innocence.
Every dollar that is paid to support the Church is paid to degrade a woman. Every collection that is made to spread "revelation" is used to suppress enlightenment and retard civilization. Every dollar that is invested in "another world" is a dollar diverted from useful purposes in this. Every hour that is spent mooning about "heaven" is that much time taken from needed labor here.
If our energies were wanted in another world we should most likely be in another world. Since we are in this one it is a pretty strong hint that we are expected to attend to business right here. We can't do justice to two worlds at the same time; and since we are assured that we shall have the whole of eternity to arrange matters in the next one, it leaves very little time by comparison to devote to our duties in this.
There we are to have nothing to do but sing and be happy—twang a harp and smile.
Here we have pain to alleviate, ignorance to dispel, innocence to protect, disease to master, and crime to restrain and prevent. Here we have the helpless to shield and guard and protect. Here we have homes to make happy, the hearts of husbands and wives to make glad, the light of love and trust to kindle in the eyes of children. Here is old age to cheer and console. Here are orphans to educate and protect, widows to comfort, and oppression to uproot.
There—nothing to do but look after yourself and manage your harp; nobody to help—all will be perfect; nothing to learn—all will be wise; no hearts to cheer—all will be happy. All that a mother will have to do if she gets a little tired practicing on her lyre and feels gloomy will be to just take a good look over the wall, and photograph on her eyes the picture of her husband and children freshly dipped in oil and put on the griddle, and she will come back to business perfectly satisfied, take up her song where she left off, and praise the Lamb for his infinite mercy. All eternity to learn how to fly round in a robe and keep time with the orchestra! Why a deaf man could learn to do that in fifty or sixty years, and then have all the rest of the time to spare.
We are here such a little while, there is so much to learn, there is so much to do, there is so much toundo, that no man can afford to waste his time on an infinite future of time, space, and leisure. Men cannot afford to lose your best energies. "God" can get on very well without them. Time is short, and needs are pressing; and this thing you know—you can keep busy doing good right here. If there is a hereafter, could there be a better preparation for it than that?
After all that has preceded this page I need hardly do more with this count of the last claim of "Theological Fiction" than simply say, if the Bible is woman's best friend, then the clergy, without authority and in violation of the precepts of their own guide, have been her worst enemy, either through malice or ignorance; in either of which cases they are and have always been unfit to dictate, to lead opinion, or to receive a following as reliable guides for this world or the next.
If they have been so ignorant or so malicious for nearly nineteen hundred years as to thus systematically misconstrue their own authority—their own "revelation"—to the constant disadvantage of women (and the consequent enfeeblement of the race), surely they can claim no respect for their opinions and no confidence in their divine calling.* In trying to shield the Bible the clergy simply convict themselves.**