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EXTRA SERIES.
With an Introduction by
LADY FLORENCE DIXIE
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HE RELIGION OF
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WATTS & CO.,
17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
~of this Series will be “ The Fundamental Principles of the Positive
Philosophy,” being two chapters from Auguste Comte
��JÌATONALSÈCULARSOGETY
THE RELIGION OF WOMAN
An Historical Study
BY
JOSEPH McCABE
(Author of “Twelve Years in a Monastery,” “Peter Abelard)' etc.)
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LADY FLORENCE DIXIE
[issued for the
rationalist press association, limited]
WATTS & CO.,
17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.C.
1905
��fig
CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction -
5.
CHAPTER I.
Woman
and the
Churches -
il
CHAPTER II.
The Woman of Pagan Culture
CHAPTER III.
Woman
Woman
in the
in the
CHAPTER IV.
Ages
-
26
Early Christian Teaching
-
35
Reformation -----
44
Middle
-
-
CHAPTER V.
The Effect
of the
CHAPTER VI.
The Churches
and the
The Religious Instinct
Modern Woman Movement
-
CHAPTER VII.
------
CHAPTER VIII.
-
The Training of Children -
-
50
59
66
CHAPTER IX.
Where Do We Stand in Religion ?
76
CHAPTER X.
The Humanism
of
To-morrow
84
CHAPTER XI.
An Appeal
92
�TO
GEORGE ANDERSON, Esq.,
WHOSE ACTIVE SYMPATHY
HAS DONE SO MUCH
FOR THIS
Cause.
�INTRODUCTION
if A slave within the Land of Bondage, kneeling, person is denied her. Body and soul is
Bows her bent form beneath the despot’s heel. she the property of others. She has no
Bathetic picture on the landscape stealing,
right in. herself.
It burns into my heart and makes me feel
Here and there a slave has raised her
That freedom must be won. For woe or weal
head and feebly questioned the justice
I couch my lance to press the tyrant down.
Poor slave, rise up ! Thou shalt no longer of such bondage. Each and all have
kneel.
been struck down and dishonoured.
Belioltl the seed of Liberty zï sown ;
Then others have made a dash for
Come reap with me the golden harvest when
freedom, and the lash has mercilessly
’tis mown.”
scourged them in return. Yet have they
The Wanderings of Izra.”
I stand on the mountain tops, above
the misty clouds, upon the far-extending
range of free-born thought, and, peering
through those clouds, I behold below the
land of bondage whereon woman, as a
subjected slave, yields reverence to the
despotic taskmaster who has manacled
her. Beneath his sway her form is bent,
and her head is bowed to the earth.
Only in supplication are her dim eyes
raised, and then they rest upon the
tyrant, who oppresses her, with reverent
homage and adoration. In him she
sees her master and her lord. His word
is omnipotent, his fiats law, his com
mands sacred, because, in her eyes, his
mission is divine. He is the mouth
piece of the Maker of all things, the
Creator of heaven and earth, and there
fore cannot err or order ill, for perfection
does no. wrong.
Believing this, woman submits and
acquiesces in her slavery. She is a helot ;
She has no voice in the framing of law,
no right to assume governing powers, no
tepresentation in the councils of the
irorld. Even possession of her own
gone down, protesting as they fell, and
denouncing the tyranny of the task
master who tortured them and oppressed
their manacled sisters.
What is this taskmaster ?
Let me cry his name to the four winds
of heaven and over every part of the
earth. The taskmaster who has retarded
the progress and development of
woman, who has sealed upon her fetters
of iron, who has withheld from her the
heritage of life—z>., freedom—and who
has subjected her to the grinding
despotism of selfishness and falsehood,
by whom she has been disinherited—is
that cruel despot, that man-made idol,
that wily serpent of intrigue and insinua
tion, Superstitious Religion.
Note that I say Superstitious Religion
—not Religion. This latter, as I under*
stand it, is a system of morality built
upon the strong foundations of ordinary
common sense; whereas Superstitious
Religion is a system of faith in the
products of imagination, belief in the
miraculous, and credence in the unnatural
—a worship of man-made fiats, which have
been declared, without any substantiating
�6
INTRODUCTION
proofs, to be of divine origin. Divine
origin! In the name of all that is
truthful, who and what is God? Dare
we, if we presume to think, uphold the
analysis of this mighty mystery which
man, in the early stages of his ignorance,
has made? A thousand times, No!
If God there be, the essence of such a
being is beyond our comprehension,
beyond our powers of realisation. Let
us be honest and acknowledge this, and
then very clearly we shall perceive that
the Supreme Power we worship has been
clothed by man in his own image and
likeness, and endowed with many of the
foibles and follies of the human being.
All the gods of superstition are man
made and the products of ignorance.
As long as ignorance prevails, imagina
tion satisfies ; but the moment the light
of Science irradiates the dark corners of
the mind, then Truth alone can satisfy its
cravings, and where this cannot penetrate
it reverently exclaims: “We do not
know.”
Every superstitious religion, more or
less, enslaves woman, and proclaims
her inferiority to man. Of these strange
products of man’s early ignorance and
selfishness there are none more potent
than the one emanating from Bible pre
cept and built on the foundations of its
Old and New Testaments. I refer to
Christianity. This religion dominates
many nations of the earth, and, wherever
it prevails, the laws governing woman are
in accordance with Bible precepts.
Here are a few of these latter
“ I suffer not the woman to teach nor
usurp authority over the man, but to be
in silence.”
“Wives, submit yourselves to your
husbands as unto the Lord.”
“ Thy desire shall be to thy husband,
and he shall rule over thee.”
“ She was the first in the transgression,
therefore keep her in subjection.”
So spoke, in this latter sentence,
Christianity’s firmest friend and woman’s
bitterest foe.
To those twelve words
she owes much of her degradation. To
the religion which enforces and upholds
them she bows in meek and humble
submission. It decrees and ordains her
inferiority, it commands her obedience,
it enforces her adoration, and it denies
her the birthright of-existence—liberty.
Out on the falsehood that dares to
assert that woman’s gradual emancipa
tion from degradation has been brought
about by the influence of Christianity.
The chapters that follow this introduc
tion will give clear proof that, far from
this being the case, Christianity found
her, under the protection of pagan
civilisation, rising into honour and
power, and that it forthwith pushed her
back into the abyss of barbaric serfdom,
and retarded for hundreds of years any
attempt on her part to rise again. Pick
me out, through the past nineteen
hundred years, one single cleric who has
ever raised his voice on behalf of the
rights of that sex to which his mother
belonged. Name to me one single pope,
or ecclesiastic of either Catholic or
Protestant denomination, who has con
demned the Bible’s command that
woman should be held in bondage, or
who has spoken out on her behalf, and
declared that man’s rights are hers, and
that the only possible saviour of man
kind is woman free. I ask the impos
sible, for, since Christianity was estab
lished, no cleric has so spoken. It is
the business of Bibleites to obstruct the
revolt of the female, and to prevent, if
possible, the forces of Evolution and
Civilisation from giving woman her
freedom.
�INTRODUCTION
For what she has obtained of such
woman is beholden to those two agencies.
No one pretends that the first of these
owes anything to Christianity, while the
second is the outcome of mental deve
lopment, in which freedom of thought
has been the guiding factor. Science
owes nothing to Christianity, which has
fought against it tooth and nail; yet to
scientific reasoning, and not to Bible
reasoning, woman must turn to prove
her earth-born rights. By religion and
ignorance these rights are condemned
and ridiculed. By the reasonings of
science they are admitted and upheld.
The noblest champions of woman’s free
dom in the past, and now in the present,
have been, and are, men swayed by
scientific truth.
These men, whom
Christians scornfully refer to as infidels,
are lovers of truth. Truth clearly tells
them that the subjection of woman is the
outcome of obedience to the false. They
proclaim this immoral, and demand
emancipation. Will Christianity effect
this ? Not unless it turns its back on
the Bible and its precepts, and admits
the injustice and cruelty of these latter.
Will it do this? No. To disown the
foundation on which its existence is built
would be the sounding of its own death
knell. It is bound to protect itself, and,
while its precepts rule the laws of our
country, woman cannot be free.
Point blank, then, this question pre
sents itself to her: “ What must I do to
obtain my redemption from the Land
of Bondage in which I am a slave ? ”
There is but one reply to this query.
Here it is: “ You must no longer
cringe to your taskmaster. You must no
longer believe in the untrue. You must
no longer acquiesce in your degradation
by the false. You must recognise that
truth alone can save you and give you
7
the freedom that you need. If this be
not wrenched from your taskmaster,
assuredly he will never give it to you, and
you will remain his bond-slave in the
Land of Bondage. There you will give
birth to sons, who will oppress you by
reason of their ignorance and acquired
selfishness.
The sons of free-born
women would never act thus; but the
children of serfs are well-nigh the same
themselves, and act accordingly.”
Urgently needed is woman’s emanci
pation and her transformation from a
bond-slave to a being born in freedom.
Until this desirable object is effected,
progress must be slow and the elevation
of humanity be retarded.
This is a
question which cannot be too plainly
stated and submitted, not only to women,
but to men as well. Let these latter ask
themselves if they desire the enslave
ment of the female to continue. True
Civilisation answers “ No,” because it
aims at perfection, and there can be
nothing of the kind where the fountain
of life is held in check and drugged with
poison. There is a vast unexplored
region in woman’s mind which has not
yet been opened out because of the
hypnotic spell which superstitious reli
gion has exercised over it. Once re
move that influence, and a wealth of
thought will arise which shall sweep
away the false, and in scientific truth
reveal the road to freedom.
Science is godly because science is
truth. Of what good to us or others is
belief in the untrue? It will not avail
us to cling to the shadows of Imagina
tion, when common sense and proof
positive proclaim them to be such. How
is it possible to make real that which is
not, or to endow with life the spectral
ghosts of Invention? Assertion without
evidence is not fact, for fact is the proven,
�8
INTRODUCTION
and superstitious religion is all assertion |
without the proven.
In submitting,
therefore, to the rule of superstitious
idolatry, women accept the serfdom that
accompanies it, and are slaves. They
cannot leave the Land of Bondage, for
their minds are fettered. Strike those
fetters from the portals of their brainsj
and Reason shall rise triumphant. Then
shall the free, upward flight of Thought
carry all before it, and emancipated
woman shall redeem the world by the
force of majestic Truth. Upon the stern
rack of research Science has stretched
the Bible and mercilessly dissected it.
With what result ? With this. It has
proved that its tissues are shams. It has
unmasked its inventions, and it has made
clear that its foundations are Ignorance
and Superstition. This being so, shall
women continue to bolster up a lie ?
Shall they work in and till the garden of
Invention, and culture therein poisonous
mushroom growths, to taste which means
mental syncope ? Shall they, in short,
connive at their own abasement and
forge the fetters that bind them ? Ah !
surely not ? There can be no freedom
for them where Superstition reigns, be
cause this tyrant is an autocrat who will
accept of no dictation, but who merci
lessly dictates. Superstition has asserted,
proclaimed, and enforced the subjection
of woman, and enjoined its continuance
in obedience to the precepts of the Bible,
falsely called the Word of God.
Abominable falsehood ! The Bible is
the Word of Man, and the God therein
is this creature deified. Into the lips of
that Deity man has breathed his ignorant
thoughts and selfish desires, chief of
which was the possession of woman as a
slave. How could this be enforced but
by making her believe that she was the
offspring of a male rib and the first to
transgress the commands of God, where
fore the mere chip of the former, and
justly subjected by the latter to the con
dition of a disinherited? Disinherited
Woman ! Through long ages your eyes
have been bound, and the light has not
shone therein. Tear off the bandages
which keep them in darkness, and see
the truth for your own salvation and for
that of your children and descendants.
While Bible precept is held to be divine,
there is no raison d'etre for the rights of
woman, seeing that she is denied such
thereby. But once it is plainly seen that
Bible precept is man-made and not Godmade, then the barrier, so long held up
by Falsehood’s props against woman’s
freedom, must go down with a crash, by
reason of its own rotten and decayed
structure.
