39. Women as Christians
The glad tidings preached by Christ were obviously highly
favourable to women. He lifted them to equality before the Lord
when their very possession of souls was still doubted by the majority
of rival theologians. Moreover, He esteemed them socially and set
value upon their sagacity, and one of the most disdained of their
sex, a lady formerly in public life, was among His regular advisers.
Mariolatry is thus by no means the invention of the mediaeval
popes, as Protestant theologians would have us believe. On the
contrary, it is plainly discernible in the Four Gospels. What the
mediaeval popes actually invented (or, to be precise, reinvented, for
they simply borrowed the elements of it from St. Paul) was the
doctrine of women's inferiority, the precise opposite of the thing
credited to them. Committed, for sound reasons of discipline, to the
celibacy of the clergy, they had to support it by depicting all traffic
with women in the light of a hazardous and ignominious business.
The result was the deliberate organization and development of the
theory of female triviality, lack of
responsibility and general
looseness of mind. Woman became a sort of devil, but without the
admired intelligence of the regular demons. The appearance of
women saints, however, offered a constant and embarrassing
criticism of this idiotic doctrine. If occasional women were fit to sit
upon the right hand of God--and they were often proving it, and
forcing the church to acknowledge it--then surely all women could
not be as bad as the books made them out. There thus arose the
concept of the angelic woman, the natural vestal; we see her at full
length in the romances of mediaeval chivalry. What emerged in the
end was a sort of double doctrine, first that women were devils and
secondly that they were angels. This preposterous dualism has
merged, as we have seen, into a compromise dogma in modern
times. By that dogma it is held, on the one hand, that women are
unintelligent and immoral, and on the other hand, that they are free
from all those weaknesses of the flesh which distinguish men. This,
roughly speaking, is the notion of the average male numskull today.
Christianity has thus both libelled women and flattered them, but
with the weight always on the
side of the libel. It is therefore
at bottom, their enemy, as the religion of Christ, now wholly extinct,
was their friend. And as they gradually throw off the shackles that
have bound them for a thousand years they show appreciation of the
fact. Women, indeed, are not naturally religious, and they are
growing less and less religious as year chases year. Their ordinary
devotion has little if any pious exaltation in it; it is a routine practice,
force on them by the masculine notion that an appearance of
holiness is proper to their lowly station, and a masculine feeling that
church-going somehow keeps them in order, and out of doings that
would be less reassuring. When they exhibit any genuine religious
fervour, its sexual character is usually so obvious that even the
majority of men are cognizant of it. Women never go flocking
ecstatically to a church in which the agent of God in the pulpit is an
elderly asthmatic with a watchful wife. When one finds them driven
to frenzies by the merits of the saints, and weeping over the sorrows
of the heathen, and rushing out to haul the whole vicinage up to
grace, and spending hours on their knees in hysterical abasement
before the heavenly throne,
it is quite safe to assume, even
without an actual visit, that the ecclesiastic who has worked the
miracle is a fair and toothsome fellow, and a good deal more
aphrodisiacal than learned. All the great preachers to women in
modern times have been men of suave and ingratiating habit, and
the great majority of them, from Henry Ward Beecher up and
down, have been taken, soon or late, in transactions far more
suitable to the boudoir than to the footstool of the Almighty. Their
famous killings have always been made among the silliest sort of
women--the sort, in brief, who fall so short of the normal acumen of
their sex that they are bemused by mere beauty in men.
Such women are in a minority, and so the sex shows a good deal
fewer religious enthusiasts per mille than the sex of sentiment and
belief. Attending, several years ago, the gladiatorial shows of the
Rev. Dr. Billy Sunday, the celebrated American pulpit-clown, I was
constantly struck by the great preponderance of males in the pen
devoted to the saved. Men of all ages and in enormous numbers
came swarming to the altar, loudly bawling for help against their
sins, but the women were anything
but numerous, and the few
who appeared were chiefly either chlorotic adolescents or pathetic
old
Saufschwestern. For six nights running I sat directly beneath the
gifted exhorter without seeing a single female convert of what
statisticians call the child-bearing age--that is, the age of maximum
intelligence and charm. Among the male simpletons bagged by his
yells during this time were the president of a railroad, half a dozen
rich bankers and merchants, and the former governor of an
American state. But not a woman of comparable position or
dignity. Not a woman that any self-respecting bachelor would care
to chuck under the chin.
This cynical view of religious emotionalism, and with it of the whole
stock of ecclesiastical balderdash, is probably responsible, at least in
part, for the reluctance of women to enter upon the sacerdotal
career. In those Christian sects which still bar them from the
pulpit--usually on the imperfectly concealed ground that they are not
equal to its alleged demands upon the morals and the intellect--one
never hears of them protesting against the prohibition; they are quite
content to leave the degrading imposture to men, who are better
fitted for
it by talent and conscience. And in those baroque
sects, chiefly American, which admit them they show no eagerness
to put on the stole and chasuble. When the first clergywoman
appeared in the United States, it was predicted by alarmists that men
would be driven out of the pulpit by the new competition. Nothing
of the sort has occurred, nor is it in prospect. The whole corps of
female divines in the country might be herded into one small room.
Women, when literate at all, are far too intelligent to make effective
ecclesiastics. Their sharp sense of reality is in endless opposition to
the whole sacerdotal masquerade, and their cynical humour stands
against the snorting that is inseparable from pulpit oratory.
Those women who enter upon the religious life are almost
invariably moved by some motive distinct from mere pious
inflammation. It is a commonplace, indeed, that, in Catholic
countries, girls are driven into convents by economic considerations
or by disasters of amour far oftener than they are drawn there by the
hope of heaven. Read the lives of the female saints, and you will
see how many of them tried marriage and failed at it before ever
they
turned to religion. In Protestant lands very few women
adopt it as a profession at all, and among the few a secular impulse
is almost always visible. The girl who is suddenly overcome by a
desire to minister to the heathen in foreign lands is nearly invariably
found, on inspection, to be a girl harbouring a theory that it would
be agreeable to marry some heroic missionary. In point of fact, she
duly marries him. At home, perhaps, she has found it impossible to
get a husband, but in the remoter marches of China, Senegal and
Somaliland, with no white competition present, it is equally
impossible to fail.