It is for men to give Woman freedom,
even as it is her bounden duty to demand
it as her right. Let Reason be her guide
and Truth her beacon. Then men shall
cease to be the sons of slaves, and
through their free mothers inherit the
glorious birthright of true liberty. Once
the origin of humanity is realised by all,
Superstition must die, for Knowledge will
never submit to Ignorance and Falsehood,
who are the parents of Superstition.
In the name of all that is noble,
upright, courageous, and pure, I appeal
for the destruction of this tyrannic fraud.
Made by man, it has proved his worst
enemy, for it has degraded woman and,
through her, pulled him down. In
plain, forcible language The Religion of
Woman tells its own sad tale. Written
by a man, it unfolds to her the truth, and
invites her to revolt against her task
master. Many there are who will do so,
but yet many more, I fear, whose eyes
have lost the power to see by long
deprivation of the light, who will not
�INTRODUCTION
For these I plead to men. Assault the
borders of their Land of Bondage, and
bear them into the Land of Freedom.
Then shall Freethought take possession
of their souls, for the taskmaster who
oppressed them will no longer over
master them with protected power.
Once Superstition dies, Intellect shall
reign. It will nesd all the forces of
Reason to accomplish this much-desired
end. Unreason looms large upon the
world, a giant in size and mighty in
magnitude and power. Nevertheless, it
is not always the vast armies that have
prevailed against well-organised and
disciplined small ones. Freethought is
the David whose sling must cast the
stone of Truth that shall strike the
Goliath of Superstition down and give
freedom and happiness to the world.
9
Of what avail life without these adjuncts
to joy ? Is the cry of Misery eternally
to go on ? Is this Misery, the only child
which Superstition has produced, to live
for ever? If the man-made God has
made his creator so wretched, is it not
time this latter deposed him and raised
in his place one who shall bring about
the Brotherhood of Man ?
Yes. It is time, and this humanity
must recognise. But, before it can
enthrone the true God, it must banish
the false. To accomplish this, it must
realise the bondage in which the latter
has placed the fountain-head of life, and
this both men and women will do if they
earnestly and thoughtfully study The
Religion of Woman.
Florence Dixie.
�!
is
r
�THE RELIGION OF WOMAN
Chapter I.
WOMAN AND THE CHURCHES
The visitor to York Minster often
lingers with an unexpected interest in
tracing the remains of structures that
have preceded the present magnificent
church. You descend into the crypt,
and examine the massive lower walls
and columns from which the cathedral
takes its upward flight. There your
architectural interest is thrust aside for
the moment by a curious discovery. In
dim recesses, just peeping out from the
swelling masonry, you descry the founda
tions of an earlier structure; then, if you
look more closely, the traces of a yet
earlier temple, until the mind runs back
along a period of religious history that
far out-distances the Christian era. As
in the dust of some most ancient town,
you read into the thin strata long periods
of the social and religious life of
humanity. At this spot for thousands
of years, apparently, the inhabitants of
the historic place have met for worship,
the religious spirit enduring amid a
hundred changes of form and vesture.
Human sacrifices have been displaced
by the symbolic sacrifice of the Host,
and this in turn has yielded to the
service of song and light. Druid priests
have given place to shaven monks and
gorgeously-attired Catholic priests, and
these again in the roll of ages to the
sober-clad clergy of the Church of
England. The costumes, the habits,
the houses of the people, have not more
changed than their religious forms and
practices. Each Church, each priest
hood, in its turn thought it expressed
the final and absolute truth. But the
time-spirit has sealed the lips of hier
archy after hierarchy. New gospels have
come from beyond the seas, or flashed in
the hearts of the people’s prophets, and,
with scorn and disdain, the old forms
have been swept into the crypt. Reli
gion grows and advances as humanity
grows and advances.
Enter the .minster now on some quiet
evening and see the handful of wor
shippers kneeling in prayer, soothed with
the familiar confidence. The law of
growth that is so vividly illustrated in
the crypt has no message for them.
They look up in pride at the stately
fabric of the minster, and see a promise
of finality in its beauty and solidity.
The waves might shatter and sweep away
the frail religious structures that had
gone before, but they fall impotently
before this building and the religion it
stands for. Yet, if they would look more
closely and less partially, how many
�12
WOMAN AND THE CHURCHES
indications they would find that the law
is at work now, not less, but more,
assiduously than ever! Look at the
empty niches, from which the statues of
Mary and the saints have been cast with
a cry of idolatry. Look at the roof,
blackened with the fumes of incense and
candles that have been extinguished.
The religion of the present worshippers
is almost as different from that of the
mediaeval worshippers who built the
cathedral as this in turn differed from
that of their predecessors. The minster
itself is an eloquent witness to the law of
growth.
But perhaps now the term is reached,
and the religious form perfect and final.
Look into the faces of the crowds that
roam about the minster with a pagan
admiration, and inquire into the thoughts
of the people of York. Read Mr.
Seebohm Rowntree’s book on the moral
and social condition of York. With all
its prestige, its endowments, its aesthetic
charm, its power of social aggregation,
its devoted ministry, its alertness to the
times, the Church which the minster
represents is losing its hold on the
nation. The majority of the people now
pass by its open doors, and refuse to
share in any form of worship whatever.
Once, many ages ago, the people merely
gathered under the open sky about a
rude stone altar, on which the priest
offered the tragic sacrifice. Then little
sanctuaries were raised to shelter the
altar and the images of the gods. Then
the structure grew into a temple that
would contain the worshippers them
selves. The little temples have grown into
huge churches and cathedrals, redolent
with the scent of flowers and incense, or
ringing with the sound of hymn and
psalm. Now they in turn are being
neglected.
For York is but a type of the fortune
of the Christian Church everywhere
to-day.
The increasing neglect of
worship is visible on the surface of life,
but there have been several careful
inquiries with a view to accurate deter
mination. Enumerations have been
made at such places as Dumfries, Liver
pool, Chester, London, Paris, and New
York. In spite of the immense differ
ences in the character of these places,
the result was much the same in all.
There is a considerable lapse from the
Churches. No town to-day is small
enough, or sleepy enough, to escape the
new spirit. The Bishop of London—of
a city where three-fourths of the popula-i
tion avoid the churches and chapels—
tells his clergy (as he did in a recent
address) “ not to live in a fool’s para
dise,” but realise the gravity of the situa
tion. The Bishop of Worcester, speak
ing for a rural district, equally deplores
the decay of allegiance to the Church.
A distinguished French bishop (Mgr.
Turinaz, of Nancy) writes that “the
Church is perishing in France year by
year.” A well-known defender of the
faith—and, therefore, an optimist by
profession—the Rev. F. Ballard, tells an
interviewer in Great Though'^ that “ the
outlook is a serious one.” Another
official optimist, the Rev. Rhondda
Williams, writes that “ already the
cultured laity on the one hand and the
bulk of the democracy on the other lie
entirely outside the Churches.”
This is a very serious and interesting
social phenomenon, and it has several
aspects that are worthy of careful study.
One might ask whether this decay of the
existing religious forms is continuous and
progressive, and what is likely to be the
moral issue of it for the nation, or what
further religious form, if any, is likely to
�WOMAN AND TNE CHURCHES
emerge out of the present chaos. I shall
have something to say on these questions
in later chapters; but my chief purpose
is to discuss the attitude taken up by
Women in the present phase of religious
development, and I turn at once to that
subject.
The most careful inquiry yet made
into the change of thought we are con
sidering is that which was conducted by
Mr. Mudie-Smith and a large body of
trained assistants.
All the flippant
objections raised against this investiga
tion by the religious bodies which
suffered most by the publication of its
results may be totally disregarded. The
inquiry was almost ideally exact and
impartial. It erred a little on the side
of loyalty when the time came to esti
mate how many people might attend
church; but I am mainly concerned
With its ascertained facts rather than its
conjectures. It was controlled by a
London journal with a pronouced
religious following. As given in Mr.
Mudie-Smith’s book, the general result
is that, out of a total population of
6,240,336 souls, only 1,514,025 attend
church or chapel; when we allow for the
proportion of these who attend morning
and evening, we get a total of about a
million and a quarter worshippers, out of
six millions and a quarter. As all the
religious leaders who were asked to
write about it said, this is a serious situa
tion. In the words of the superinten
dent of the census, a religious man:
“ Four persons out of every five, not
dwelling in institutions, are either care
less or hostile as regards public worship.”1
The less careful enumerations of church
goers which have been made in other
towns gave, on the average, about the
1 The Religious Life of London, p. 18.
13
same result. Further, we are able to com
pare this result with that of a census taken
in 1886 by the editor of the British
Weekly. London had then a population
of 3,816,483, and of these 1,167,312
attended church. The same area has
now a population of 4,500,000, yet only
1,003,361 attend any place of worship.
As the latter figure includes some 50,000
Jews, Spiritists, Ethicists, and all kinds
of people outside of the great Christian
bodies, we must deduct these for the
purpose of comparison. In spite of the
immense increase of the population and
the very remarkable stimulation of
Church-work during recent years, there
has been a positive loss of 200,000 wor
shippers ; the real loss is very consider
ably higher when we look to the increase
of the population.
One of the most noticeable features of
this census, and of similar calculations
elsewhere, is that women have remained
attached to the Churches in a far higher
proportion than men. Thus, for Greater
London we find an attendance (apart
from the Jews) of 372,264 men and
607,257 women (that is, without deduct
ing 38 per cent, for double attendances).
It is important to note, too, that the
higher proportion of women is much
more conspicuous in the older Churches
—the Anglican and Roman Catholic—
and in cultured districts. The Church
of England has 153,365 men to 292,710
women. Taking three districts that may
be considered to represent the better
educated classes, we find this result: In
Marylebone the Church of England had
4,051 men to 10,891 women; the Church
of Rome, 1,161 men to 3,026 women.
In Paddington the Church of England
had 3,392 men and 9,237 women; the
Church of Rome, 408 men and 1,254
women. In Kensington the Church of
�14
WOMAN AND THE CHURCHES
England had 5,362 men and 14,577
women; the Church of Rome, 1,866
men and 5,009 women. In all these
cases 38 per cent, must be deducted for
“twicers.” When we descend to indi
vidual churches, this feature is still more
striking. At the Brompton Oratory
there were 267 men and 1,105 women;
at the Carmelites’ Church, 276 men
and 807 women; at the Pro-Cathe
dral, 237 men and 701 women; at
the Holy Trinity, Brompton, there
were 160 men and 880 women (the
Bishop of London preaching there on the
occasion, if I remember rightly); at
Christ’s Church, Lancaster Gate, 249
men and 1,034 women.
It would be idle to question that these
figures have a significance, and it would
seem that every thoughtful woman
should be anxious to discover what that
meaning is. It is not a question of
England alone.
That distinguished
woman-worker in the States, Miss Susan
B. Anthony, tells us (Arena, May, 1897)
that women form “ from two-thirds to
three-fourths of the membership of the
Churches of America.” Jules Simon
said of France, even in his day, that
“ woman had lost the force of religion—
not that she was irreligious herself, but
her husband was so, almost irremedi
ably.” M. Taine, at a later date, gave
some statistics. In 1890 there were
2,000,000 people in Paris. Of these (on
the authority of an eminent ecclesiastic)
only 100,000 made their Easter duty—a
very strict test of membership for
Catholics—and these included four
women to one man. In other words,
on a very reliable test, only one woman
in twelve or thirteen, but only one man
in fifty, owned allegiance to the Church
at Paris in 1890. In the French pro
vinces one woman in four and one man
in twelve was found to be a real believer.
That the situation has not improved is
very clear from the fact that some 800
priests have left their Church in France
alone during the last five years.
We have here a very well-defined social
fact, and one that should be of the
deepest interest to women themselves.
The present controversy about the
differences in power or quality between
man and woman is largely rendered
tiresome by the lack of exact data to
proceed on. In this matter of religion
it is established that woman is far more
conservative than man. The proportion
of women in the Churches is vastly
greater than their proportion in the
general population. Why is this ? The
question cannot be without interest to
any thoughtful woman. We might,
indeed, give a stronger expression to
the fact, for few women will doubt that
many of the men who do frequent the
churches only do so under the pressure
of professional interest or social or
domestic influence. But we may be
content with the sufficiently abnormal
figures I have quoted. It is time for
women to confront the facts of their
religious life seriously. If their attach
ment to religion is well founded, it will
only be strengthened by examination.
But if women hold aloof improperly
from the greatest thought-movement of
their time, they will endanger the chances
of that intellectual respect which the
world is at last yielding them.
Women who are taking their part in
the world’s work to-day are aware how
frequently their claim for their sex is
evaded, or even openly rejected, with a
vague charge that they are reactionary,
or thoughtlessly conservative. Now,
there are several obvious arguments
which it would be possible for them to
�WOMAN AND THE CHURCHES
put forward in justification of their con
servatism in the matter of religion. It
will not be urged that they have a finer
perception of the intellectual evidences
for Christianity, so that I shall not need
in this work to discuss those evidences
in themselves. But probably one of
three reasons will be alleged by the
woman who would justify the greater
loyalty of her sex to the faith that is
passing from our midst. It may be said
—as it is widely believed—that the
Christian Church has a peculiar title to
the gratitude of woman for the share it
has had in liberating her from the
tyranny or the contempt or ill-usage of
man. It may, again, be urged that
woman’s more emotional and refined
nature affords greater hospitality to the
religious sense or instinct than does that
of man; or it may be felt that woman’s
deeper realisation, as mother, of the
moral need of ideas in the training of
children impels her to retain, as much as
possible, the Church-influence which has
so long been the only agency for the
formation of character. It is unques
tionable that large numbers of women
do deliberately retain their faith on these
grounds, and do not merely listlessly
acquiesce in things as they are. There
is a vague feeling abroad that woman’s
greater attachment to religion has both
utility and dignity. I propose in this
little work to examine carefully these and
other apologies for woman’s position in
the Churches.
Though I leave to a later chapter the
subject of the religious instinct and its
fuller development in woman, let me say
at once that there is a natural conser
vatism in her which is at once entitled
to man’s respect, and yet should be an
object of suspicion to herself. Mr.
Havelock Ellis has devoted a chapter of
15
his Man and Woman to the subject.
He says that woman is proved to have
a greater general organic stability than
man. Life has reached the high level it
occupies in us to-day by a long and
arduous struggle, as is now fully admitted.
In this struggle a tendency to variation
on the part of living things has been
essential to any advance; and it has
been equally essential to have a tendency
to stability for the purpose of fixing the
good steps won in the ascent, and check
erratic wandering. Somehow, the ten
dency to variation has found embodi
ment more particularly in man, while
the restricting tendency has been more
absorbed by woman. This is probably
a wise distribution (though a fresh
arrangement of the needs of the world
may very well claim an alteration). My
only point here is that it should make
men less impatient of women’s conser
vatism ; while the consciousness of having
such an organic bias should make woman
more careful as to what she conserves,
more resolute to use her reason and
judgment on the opinions she hands to
her children. It is at the same time
proved—-if scientific determination of it
were necessary—that woman has greater
suggestibility (or is more receptive of
outward influence), keener affectibility
(or emotions), and less independence.
It is, of course, an open question how
far this is due to nature and how far
merely to education.
All this will find a closer application
later on. For the moment I will only
mention one or two facts which indicate
how it works out in the province of
religion. Thus, at the most intellectual
period of the history of women, in
classical Greece, there were great num
bers of women philosophers. But of
those whose names have come down to
�i6
WOMAN AND THE CHURCHES
us thirty-four distinguished themselves
in the Pythagorean philosophy (the most
spiritual and mystic of the Greek schools),
while there were only three or four in
any other school, and only one among
the Cynics. So with regard to the history
of religion. Mr. Havelock Ellis found
that, out of 600 sects in a dictionary of
religions (which he calls “the most pain
ful page in the history of humanity ”),
only seven had been founded by women.
These seven sects, moreover, were all
Christian, obscure, fairly recent, and of
a mystic character; and their founders
were all of a more or less morbid nature.
Such facts as these show that woman has
been a follower rather than a pioneer,
and that she follows most easily along
the line of her own temperament. It is
surely, therefore, needful that she should
examine more rigorously the part she
plays in the world as a conservative force.
But it will be more convenient to take
at a later stage of this inquiry the question
of woman’s religious instinct and of the
necessity for religious influence. In the
way of all inquiry, or, at least, prejudicing
every inquiry by the plea of gratitude
and loyalty which it seems to impose on
woman, is the theory that Christianity
has rendered considerable service to her
cause. This claim must be examined
before we proceed. On the surface of
the matter, it is obvious that Christianity
has in several ways aided in the libera
tion of woman. A very imposing case is
made by those clerical writers who press
the subject on behalf of the Churches.
But few are ignorant to-day how narrow
and self-complacent ecclesiastical history
has always been ; how it has only glanced
back at pre-Christian times for the pur
pose of discovering their errors and
defects, while it has, with a narrow idea
of loyalty, distorted the facts of its own
peculiar province. It may be that, when
the whole of the facts are known, woman
may have to modify her so common
opinion about the effect of the coming
of Christianity upon her fortunes.
Take, for instance, the position of
woman at these two very different stages
of human history—in ancient Egypt and
in modern England and the United
States. We have so rich a collection of
remains of the ancient Egyptian civilisa
tion, and so careful and industrious a
scholarship has been set to interpret
them, that we can with confidence recon
struct the life of woman in that country
2,000 years before Christ was born, and
even at a date which Christian tradition
had named for the beginning of the
world. Two thousand years before the
time of Christ—and, if we went farther
back, we should find the position of
woman more rather than less honourable
—woman was more free and more
honoured in Egypt than she is in any
country of the world to-day. She was
the mistress of the house, her husband
being merely, as Flinders Petrie says, “ a
sort of boarder, or visitor, who had to
keep up the establishment,” or, as M.
Maspero puts it, “a privileged guest.”
She inherited equally with her brothers,
and had full control of her property.
She could go where she liked, or speak
with whom she liked. She was “juridi
cally the equal of man,” says M. Paturet,
“having the same rights and being
treated in the same fashion”; and the
same authority observes that it was not
as mother, but as woman, as a being
equal in human dignity, that she was
thus honoured. There was polygamy in
theory, but the first wife was generally
able to exact conditions in her marriage
contract which effectually prevented it.
She could bring actions, and even plead
�WOMAN AND THE CHURCHES
in the courts. She practised the art of
medicine. As priestess she had authority
in the temples. Frequently as queen
r Wia she was the highest in the land.
In the
irksT earlier times her marriage was probably
¿feníj indissoluble ; at all events, the inscrip
gfeil tions show, says M. Maspéro, that she
ï Sç,,,
EjïïÎM remained to the end of life “ the beloved
ifî To of her husband and the mistress of the
gîrodj house.” “ Make glad her heart during
1 Sri i the time that thou hast ” was the tradi
inorjj tional advice to the husband. Even
when she proved unfaithful—and the
fe® Egyptians had a high ideal of domestic
relations 6,ooo years ago — he was
told : “ Be kind to her for a season,
send her not away, let her have food
to eat.”
$fe':
Now pass swiftly from this remote
iiorq picture of dignity and justice to a nation
biriwi which represents i,8oo years of culture
under Christian influence. I take the
rrùÈSJEï nearest concise statement to my hand—
a description of the position of woman
JEfli in
enlightened Boston about 1850
ifeíW.) (under English Common Law)1 :—
dLtli
bteJ
[D9ÎÏI
ffd-
Woman could not hold any property, either
earned or inherited. If unmarried, she was
Mm3 obliged to place it in the hands of a trustee, to
whose will she was subject. If she contemplated
ïfcfiABŒ marriage, and desired to call her property her
own, she was forced by law to make a contract
f'dlívw with her intended husband by which she gave up
all title or claim to it. A woman, either married
íffi K or unmarried, could hold no office of trust or
power. She was not a person. She was not
ÍW recognised as a citizen. She was not a factor in
the human family. She was not a unit, but a
8 '019 zero in the sum of civilisation........ The status of
a married woman was little better than that of a
¡gaütól domestic servant. By the English Common Law
her husband was her lord and master. He had
toaban the sole custody of her person and of her minor
3®id children. He could punish her “ with a stick
no bigger than his thumb,” and she could not
^1-
1 I am quoting it from vol. iii. (p. 290) of Mrs.
Cady Stanton’s History of Women’s Stiffrage.
17
complain against him........ The common law of
the State [Massachusetts] held man and wife to
be one person, but that person was the husband.
He could by will deprive her of every part of his
property, and also of what had been her own
before marriage. He was the owner of all her
real estate and her earnings. The wife could
make no contract and no will, nor, without her
husband’s consent, dispose of the legal interest
of her real estate........ She did not own a rag of
her clothing. She had no personal rights, and
could hardly call her soul her own. Her husband
could steal her children, rob her of her clothing,
neglect to support the family : she had no legal
redress. If a wife earned money by her labour,
the husband could claim the pay as his share of
the proceeds.
So painful a contrast as this in two
civilisations, one of which long preceded
the coming of Christ, while the other is
a high type of Christian culture, must
surely give ground for reflection. It is
clear that the notion held by so many
religious women—that their cause lan
guished until the coming to power of
Christianity, and then entered upon a
grateful period of advance—is greatly in
error. One need not be surprised at the
error. It has long been the custom to
judge pre-Christian civilisations by the
lowest depths they ever touched, while
the application of such a test to Chris
tianity itself was bitterly resented. The
result has been a wholly romantic idea
that the world lay in the shadow of death
until the first century of the Christian
era, and then at last the pale dawn of a
higher idealism broke upon it. This is
a myth, and a very mischievous one.
It is particularly foolish in relation to
the progress of woman’s cause. The
growth of justice in this or any other
section of life is not for a moment com
parable to the dawn of a new day.
Rather has it been like the slow advance
of a tide up an uneven beach. Here it
has run quickly ahead by a pre-fashioned
C
�THE WOMAN OF PAGAN CULTURE
channel; there it has found banks and
obstacles, and has lingered impatiently.
Did Christian thought smooth the way
for it, or impede it? The contrast of
pagan Egypt and Christian Boston more
than justifies the raising of the question.
Chapter II.
THE WOMAN OF PAGAN CULTURE
Religious-minded people who are con
vinced that Christianity brought a
deferred hope to womankind have a
vague notion that she was degraded and
enslaved under the Greek and Roman
systems, whatever may have been her
position elsewhere, and that from this
condition Christianity set out to rescue
her. It is important to look more closely
into this than the ecclesiastical historian
is wont to do. The time is, happily,
passing away when men and women
feared to be deprived of their conven
tional shudder over the sins of Athens
and Rome, and resented every effort to
redeem or alleviate the character of those
whose civilisation we barbarians inherited.
To-day there is a feeling that it is better
to err by generosity in our estimate of the
dignity and promise of human nature.
One need not ask so much as this. A
careful inquiry into the condition of
Greek and Roman thought as to the
position of woman at the time when
paganism yielded to Christianity will
sufficiently answer my purpose.
I have spoken of the condition of
woman in ancient Egypt. This was, it
is true, an exceptional civilisation in its
treatment of women; but you will find
broad gleams of justice in many other
parts of the world long before, or wide
apart from, Christian influence. One
high authority, M. Revillout, tells us
that he finds woman held in equal
dignity with man in the earliest periods
of Chaldaic and Assyrian civilisation.
At a later date, Mr. Lecky says, we find
that among the ancient Aryans and the
Brahmans woman is the worker, and is
subject to her husband, but he is reli
giously enjoined to bear in mind all that
he obtains through her. The ancient
laws of India forbade the making of a
marriage gift to the father of the bride,
on the ground that he must not sell his
child. In distant Japan women were
freely honoured until the adoption of
Chinese ideas. Several distinguished
Mikados and chieftains were women.
During the classic period of their litera
ture (about 800 to 1186 of the Christian
era—that is to say, just at the time when
women were at the lowest point of legal
degradation in Christian Europe) “a very
large and important part of the best
literature Japan has produced was written
by women,” as Mr. Astor says in his his
tory of Japanese literature. The position
which woman occupied among the
Germanic tribes, and which she retained
to an extent in England for some time
after its conversion, is very well known.
Monogamy was almost universal; and
not only does Tacitus contrast their
general chastity with that of the Romans
�THE WOMAN OF PAGAN CULTURE
of his day, but Salvianus, a Christian
priest, represents them as equally
superior to his own Christian contem
poraries. Women were “honoured by
the Germans as something sacred and
prophetic,” says Tacitus. They were
often consulted about war or other
important tribal affairs. Among the
Goths, and some other tribes, the
daughter inherited equally with the son;
and the wife retained full control over
the husband’s wedding gift to her. An
ancient tradition declared that Odin had
charged them to honour woman as a
visible deity. Boadicea is a familiar
illustration that among our Celtic parents,
too, woman was able to play an impor
tant part. In fact, some writers have
held that all civilisation begins with the
rule of the mothers in a community; but,
though there are very extensive traces of
a primitive matriarchate, it is by no
means admitted to have been universal.
It is important to bear these facts in
mind, because European civilisation has
drawn upon all these earlier polities,
under the direction of Christianity, for its
system, and we may pertinently ask how
these good features came to be lost.
But my more particular task is to deter
mine the fortune of woman under the
Greek and Roman systems, from which
modern Europe more clearly emerged.
Here, emphatically, we find a growth
that must be likened to the irregular
onrush of the tide rather than the
measured break of the day. There has
been no steady advance, and most
certainly no sudden illumination at the
appearance of Christianity. The real
betterment of woman’s lot has been
strangely tortuous and unromantic.
With her position in Greece we need
not delay long, as the Greek civilisation
was for the most part absorbed in the
19
Roman. At the very earliest period of
Greek history we find a concern to treat
woman justly and honourably. Polygamy
was generally abandoned. Schaible tells
us that a Greek legend spoke of the
abolition of polygamy by Cecrops in
prehistoric times. It is, at all events,
quite clear that they had abandoned it
at a time when the Hebrews maintained
it in a form peculiarly insulting and
unjust to woman. At an early period,
too, the gift to the father of the bride
was changed into a gift from her father,
which made a considerable difference in
her moral position. Later, in the Homeric
period and the*subsequent age of the
great tragedians, woman holds an
honoured though a restricted position.
Moreover, her cry for complete justice is
growing louder. Listen to it, for instance,
as it is voiced in the Medea of Euripides.
Then came the age of the great moralists,
of Plato and Aristotle, and we find a
distinct perception of the injustice of the
Greek social order, in which the courtesan
alone is free and the married woman is
confined to the home and uneducated ;
though legally, we must remember, the
Greek woman was capable of all civic
and many juridical acts, without her
husband’s intervention. Plato, who
seems not to have consistently denounced
the prejudice of his time (and we can
forgive some hesitation when we study
the classic examples of Greek woman
hood), said, nevertheless, in his Republic
(I quote from Schaible) :—
This sex, which we keep in obscurity and
domestic work, is it not fitted for nobler and
more elevated functions? Are there no instances
of courage, wisdom, advance in all the arts?
Mayhap thèse qualities have a certain debility,
and are lower than in ourselves. But does it
follow that they are, therefore, useless to the
country ? No, nature bestows no talent with a
view to sterility ; and the great art of the
�20
THE WOMAN OF PAGAN CULTURE
lawgiver is to make use of all the forces which
nature confers.
Alexandria, came to a close, in the fifth
century, with the noble and gifted
Hypatia, whose real greatness of mind
and character Kingsley has so artfully
concealed behind the figure of his charm
ing but frail young heroine. Hypatia, a
woman of perfect and solid culture, of
formed and resolute character, of great
civic dignity and importance, is the last
outcome of the growing recognition of
woman’s dignity in Greece. She stands
out amid a darkening and reactionary
age as a final reminder of what Greek
culture would soon have done for woman.
Into the development of woman’s
position in Rome we must inquire more
closely. It is here most precisely that
the effect of the coming to power of
Christianity will be felt, and where it has
to be chiefly appraised. The majority
of religious people know two things, and
little else, about Roman life and thought
in this connection. They know that in
the stern, puritanic, earlier days of the
Republic woman was the slave of her
father until she married, and then the
stave of her husband for the rest of her
life; and they know that at the time of
the coming of Christianity woman (and
man, too) led a life of general and, in
some respects, sordid licentiousness and
cruelty. They vaguely ascribe the dis
appearance of both evils to Christian
influence, and so look with suspicion on
every proposal to subvert it. This is a
familiar pulpit account of the moral
history of humanity. It is a complete
distortion of the facts.
It is true that in the early days woman
was under the absolute control of father
or husband, and that they had the power
of life and death over her.1 But in most
Aristotle, too, though he rarely breaks
away from the conventional feeling of his
time on this subject, is not without a
contribution to the advance. He says
in one place that the Greeks are superior
to the barbarians in that their wives are
not their slaves, but their helpmates;
and in another place, Mr. Lecky says, he
clearly demands of husbands the same
fidelity that they exact of their wives.
This marks an important advance in the
application of moral principle to the rela
tion of the sexes.
Then came the conquest of Greece by
Rome and the distortion of its natural
growth; but if we follow patiently the
tangled threads of its moral development,
we find a continuous growth of the ideal
of justice. In the period of disorder, of
enfeeblement, and of dependence that
followed, we cannot expect to find an
equable progress of the cause of woman
in Greece. Yet when we come to
Plutarch, a Greek moralist of the early
years of the Christian era, we find that
the sense of justice to woman is still
growing. Plutarch openly claims for
woman a mental and moral equality with
man, and a perfect reciprocity of their
obligations. He claims, in particular,
that woman shall be equally educated
with man. Greek philosophy was clearly
preparing the way for a full correction of
the undue pressure of the social system
on woman ; and Plutarch, unlike Plato,
was not resisting, but voicing, the cultured
feeling of his time. Thus, when Chris
tianity was first brought to Greece, the
age of woman’s oppression was virtually
over, and a clear promise of a more
enlightened social order can be dis
1 would refer the
Englishwoman
covered. Fitly enough, the Greek philo who Ireads of this powerhorrifiedand death to an
of life
sophy and ethic, now transferred to article in the Contemporary Review, December,
�THE WOMAN OF PAGAN CULTURE
other respects the Romans treated their
women with far higher consideration than
the Hebrews. The Roman religion, like
that of the Egyptians, did not preach the
inferiority of the female. Revillout and
other scholars find proof that in the
earliest accessible stages of Roman his
tory the relation of the sexes was one of
great humanity and concord. Monogamy
was strictly enforced. Valerius Maximus
affirms that divorce was unknown for 520
years after the foundation of Rome.
Throughout the period of the Republic,
in fact, woman was in a far better posi
tion than in Greece; Nepos claims that
his own civilisation is higher than the
Roman in that respect. She eat at the
same table, lived in the atrium (hall) of
the house instead of being relegated to
the gyneazum (women’s quarters), went
out to dine, or to the theatre or temple,
and was treated with the highest respect
in the street. “The Roman matron,” says the French biographer of St.
Ambrose, “was the first model of the
Christian woman.” The classic portraits
of Roman women are among the finest
of all time. And, though they were
excluded from political work, they held
one office, that of Vestal Virgin, which
was in some regards higher than the
Consulate. The elder Cato, a type of
the older Roman, said : “ A man who
beats his wife and his children lays
impious hands on that which is most
holy and most sacred in the world.”
But a momentous change came over
the fortune of women about the close of
the Republic, and it is this that we have
chiefly to appreciate. It might be ex1899, by Signora Melegari. From this it appears
that this custom is really not so far removed from
our own day. “ In the south of Italy, especially,
a woman may suffer death at the hands of the
males of her family, and public opinion be not in
the least moved to reprobation thereby.”
21
pressed in the statement that woman
gained the liberty she had coveted and
lost the moral dignity she had borne.
After the end of the Punic wars the
despotic authority of the father and hus
band began to wane. This authority
had been transferred from the father to
the husband at marriage—that is to say,
in the more solemn form of marriage
known as the confarreatio. The radical
change which now took place was that
the stricter form of marriage fell into
disuse, and a laxer form became general.
In this way the husband lost the stern
power which the confarreatio had given
him, and the woman found a path to
complete liberty. By the time of the
beginning of Christianity woman had
attained a liberty and distinction which
she has not even yet completely regained.
Emperors set their wives beside them on
the throne, and the wives of the patri
cians took the hint. They formed a
conventus matronarum (a club), with a
meeting-house of their own on the
Quirinal for the discussion of their public
affairs. They owned considerable pro
perty, and at times lent money to their
husbands—at more than shrewd interest.
We find the wives of generals in camp
with their husbands; and on the walls of
Pompeii we discover election addresses
signed by women in support of certain
candidates. They had great wealth, con
siderable culture, a large visiting circle
(including male friends), and complete
control of the slaves, freedmen, and
clients of the house. In the provinces
they sometimes held high municipal
offices.
Sir Henry Maine, whose chapter on
this subject in his Ancient Law should
be read by every woman, points out that,
if it had not been for the discovery of
the writings of Gaius (a Roman jurist
�22
THE WOMAN OF PAGAN CULTURE
who wrote about 130-180 a.d.), we
should scarcely have been able to realise
at all the force of the older law. “ It
had fallen into complete discredit, and
was verging on extinction,” he says
(P- 154).
The great jurisconsult himself scouts the
popular apology offered for it in the mental
inferiority of the female sex, and a considerable
part of his volume is taken up with descriptions
of the numerous expedients, some of them dis
playing extraordinary ingenuity, which the
Roman lawyers had devised for enabling women
to defeat the ancient rules. Led by their theory
of Natural Law, the jurisconsults had evidently
at this time assumed the equality of the sexes as
a principle of their code of equity.
Thus, long before there could be any
question of Christian influence on Roman
society or Roman law, woman had
attained in the Empire a position of
almost complete liberty and distinction.
The woman of the wealthier class had
practically no grievances, and she was
conscious of a power to secure whatever
further ambition she might entertain. It
is, therefore, wholly absurd to speak as
if Christianity had delivered her from the
despotism of earlier Roman law. But we
must go further. The Christian Church
must tell us how it came about that,
whereas we find woman in Rome 1,800
years ago on the eve of complete inde
pendence, we have had to fight the battle
all over again in the nineteenth century;
how it came about that in the intervening
1,800 years, and particularly during that
period when the power of the Church
was paramount—the Middle Ages—
woman fell to a lower position in law
than she had ever occupied under the
Greek or Roman system.
Let me approach the subject once
more under cover of the great authority
of Sir Henry Maine. After describing
the degree of liberty won by the Roman
women, he goes on (p. 156): “Chris
tianity tended somewhat from the very
first to narrow this remarkable liberty.”
This opposition on the part of Chris
tianity rested on religious and ethical
grounds. I have explained how the new
liberty of woman in Rome curiously
sprang from the substitution of a laxer
form of marriage, with a greater facility
of divorce, for the old and stricter form.
To this change Christianity was bound
to oppose itself. But it went on to fatal
excesses under the influence of its
“passion for asceticism,” as I will explain
in the next chapter. “ The latest Roman
law,” says Sir Henry, “so far as it is
touched by the Constitutions of the
Christian Emperors, bears some marks
of a reaction against the liberal doctrines
of the great Antonine jurisconsults”;
and he attributes it to “ the prevalent
state of religious feeling” that, in the
formation of mediaeval jurisprudence by
the fusion of Roman law with the
customs of the barbarians, the legislation
of Europe “ absorbed much more than
usual of those rules concerning the posi
tion of woman which belong peculiarly
to an imperfect civilisation.” The Jus
tinian Code had generally acted as a
corrective of the barbaric customs, but
the chapter of law relating to married women
was for the most part read by the light, not of
Roman, but of Canon law, which in no one par
ticular departs so widely from the 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 preserves
any tincture of Christian institutions is likely to
restore to married women the personal liberty
conferred on them by the middle Koman law,
but the proprietary disabilities of married
females stand on quite a different basis from
their personal incapacities, and it is by the ten
dency of their doctrines to keep alive and con
solidate the former that the expositors of the
Canon law have deeply injured civilisation.
�THE WOMAN OF PAGAN CULTURE
He then points out that those legisla
tions which have kept the longest and
the strictest in touch with Canon law
have been the most harsh in their treat
ment of women, and that the English
law relating to married women is one of
the most painful instances of this.
This is a very grave indictment of the
action of the Christian Church by a dis
tinguished legal authority; it is a prosaic
statement of the facts that must out
weigh any number of sermons or apolo
getic works. Nor can relief be sought
in the idea that priestly legislators
framed this iniquitous Canon law in
defiance of the real teaching of the
Christian religion. The truth is, as I
will show, that it is the explicit and
emphatic teaching of the great Christian
leaders that brought about this unhappy
result. Woman was thrust back into the
gynecceum by the official action of the
Church, under the clear direction of its
most sacred writings.
But before we pass on to consider the
development of the Christian attitude
towards woman and her aspirations, we
must consider the second fallacy of which
I spoke. Let us grant, it is said, that
the sternness of the older Roman law
and custom had been moderated, if not
abolished, and that woman had won
liberty and independence. But you
admit, it is urged, that in gaining liberty
she had lost her moral dignity; and it
was more important to restore this than
to secure the permanence of her inde
pendence, with all its abuses. Chris
tianity came into a world that seethed
with vice, and called for moral rather
than material redemption. That is an
arguable position; only people should
be consistent, and not claim that Chris
tianity emancipated woman when they
mean that, on however lofty grounds, it 1
23
neglected—nay, contemned—the greatest
chance ever offered of emancipating her.
But the chief defect of this new position
is that it is a mere travesty of the moral
and religious history of the empire.
Women who wish to know the truth as
to what Christianity has or has not done
for them will do well to read this page
of history very carefully.
In the first place, one cannot protest
too frequently against the fallacy of
judging a people by the lowest depth
they ever touched. It is stupid or dis
honest in a high degree to describe the
worst vices of the Augustan age, and
then say this is paganism. If future ages
are to test the era of Christian influence
in this way, it will go ill with it.
Religious writers talk, for instance, of the
6th Satire of Juvenal as an illustration of
“ pagan morals.” It would be just as
fair and logical to take the Liber
Gomorrhaicus of Cardinal Peter Damian
(a far more terrible exposure of the
morals of the clergy in the eleventh
century) as an illustration of “ Christian
morals.” It would be just as fair to
judge our own nation by the degraded
condition of the people in, for instance,
the eighteenth century; when, says Sir
Walter Besant, “ for drunkenness, bru
tality, and ignorance the Englishmen of
the baser kind reached the lowest depth
ever reached by civilised man.” If we
look about us, we shall see a hundred
warnings of the folly—a folly of which
hardly a single religious writer on the
subject is not guilty—of selecting the
darkest shades of Roman life and repre
senting these as typical. Indeed, I
could go further, and claim that these
shades have been greatly exaggerated in
the comparison with our own time. The
yagueness with which we necessarily
discuss these matters lends itself to such
�24
THE WOMAN OF PAGAN CULTURE
interested exaggeration. The truth is
that some of the worst vices scourged by
Juvenal at Rome are just as prevalent in
London or Paris to-day.
However, it is no part of my plan to
institute comparisons. I would rather
direct attention to this undoubted but
little appreciated fact—-that, long before
Christianity became powerful enough to
exercise the slightest influence on the
morals of Rome, there was a very remark
able improvement. Christianity had not
converted two per cent, of the Empire
by the reign of Constantine. It was not
in a position to affect the general
character until near the close of the
fourth century. But by that time there
had been a considerable change in the
pagan character. A number of regene
rating influences were at work in the
Empire.
Those who imagine that
Christianity was the sole spiritual force
in operation at that time are strangely
ignorant of the period. Two philo
sophies and three religions, besides
Christianity, were working to restore the
moral dignity of the Roman people.
Greek philosophy had, as I said, been
transferred from Athens to Alexandria,
and there it took almost the character
and fervour of a religion. It had an
appreciable influence, in this form of
neo-Platonism, on the moral temper of
the age. The Emperor Julian was a
follower of it. Saint Augustine and
several others found it the ante-chamber
to Christianity. Its last great teacher,
the brilliant Hypatia, shows that its
spirit was one not only of abstract
justice, but also of justice to woman.
On the other hand, the Stoic philo
sophy was even more effective, both in
improving the general moral temper of
the Empire and in securing justice for
the woman and the slave. Its chief
Roman writers, Seneca, Epictetus, and
Marcus Aurelius, are teachers for all
time. It had completely altered the
tone of Roman society before the middle
of the second century. The vicious
luxury and gluttony of the Augustan
age, the crucifixion of slaves, the licen
tiousness of the emancipated women,
and other disorders of the “ pagan ”
world, were healed by purely pagan
influences.
Renan, glancing from the age of
Marcus Aurelius to the later develop
ment of European history, exclaimed
that “human life was suspended for a
thousand years.” Certainly, in respect
of the particular question we are con
sidering, the plaint was perfectly just.
Clearly, what was needed, as far as
woman’s cause was concerned, was an
agency that should not destroy, but
purify and consolidate, the new liberty.
It was based, to an important extent, on
the new laxity of morals. The serious
task of the moralist was to transfer it to
a sounder foundation. This is what the
Christian Church disdained to do, and
what the pagan moralists were doing.
Seneca spoke, like Plutarch, of the
equality of man and woman in moral
dignity and moral responsibility. Anto
ninus Pius embodied in one of his judg
ments the opinion that the husband was
just as strictly bound to be faithful as the
wife, and it is given as a legal axiom by
Ulpianus. We have seen that another
jurisconsult, Gaius, sharply rejected the
notion of woman’s inferiority. Dion
Chrysostom demanded the suppression
by law of prostitution. All the neoPlatonists insisted strongly on pre-matrimonial chastity. As a French Christian
writer, M. Thamin, says : “ The ancient
wisdom had taken on a new and quite
Christian form.”
�THE WOMAN OF PAGAN CULTURE
But the efforts of the philosophic
moralists were aided among the people
by three religions which sought, no less
eagerly than Christianity, to regenerate
the Empire. The cult of Isis, the cult
of Mithra, and the Manichean religion
were spreading even more quickly, and
with no less moral effect, than the Chris
tian religion. Most of the Roman senators
who made the last stand about the year
380 against the new Church belonged to
one or other of these cults. And these
religions, introduced from abroad, tended
to help the settlement of the “ woman
question ” of that time. The cult of Isis
brought to the women of Rome, not only
a pure if not ascetic ideal, not only the
great moral prestige of conceiving the
Deity in female form, but also a relic of
the old Egyptian tradition as regards
woman. The cults of Mithra and Mani
brought equally elevated ideals of con
duct ; St. Jerome scornfdlly told his
Christian followers that, when he met a
woman of sedate and spiritual appear
ance at Rome, he knew at once that she
was a Manichean. They embodied some
of the best moral traditions of Persia.
In Manicheism women formed an im
portant part of the administrative system.
These religions took deep root in the
Roman world. By the time Christianity
came into the position to exercise a wide
spread moral influence, they had already
25
half accomplished the work of regenera
tion, and not until the thirteenth century
did it advance any further. The last
group of “ pagans ” which we find oppos
ing the advance of Christianity was a
group of high-minded men and women.
In the centre of it we find the last great
Roman, Vettius Agorius Praetextatus,
and his equally distinguished wife, Fabia
Aconia Paulina, a priestess of Isis. The
letters of Symmachus and the Saturnalia
of Macrobius show us the fine and sober
and humane temper of this group. We
have, in fact, reached here (the latter
part of the fourth century) a turningpoint, not only in the religious history of
Europe, but also in the fortune of
woman’s aspiration. Up to this point
the better tendencies of the Greek and
Roman moralists were steadily advancing.
The new freedom which woman had won
in a period of licence was being legiti
mised and consecrated. There was no
longer question of her inferiority, of
putting her under the tutelage of her
male relatives, of shutting her up in the
gynceceum. Already she looked from the
slope of Pisgah. Then every other moral
agency was swept out of Europe by a
politically triumphant Christianity—and
the hopes and ambitions of women were
sealed up for 1,500 years in the tomb of
paganism. Let us see how this dire
result came about.
�2Ô
WOMAN IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN TEACHING
Chapter III.
WOMAN IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN TEACHING
In the introduction to her Woman's
Bible, Mrs. E. Cady Stanton says : “ The
canon and civil law, Church and State,
priests and legislators, all political parties
and religious denominations, have alike
taught that woman was made after man,
of man, and for man, an inferior being,
subject to man.” She goes on to show
us the root of all this when, after describ
ing woman according to the Bible, she
says: “ Those who have the divine
insight to translate, transpose, and trans
figure this mournful object of pity into
an exalted, dignified personage, worthy
our worship as the mother of the race,
are to be congratulated as having a share
of the occult mystic power of the eastern
Mahatmas.” This is the new influence
that began to colour the social life and
the legislation of Europe, and extin
guished the brilliant promise of the
closing years of paganism. “ The life
of woman,” slightly to alter M. Renan’s
phrase, “ was suspended for a thousand
years.”
It will hardly be questioned seriously
that the teaching of the Old Testament
with regard to woman was a menacing
element. To-day we read our Old Testa
ment in a circuitous way. We are told
by every theologian who has any authority
on the interpretation of the Bible that the
Prophets were written first, the Law
second; that those dreadful earlier books
of the Old Testament, with their crude
morality, are a late and fictitious com
pilation from fragments of ancient legend
and history, invested with a quite illegi
timate divine authority. They express
the efforts of the early Hebrews, who
were barbarians at a time when the civili
sations of Egypt and Babylon were grey
with age, to emerge from their low moral
condition. It has been a fatal accident,
or artifice, that gave a uniform divine
authority to the whole of this very
different mass of literature. It involved
the sanctioning with a divine authority
of some of the crudest and most primi
tive conceptions of a late-developed race.
Little did Esdras dream, when he finally
edited the earlier books, that his action
would have so grievous an influence on
the social development of Europe ! Yet
it was this primitive Hebraic image of
woman that from the year 400 onward
cast an ever-deepening shadow over
Christianity.
It is unnecessary to linger over this
conception. Woman was to the Hebrews
an inferior being, the cause of the Fall,
a fragment detached from the virility of
Adam. Polygamy and concubinage carry
the story of woman’s inferiority far into
the best ages of Hebrew development.1
1 Polygamy only began to disappear among
the Jews in the fifth century b.c. And so
curious was the influence of the Old Testament
on the early Christian Church that several of the
Fathers could not bring themselves to condemn
it, and it was not officially suppressed by the
Church until 1060 a.d. Luther and the Re
formers allowed it even later. Yet polygamy
was one of the surest signs of a disdain of
woman, and had been rejected by Greeks,
Romans, and barbarians long before the Hebrews
began to perceive its enormity.
�WOMAN IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN TEACHING
The familiar ritual of the Temple
sanctioned it with a stern and odious
injunction. The purification ceremony,
with its reference to “ sin ” and “atone
ment,” was in itself an offensive survival
of a barbaric taboo ; but when the law
went on (Lev. xii. 2, 4) to direct that the
process should last seven days in the case
of a male child and fourteen for a female
child, the inference was clear. Consis
tently, the Hebrew law and custom
ignored females in the family chronicle.
The Hebrew word for “ male ” is equi
valent to “ memory ”; the word for
“female ” cannot with decency be trans
lated literally into English. A daughter
had no will to consult as to her marriage;
she was virtually sold by her father; and
she had no share of the inheritance.
Repudiation of a wife was repulsively
easy for a man, and punishments fell
unevenly upon the sexes. The saYne
strain of contempt is seen in the rigid
exclusion of women from the service of
the Deity, and even from the inner
court of the Temple; and, indeed, all
through the life and religion of the Jews.
It is true that a few women contrived
to win an honourable position in the
Hebrew chronicles or romances; but,
setting aside such equivocal heroines as
Judith, they are types, to use the words
of Mr. Lecky, “ of a low order, and
certainly far inferior to those of Roman
history or Greek poetry.”
We need not delay, however, in deter
mining the inferiority of the Hebrew
conception of woman to that of the great
pagan nations which surrounded Pales
tine. We shall see that, rightly or
wrongly, the Old Testament was the
source of the fatal theory which grew up
in the mind of the Fathers. For the
same reason I will not stay to determine
the attitude of Christ himself towards
27
woman. Moreover, he would be a bold
man who would, in the present condition
of New Testament scholarship, venture
to formulate the opinion of Christ on
any point. Theologians are beginning
to dissect the Gospels in the same way
that they have taken the Old Testament
to pieces. The chief clerical scholars of
Germany and England and America now
speak freely of earlier and later “layers”
of Biblical tradition. Already some of
the most characteristic sayings and doings
of Christ are rejected—by the leading
theologians themselves, be it remem
bered—as late and unreliable interpola
tions. Until this process has reached
its term, it is quite useless to speculate
on Christ’s attitude towards woman.
There are traits in the Gospel figure of
Christ which contrast gratefully with the
harsh Hebraic tradition. Whether, how
ever, these are not contributions of the
Alexandrian Greeks to the Gospel mosaic
it is impossible to say. This much is
certain—the Christ of the Gospels gave
not one word of clear guidance on this
or any other social problem, and entered
not one word of explicit protest against
the injustice of the Judaic treatment of
women.
But it will presently appear that this
point is not really relevant to our purpose.
It was the teaching of the Fathers that
barred the way to the progress of woman’s
cause in Europe, and this was based on
St. Paul and the Old Testament. The
numerous references of St. Paul to woman
are familiar. She shall veil her head in
the churches, and shall not ask questions
there as her husband may. She is sub
ject to her husband as “ head.” The
man was not created for the woman, but
the woman for the man. She shall not
teach, for she brought ruin on the world,
but shall be saved by child-bearing.
�28
WOMAN IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN TEACHING
Here was a strong re-affirmation, under
the new dispensation, of all the harsh
and sophistic teaching of the old. The
Gentile converts evidently fought at first
against the Hebraic strain of contempt.
St. Paul is clearly rebuking active revolts
of Christian women here and there. In
the spirit of the cultured pagan thought
of the first century, they are claiming
equality of treatment and a share in the
work of the new Church. Salutations to
women-workers are frequent. Deacon
esses are active. There seems hope that
the new religion will not follow the
familiar masculine type. Then St. Paul
smites down the feminist movement with
his apostolic authority. Then the priest
hood and episcopate rise into power,
crushing out the deaconesses, and sub
ordinating the deacons. The hierarchy
becomes rigidly masculine. The Old
Testament is, after long struggles,
retained in the canon; and the mainte
nance of the old Hebraic harshness
towards woman becomes inevitable.
No impartial student of the period
can profess to have expected any other
issue.
Christianity was not a great
intellectual movement. It was the out
pouring of a stream of religious emotion
that had been pent up by centuries of
Judaic formalism. Its great task was to
spiritualise religion. Of social problems
it knew and cared nothing. To social
injustice it was blind, for the real social
order lay beyond the clouds. Hence
on secondary questions, like this of the
treatment of woman, it acquiesced in the
feeling of its environment. Cultured
pagans had reached a higher stage on
the question; but the people at large
held the older ideas, and Christianity, as
a popular religion, took its colour from
them. Thus, instead of taking up the
nobler appeals of moralists like Seneca,
it came to ignore, and finally resist, them.
Except in a few imperfect ways, it brought
no hope, but a fresh refusal of hope to
woman.
I have said that Christianity was not
really in a position to influence the
Roman social order until three centuries
later. During those three centuries the
Fathers raised the structure of Christian
teaching which was to command the
absolute allegiance of Europe until the
Reformation at least. It is a matter of
no less interest than importance to trace
the growth of a religious contempt for
woman through the patristic literature.
But it is a sad page for any Christian
woman to read. I begin with the Greek
fathers, as these were not only earlier in
time, and therefore present the theory of
woman’s inferiority in a slight and im
mature form, but they were also, through
Alexandria, in closer touch with the
humanist culture of the neo-Platonists.
Theology was born when the cultured
Greek mind at Alexandria, then the
Athens of the civilised world, came to
reflect on the Gospel message. In this
first stage of the theoretical interpretation
of the New Testament we find the
earliest traces of the reaction of the
Hebrew tradition on Greek thought.
Clement of Alexandria, the subtlest of
the school, exhibits the ordinary improved
feeling of the educated Greek of his
time as regards women, when he writes
as a philosopher. When he is asked if
she may study philosophy like her
brothers, he answers at once in the
affirmative. She has the “same nature”
as man. But as soon as he is confronted
with the familiar texts from the Epistles
of St. Paul, his humanism begins to
waver. He must bow to the ruling of
the Apostle that the man is her head,
and all the rest. The first shadow of the
�WOMAN IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN TEACHING
Hebrew idea of woman is creeping over
the fine prospect that Greek culture has
opened out for woman. Moreover, we
find already in Clement of Alexandria
that contempt of marriage which was
soon to become one of the great errors
of the Church. It interests us because
it ever either springs from or leads to a
contempt of woman. He says in the
Stromateis that “fornication is a lapse
from one marriage into many.”1 Origen,
the most learned (and least orthodox) of
the Fathers, betrays (it is hardly neces
sary to say) the same contempt of
marriage. “Digamists”—that is to say,
those who married a second time when
the first wife was dead—“are saved in
the name of Christ, but are by no means
crowned by him”; and there are texts
where he speaks with something very like
censure of even first marriage. Athenagoras had already set the example of
calling second marriage “a decent sort
of adultery,”2 and the phrase was to be
repeated time after time, until at length
a Church Council should introduce it
into its decrees. But Origen and
Clement and Athanasius were humane
enough in their independent expressions
concerning the nature and dignity of
woman. In this they are Greeks. They
merely bow to the harsh phrases of St.
Paul when these call for comment.
1 I take this and the next quotation from
Lecky. In all other cases I translate direct, and
literally, from the Greek or Latin.
2 The early Romans had themselves looked
with disfavour on second marriages, but this was
on the ground of sentiment and loyalty of
memory—on principles which were in themselves
most commendable. The Fathers renewed the
attack on second marriages, but on grounds
which were socially mischievous. They had
granted a first marriage as a concession to the
weakness of the flesh, and drew an ascetic line
at second marriage. This not only encouraged
immorality, but tended always to obscure the
dignity of woman and her love.
29
The other great trio of the Greek
Fathers was St. Basil, St. Gregory of
Nyssa, and St. Gregory of Nazianzum.
In their writings we find the shadow
deepening and lengthening. They were
trained in the best Greek schools, but
soon passed out of touch with the culture
of the day. St. Basil, of strong and
trenchant mind, insists that woman is
“man’s equal in mental power, only less
in bodily strength.” When, however, he
comes to deal with the Old Testament,
he is prevented by his religious regard
for all its books from setting its awful
teaching aside. He can only murmur
that its treatment of woman is “a mys
tery.” St. Gregory of Nyssa, though a
married bishop, furnishes to the monas
teries of a later date a great deal of that
religious depreciation of marriage of
which I have spoken. He dwells con
stantly and morbidly on the praise of
virginity. It was no part of God’s primi
tive design that the race should be con
tinued by sexual union. Marriage is the
outcome of sin. St. Gregory of Nazian
zum, the sweetest singer and most
eloquent and emotional of the Greek
Fathers, takes us a step lower in this
degeneration of Christian culture as
regards woman.
In his poem to
Olympias he expresses the growing feel
ing of woman’s inferiority. Shall the
maid Olympias learn philosophy? By
no means. “Woman’s philosophy is to
obey the laws of marriage.” She must
refrain even from going to weddings and
christenings; must not give a thought to
public affairs—“Let thy house be thy
city.” Then the usual concern for vir
ginity appears : “ Blessed is the one who
leads a celibate life, and soils not the
divine image within him with the filth of
concupiscence.” And it has the inevit
able ending in a contempt of woman :—
�30
WOMAN IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN TEACHING
“ Fierce is the dragon, and cunning the asp;
But woman has the malice of both.”
at length he is moved to tell the virgin
that marriage is “ not far removed from
fornication.” The second great African
Father, St. Cyprian, is more moderate in
his phrases, though he forbids women to
teach when a fresh effort is made to
secure that outlet for the activity of
Christian women.
When we pass to St. Augustine, how
ever, the tendency becomes at once pain
fully apparent. It must not be believed
that St. Augustine had, to use the
common phrase, “burnt his fingers,” and
so went too far in the inevitable moral
reaction. He never led the licentious
life which it has been thought fit to
ascribe to him.1 We have in his writings
a simple illustration of the way in which
the teaching of the Old Testament and
St. Paul with regard to woman entered
into the social life of Europe. Saint
Augustine, by nature one of the most
humane as he was one of the ablest of
his day, never loses an opportunity to
express his disdain for woman. “ After
the manner of her sex,” he observes in a
sermon when speaking of a woman’s
anger. “What does it matter whether
it be in the person of mother or sister;
we have to beware of Eve in every
woman,” he writes to a youth who hesi
tates to join his monastery because his
mother implores him to remain at home.
But it is chiefly in his final and mature
commentary on Genesis that the working
of St. Augustine’s mind is seen. Why
was woman created at all ? he asks
himself, and he can find no answer but
the painful need to carry on the race.
Perhaps, he suggests to himself, she was
made to be a companion to man. No,
he replies at once, for “ how much better
Finally, we have in St. John Chrysostom
a continuance of this unhappy tendency.
A great and popular preacher, with crowds
of women always hanging on his lips in
one of the chief cities of the Empire, he
is nevertheless thoroughly Pauline. He
sees symptoms of the feeble revolt that
even Christian woman is ever raising
against this new despotism of man, and
he insists that “ she shall not demand
equality, for she is under the head.”
But Chrysostom never breaks into
expressions of contempt.
When, however, we pass from the
Greek to the Latin branch of the Church,
and examine the writings of those
Fathers who were the absolute guides of
opinion for the next thousand years, this
pious misogyny at once takes a more
sombre, though at times a most amusing,
form. A gulf was beginning to yawn
between profane culture and sacred
culture. A constant brooding over the
Scriptures was accounted the only desir
able form of learning; and the conse
quences were disastrous for the cause of
woman.
Tertullian, the first of the Latin
Fathers, a sternly ascetic figure, opens
the chapter with the most violent phrase
ology. The first sentence of his work,
On the Adornment of Women, runs: “If
your faith were as firm as its eternal
reward, my beloved sisters, no one of
you, after learning of the living God and
her own condition as a woman, would
dare to seek gay apparel, but would dress
in rags and remain in dirt as a sorrowful
and penitent Eve.” “ Thou,” he says, a
few lines afterwards, “thou art the devil’s
gate, the betrayer of the tree, the first
deserter of the divine law ! ” He, more
1 As I have shown in my Saint Augustine and
than any others, praises virginity, until His Age.
�WOMAN IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN TEACHING
two men could live and converse together
than a man and a woman.” Later, how
ever, he discovers a peculiar reason for
the creation of woman. He asks him
self how this glorious being, as he has
described Adam, could be deceived by
the clumsy trickery of the serpent. Pos
sibly, he goes on, God created a being
of inferior intelligence and will—woman
—with a view to the carrying-out of this
pre-arranged drama of the Fall. So it is
when St. Augustine comes to deal with
the polygamous lives of the patriarchs of
the Old Testament. As a heretic, he
had boldly ridiculed them as barbaric
types. As a convert, he had taken
refuge in the broad harbour of “mystery.”
Now, in his new conviction of woman’s
absolute inferiority, he sees polygamy to
be a perfectly defensible arrangement.
In one of his works (De bono conjugal!)
he is ready to allow that, even in Chris
tian times, a man may have a second
wife or mistress if his first is barren,
though still alive. But would he allow
a wife two husbands? No, because “by
a secret law of nature things that are
higher must be unique, while the things
that are subject are set under—not only
one under one, but, if the system of
nature or society allow, even several
under one, not without becoming dignity.”
The two other leaders of Latin Chris
tianity, St. Ambrose and St. Jerome, are
little more favourable to woman. St.
Ambrose does not, indeed, show any
deliberate contempt. Woman must be
obedient, but not servile, to her hus
band. In one place he makes an amus
ing attempt to find a ground for the
restriction of her work and education.
She is more fitted for bodily work, he
says, because “remember that God took
a rib out of Adam’s body, not a part of
his soul, to make her.” And when he is
31
asked why she must veil herself in the
churches, while her husband does not,
he answers, because “ she was not made
to the image of God, like man.” St.
Jerome, who through most of his life
had a circle of noble Roman ladies in
daily intercourse with him, has never
theless a fine theoretical contempt for
woman. A great Scriptural scholar, he
never fails to endorse and amplify the dis
dainful references to woman in the Old
Testament, such as that she is “the root
of all evil.” He points out with some
complacency how rarely the saints of the
Old Testament are described as having
daughters, though they have many sons,
and how the reverse is true of the wicked
kings. In his attacks on Jovinian—a
Luther of the fourth century—he habitu
ally depreciates woman for the purpose
of discrediting marriage; “ but marriage
is good for those who are afraid to* sleep
alone at night,” he says. In a letter to
Heliodorus, who hesitates to join him
in the desert, he says: “Though thy
father cling to thee, and thy mother rend
her garments and show thee the breasts
thou hast sucked, thrust them aside with
dry eyes to embrace the cross.” This
letter is said to have been learned by
heart by Jerome’s lady pupils.
We thus see that while, as I described
in the preceding chapter, a remarkable
advance was being made in the cultured
mind of the age with regard to the treat
ment of women, the Christian Church
was preparing a terrible reaction. Stoic
and neo-Platonist thinkers, and educated
Romans in general, were forming a more
enlightened judgment. From the north
the barbarians were marching down with
a great and menacing fund of undis
ciplined passion, it is true, yet with an
ideal of womanhood which was singularly
just and elevated. From the south and
�32
WOMAN IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN TEACHING
east the new religions of Egypt and
Persia were bringing an equally liberal
and humane temper on this point. A
fair field was opening to the hope and
ambition of woman. But all the time
the shadow of the Hebraic ideal was
falling over the Christian Church, and
the Christian Church was destined to
reach the supreme authority. By the
end of the fourth century “ paganism ”
was in its agony. By the middle of the
fifth century it was dead, and Christianity
was all-powerful.
The writings of
Augustine and Ambrose and Jerome
ruled the life of Europe. Their ideas
about women enter into the Church life
and social life and the legislation of
every country, as it settles down into
orderly administration.
In the fifth century the Councils began
to close the door of the ministry effectu
ally against women. Few deaconesses
can be found after that time. One by
one the public functions were reserved
for the clergy. Women were forbidden,
successively, to teach, to baptise, to
preach, or take any order whatever.
Councils of bishops began to dispose of
women in a curious fashion. At the
Council of Macon, in 585, a bishop was
found to hold the opinion that woman
had no soul.1 He was immediately cor
rected, but the appearance of a bishop
with such a theory is significant. At the
Council of Auxerre, in 578, the bishops
forbade women, on account of their
“impurity,” to take the sacrament in
their hands as men did. On every side
woman was forced to retire from the
position she had won. The dignity
which the Stoics had at length granted
her was flung to the winds once more.
“The chain was broken,” says Mlle.
Chauvin in her Professions accessibles aux
femmes. “ With these Jewish doctrines,
supported presently by the old legal
texts, tradition recovered its force. A
new and larger and more painful evolu
tion had to commence, in the course of
which the two conflicting principles, con
quering and conquered in turn, gave to
the Middle Ages a very varied and often
contradictory legislation.”
The profound social importance of the
adoption of this reactionary view of
woman is best realised in the legislation
of the following centuries. We have
seen that the harshness of the old Roman
law had almost disappeared by the
beginning of the second century. Custom
and legal devices had taken the stiii£*
out of what was left. But when the
influence over the legislative authorities
passes from the Stoics to the Christian
prelates, reaction sets in. I have already
quoted Sir Henry Maine's judgment that
“ the latest Roman law, so far as it is
touched by the Constitutions of the
Christian emperors, bears some marks of
a reaction against the liberal doctrines of
the great Antonine jurisconsults.” In
the political disruption of Europe that
followed the barbarian invasion there
was a period of judicial chaos, during
which the modifications induced by cus
tom were lost sight of. When the study
of the texts was resumed, their literal
harshness was felt to coincide with the
teaching of the Fathers, and was applied
without mercy. In the feudal legislation
which was built up out of the barbaric
customs and the Roman law, under
1 Bebel and Mlle. Chauvin, and other feminist
writers, give a wrong impression that the Council Church influence, woman sank lower and
deliberated on the subject. The acta of the lower. In this section theology and
Council make it clear that only one bishop held
canon law interfered more than anywhere
the opinion, to the horror of his colleagues.
�WOMAN IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN TEACHING
else. In the end a legislation emerged
which was compounded of the old
Roman injustice and the new JudseoChristian contempt. The whole of the
ground won in Greece and Rome was
lost. Woman, as Mr. Lecky says,
sank to a lower legal position than she
had ever occupied under paganism.
“In this union of Church and State,”
says Mrs. Cady Stanton, “ mankind
touched the lowest depth of degrada
tion.”
I am, however, descending too speedily
into the abyss of the Dark Ages, though
it is, perhaps, advisable to point out at
once the frightful retrogression that took
place. But before examining in greater
detail the miserable period for woman
which the teaching of the Fathers
initiated, it is advisable to glance at the
brighter side of the influence of Chris
tianity. How, in the face of all this, can
ecclesiastical writers make such urgent
claim to the gratitude of women ? How
could a humane and elevated religion
like early Christianity fail so utterly to
support this social reform ? The truth
is that Christianity did bring into the
Roman world—though it was not the
only religion to do so—ideals and prin
ciples which aided the cause of woman;
but it nullified their action by unprac
tical excesses and mischievous errors. I
am not thinking so much of the elevation
of Mary to the supreme position among
mortals. So far was this from being a
novelty in the Roman world that it was,
on the contrary, forced on the Church
itself by the inveterate custom of the
pagans. Isis and Cybele and Frigga and
Minerva, and the hundred other pagan
goddesses, could only be banished from
the hearts of the people by a substitution
of the image of Mary. Statues of Isis
and hymns to Cybele were adapted to
33
the mother of Christ. Moreover, the
Church strictly insisted that Mary had
been raised to such an altitude by no
effort, and for no merit, of her own;
hence the elevation gave little real
encouragement.
But it is urged that Christianity at
least aided the cause of woman by rais
ing matrimony to the dignity of a sacra
ment. Those who write like this read
the teaching of the modern Church into
the early centuries. It is perfectly true
that the Roman world needed a more
serious conception of the marriage bond,
though it is also true that the Romans
of the fourth century had less to learn in
this direction than is usually supposed.
It is true, again, that the Christian
Church brought a severe ideal of mar
riage, and so far rendered a social
service, and a service to woman. But
the Church took away with the left hand
what it gave with the right. While sus
taining the rigour it destroyed the dignity
of marriage. It set itself, as St. Jerome
expressed it, to “lay the axe of virginity at
the root of the tree of matrimony.” It
never declared marriage sinful, but it
went as near to such a declaration as was
possible. It strongly and persistently,
by all its great teachers, advocated
abstinence from marriage. It denounced
divorce with an irrational zeal—though
the Fathers said it was not absolutely
unjustifiable for the husband to re-marry
when the wife had sinned—and it used
violent language of second marriages.
It represented sexual love to be an out
come of sin; strictly forbade indulgence
in it, even for married folk, for its own
sake, and on the eve of holy days; con
demned it as incompatible with the holy
office of the priest; and generally ascribed
to it an odour of the pit. No great
social service, and no advantage to
D
�34
WOMAN IN THE EARLY CHRISTIAN TEACHING
woman, could result from a gospel which
was marred by such eccentricities.
Of the other services to women which
are alleged only a few gave absolute
advantages. The opening for women
which was provided by the founding of
nunneries will be dealt with more fully
in the next chapter, but it may be said
at once that this is a strange claim. The
theologian might just as well boast that
he opened up the profession of usury to
the Jew by closing every other profession
and employment against him. Legouve
finds that Christianity conferred an in
calculable boon on woman by insisting,
“ for the first time in the history of the
world,” that the husband was just as
rigorously bound to fidelity as the wife.
We have already seen by many quota
tions that this was a common doctrine
of the Stoics and neo-Platonists; and
Legouve admits that what the Church
did in this respect soon disappeared in
the disorder of the Middle Ages. On
the other hand, one can readily and
gladly admit that several of the Christian
emperors did obtain changes in law in
favour of women; but these were quickly
neutralised in that fatal reconstruction of
European law which all admit to have
been disastrous for women, and which
was in this department predominantly
ruled by the Church law. “ This will
never be a good world for women,” said
Kingsley, repeating the opinion of Maine,
“ until the last remnant of the canon law
is swept from the face of the earth.”
In this wise, therefore, came and
passed a great crisis in the affairs of
women 1,500 years ago. We have seen
that the notion of woman being uniformly
oppressed or degraded under pagan
ideas, and of her condition beginning to
improve as soon as Christianity came to
power, is the reverse of the truth. Here
and there over England you find, perhaps
on a desolate moor, some trace of one of
the solid roads that the Romans extended
over Europe 2,000 years ago, and that
no succeeding people would even try to
maintain until our own age. Those
relics of Roman roads, peeping out of
centuries of idle undergrowth, fitly
symbolise the fortune of woman’s cause
in Europe. The work that was done for
woman was allowed to lapse—nay, was
stricken from the hands of the converted
peoples. The life of the Middle Ages
has clothed it with idle weeds, so that
we only recover it with difficulty to-day.
Woman has had to wait for the new
paganism of our time—our Condorcets,
and Robert Owens, and J. S. Mills—to
stretch a hand back across the gulf of the
Christian domination, and take up afresh
the work of Plutarch and Seneca and
Hypatia. With what truth the interven
ing age is called a gulf (in this respect),
and into what depths the Judseo-Christian theory of woman allowed men to
descend, I proceed to indicate, as briefly
as possible, in the next chapter. But 1
cannot but apply in this connection the
words in which Mr. Lowes Dickinson
refers to Plato’s teaching on another
social question: “ With what a breath of
the air of dawn, what a gleam of Mediter
ranean light, do these words come waft
ing, as in a blue heaven, over the deli
rious fumes of the Middle Ages, to
remind us of what men were before they
had learned to distrust their own fairest
impulses and instincts, and to seek in
authority the good and the true, which it
is their privilege to divine through experi
ence.” These words come spontaneously
to the pen when one passes from the old
pagan work for woman over the abyss of
the Middle Ages to the awakening of
Europe in the nineteenth century.
�WOMAN IN THE MIDDLE AGES
35
Chapter IV.
WOMAN IN THE MIDDLE AGES
The period through which I am now
going to follow the fortunes of woman,
in so far as they were influenced by the
Church, stretches from the fifth century
to the fifteenth. It is necessary to pick
one’s way through this part of history
with care. Nothing would be easier
than to plunge into medieval chronicles,
or the writings of Lecky, White, Buckle,
Milman, Lea, etc., and pile up an indict
ment of the Middle Ages, and so of the
Church which dominated the Middle
Ages, that would unnerve any apologist.
It is just possible, on the other hand, as
Maitland showed, to avoid the mud, and
step daintily from tuft to tuft, and then per
suade the world that the Dark Age is not
a morass at all. I wish to do neither. I
wish to outline with impartial pencil the
course of the woman cause from the
fifth to the fifteenth century, to touch
the features of social life only in so far
as they illustrate this, and so to discover
with what gratitude or resentment the
woman of to-day may look back to the
dominance of the Christian Church in
Europe during that period. The subject
is enormously complicated and seductive,
so that I must keep conscientiously to
the narrow path lit by my inquiry.
One of the women writers who has
best succeeded—apart from unreliable
sectaries—in discovering the consola• tions which medieval life offered to
women says : “ Although women appear
to have had a wider field of activity than
they afterwards enjoyed when social life
became more complex, there was a
counteracting influence which told
against the development and free
exercise of their energies. This was
the influence of the Church. It was
the policy of the Church to keep women
in a subordinate position.”1
Other
writers on the fortunes of women use
stronger phrases. Mlle. Chauvin says
that “ at the close of the Middle Ages
reaction was triumphant in the whole of
society, in every rank, every subject,
every function,” and she expressly traces
this to that shadow of the Hebraic ideal
of woman which I have described as
stealing over Christendom. Legouve
fHistoire morale des femmes, p. 183) says
that “under the feudal regime conjugal
morals return to brutality.” I will not
venture to quote the language of Mrs.
Gage, or Mr. Lecky, or Mr. Lea, or
Professor K. Pearson, or Professor W.
White, or Bebel, or Büchner. Let us
examine the question with patience and
method. Medieval Europe arose from
the fusion of the dissolving Roman
Empire with the invading Celts and
Teutons. On both sides there was, to
begin with, or before conversion to
Christianity, a fair ideal of womanhood.
What was the result of the fusion as
regards the general esteem of woman
and her work ? And how far was the
Church responsible for the result ?
After all that we have seen, from Sir
Henry Maine and Mlle. Chauvin, and
1 Georgiana Hill, Women in English Life,
p. vii.
�36
WOMAN IN THE MIDDLE AGES
other legal writers, it is hardly necessary
to linger over the question of woman’s
position in law. It became worse than
it had been in any civilised nation for
many a century. By the end of the
eleventh century the dominance of the
Church or Canon Law was supreme, and
it determined the common law, whose
barbarities we have only lately repealed.
In an earlier chapter I illustrated it from
the legal condition of woman in Massa
chusetts little more than half a century
ago. Its fundamental principle was the
inferiority of woman. She was deprived
of the control of her person and property,
deprived of the resource of legal testi
mony, and made morally and economi
cally dependent to a pernicious extent
on her husband. There is no defence of
this legal degradation of woman, and
there is no question but that, after allow
ing for the influence of the ancient
Roman texts, it was due to the domi
nance of Church law over civic law. It is
unnecessary to say more of disabilities
which are yet fresh in the memory of
women.
.It is not so easy to express in brief
the industrial and political position of
woman during the Middle Ages, as the
conditions were exceedingly varied and
the authorities seem to be discordant.
It is possible to distinguish three broad
stages. From the fifth to the eleventh
century the industrial position of woman
remained what it had been under the
older religion, but she lost the old
respect. It had been a recognised and
necessary institution of barbaric life that
the women should work while the men
fought.
As Christianity completely
failed to check their pugnacity and
bloodshed, the work of the women was
little changed. But they were no longer
held to be “ something sacred and pro
phetic.” The Age of Iron (up to the
eleventh century) had no time to think
of the economic position of woman.
Here and there the women of "the higher
class had some distinction. The AngloSaxon woman could inherit and dispose
of property, and could sue in the courts.
Sometimes she succeeded to a barony,
and exercised the full local jurisdiction
attaching to it; there are records of her
attendance at the Witenagemote. With
the coming of the Normans, however,
she lost her right to hold property—the
root of all power and enduring respect—
and became more dependent. And the
condition of the poorer women was
everywhere degraded. Professor K.
Pearson suspects that the men of the
Germanic tribes had accepted Chris
tianity eagerly because it was a masculine
religion, and lent itself to the subjection
of their wives. The older religions were
women-made, as they went back to a
matriarchal age. Hence the women
suffered heavily by the conversion of the
tribes to Christianity.
But in what I call the second stage of
the Middle Ages woman’s industrial
position greatly improved. Almost every
craft and trade was open to her as well
as to men, and some, such as brewing,
were almost reserved to women. They
were admitted to guilds, they joined with
the men in building the great cathedrals
and in making pilgrimages, and so on.
As abbesses of the great monasteries
that now sprang up, women here and
there obtained a very high distinction in
the community. The old Germanic
feeling towards them re-appeared in the
well-known form of chivalry. The new
born poetry of Europe was filled with the
praise of woman and the desire to serve
her. In places they had a considerable
culture. Learned ladies corresponded in
�WOMAN IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Latin with eminent prelates. Sometimes
they opened public schools—as when
the widow and daughters of Master
Manegold continued that teacher’s school
of philosophy at Paris after his death.
This is the period of medieval life in
which enthusiasts seek evidence with
which tb rebut the name of the “ Dark
Ages.” As the Middle Ages embrace
seven or eight long and changeful
centuries, it is obvious that one can
easily select sufficient passages of romance
and even beauty from its chronicles to
make an alluring picture—if one ignores
all the rest. I have not to defend here
the phrase “ Dark Ages,” except insofar
as woman is concerned; but I may
admire, as I pass, the facility with which
these optimistic writers can overlook
the crass ignorance of the people, the
violence and knavery that covered the
whole country, the plagues and famines
that decimated towns and villages every
few years, the flood of spurious and in
decent relics, the degradation of the
clergy and monks, the slavery of the
serfs, the daily brutalities of the ordeal
and the torture, the coarse and bloody
pastimes, the insecurity of life, the
triumphant ravages of disease, the check
of scientific inquiry, and a hundred
other features of medieval life. A humane
romanticist, like Scott or Morris, will
temper those features; but spend a few
hours over the Latin text of the medieval
chronicles ! If, indeed, this were only a
transitional stage between barbarism and
civilisation, we could pardon much. But
we know perfectly well to-day that the
Roman Empire at its death had handed
on to Europe a fine system of education,
an excellent beginning of medical science,
an effective restraint of violence and
cupidity, a concern for culture and
humanity, an admirable legal system, and
37
a superb scheme of roads, bridges, aque
ducts, and other material conveniences.
However, to return to my point, the
position of woman in the best period of
the Middle Ages fell far short of what
the earlier progressive movement had
promised. The medieval woman of the
wealthier class had one choice—marriage
or the nunnery. In the latter case she
might become abbess, and so exercise a
certain power over her community and
the dependent villagers. In neither case
could she hope, except in an illegitimate
and unenviable way, to take any active
interest in public affairs. The lady of
the manor dwelt with her young children
in an upper part of the house. She came
down to dine and meet visitors in the
hall; and her position as mistress, and
the frequent absence of her lord, gave
her some distinction. But her world
was a painfully narrow one. Rarely
educated, immersed in the task of seeing
to the sewing and brewing and spinning,
united for life to a man she had not
chosen, and jealously screened from
intercourse with other men, her chance
of happiness was limited. We find a
great lady highly praised because in forty
years she never went ten miles away from
her home. Her life was a species of
slavery in comparison with the life of
woman at that very period in pagan
Japan or among the Moors in Spain.
Moreover, it was only the woman of
the higher classes who had any recom
pense for her loss of liberty under the
feudal system. The wife of the labourer
was a chattel of the estate. Her life was
one of unceasing drudgery; it is folly to
take the village pastimes of her teens and
early twenties as any redemption of her
bondage. See was sold into slavery to
her husband by her father, and was
treated with a different legal code from
�38
WOMAN IN THE MIDDLE AGES
her brother. Her husband had the
legal “right” to flog her—a legal and
religious encouragement of the most
brutal act man can stoop to—and to
claim for her the pain and degradation
of public punishment if she resented his
coarseness.
The ducking-stool, the
scold’s bridle, the stocks, and other such
institutions, ensured her submission and
silence. And if she attempted to live
apart from the coarseness and violence
when her first husband was dead, there
hung over her continuously the dread
accusation of witchcraft and the brutal
and stupid tests of it that the Middle
Ages provided. From the Church she
could get no word but “ obedience
man was made in the image of God, but
woman was not.
I have said that there was a third
category of medieval woman—the nuns,
and the women who worked at trades
and crafts in the towns. I will speak
presently of conventual life as such;
but, though it is true that for a short
time the towns and the convents offered
varied employment to women, the in
creasing penetration of the canon law
into the general system, and other
causes, soon brought this to an end.
Through the nunneries women had
resumed the profession of teaching, which
the early Church had taken from them.
Nuns were also taught and practised the
rudimentary medicine of the medieval
world. In the towns all the lighter and
some of the heavier crafts were opened
to them. All this, Mlle. Chauvin says,
disappeared in the course of the thir
teenth century — the most Christian
century of the whole era. It would be
absurd, no doubt, to see the action of
canon law alone in this narrowing of
woman’s industrial sphere (and therefore
of her economic independence), but it
would have been impossible for men to
accomplish it if there had not been a
lowering of the general feeling with
regard to woman.
That there was this perversion of the
general attitude towards woman needs
little proof. For the earlier portion of
the Middle Ages it is plausible to hold
the Church excused on the ground of
its powerlessness to restrain the violent
and semi-civilised northern barbarians.
One cannot help recalling that it is clear
from their legends that their earlier
religion, as long as they believed in it,
had been able to restrain them, especially
in the matter of respect for their wives.
It is singular that Christianity should
have suffered so many of them to
descend even to polygamy for several
centuries. However, it is more im
portant to observe that the violence of
the wicked was not a whit more injurious
to woman than the religiousness of the
good. That is a paradoxical statement,
but the reader must remember at what
point we left the Christian conception of
woman in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The extravagances of the Fathers were
repeated with terrible emphasis in the
Middle Ages. St. Jerome and St.
Augustine had urged their friends to
thrust aside their mothers with stern
disdain. St. Columban, accordingly,
stepped over the prostrate form of his
mother as she clung to the door-posts to
keep him from the dreaded monastery.
St. Elizabeth of Thuringia sent her
children away because the love of them
interfered with her spiritual growth ; she
was content when at last she could look
on them with the same indifference as
on other children. It was an act of
heroism; but it was a crushing in
dictment of the religious system
that directed her. St. Catherine of
�WOMAN IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Siena1 assured her contemporaries,
who believed her to be inspired, that
the blessed in heaven were so united
with God that “if a father or mother
sees her son in hell, or the son his
father or mother, they will not be
troubled.” Often enough this kind of
piety took the form of the patristic con
tempt of woman. We have a letter
(No. III.) written by St. Bernard in the
name of one of his monks to parents
who were emploring him to return to
them. There is no question but that it
was written by St. Bernard himself, the
greatest spiritual ruler of the Middle Ages.
It contains passages such as this :—
What have I to do with you ? What have I
received from you but sin and misery ? Only
this corruptible body that I bear do I confess
that I hold from you. Is it not enough for you
that you have brought me into this miserable
world ; that you, being sinners, have begotten
me in sin; that, being born in sin, you have
nourished me in sin ; but you must envy me the
mercy of God I have obtained, and wish to
make of me a son of hell? You may choose to
neglect your own salvation, but why should you
wish also to destroy mine ?
Such scenes as the Egyptian desert had
witnessed—when, for instance, an aged
mother had crossed the wilderness, with
great pain and fatigue, to have a last
look at her hermit sons, and they
slammed the door upon her—were seen
on every side in the Middle Ages.
This question of the conventual life of
the Middle Ages has many sides, it is
true. It is frequently said that woman
was indebted to the Church for providing
this retreat from a violent world. From
the description, which Mrs. Hill—who
urges this point—gives of the painfully
retired character of woman’s life in the
1 I quote this and the two preceding incidents
from Miss Eckenstein’s Woman -under Monas
ticism.
39
upper storeys of the great manor houses,
one would think that further retreat from
the world was unnecessary. It must be
noted, too, that other apologists for the
conventual system commend it for a
precisely opposite reason ; that is to say,
because it affords women their one
opportunity of taking a share in the
active work of the world. However, we
shall the more quickly reach a true
estimate of its value if we grant both
claims, in different applications, and
pass on to consider the other side of the
conventual system. On a broad view of
the situation it is impossible to doubt
that the concentration of women in
nunneries during the Middle Ages was
a great social evil. Let me put it in a
concrete form. A few years ago I had
occasion to study the conventual system
in France about the beginning of the
twelfth century, for the purpose of
writing a life of Abélard and Heloise.
I found that the chief ecclesiastical
chroniclers of the time spoke with
bitterness of the moral condition of the
great majority of the nunneries, and
case after case turned up in the chronicles
of the suppression of convents on
account of their immorality. On the
other hand, two or three reformers of the
type of St. Bernard were causing the
erection of huge nunneries of a strictly
virtuous character. But what was the
social effect of this new crusade? Its
chief result was to break up thousands
of refined homes, and to withdraw from
their natural task of sweetening the world
thousands of married women of the
better type. In the one abbey of
Fontevraud there were many hundreds
of married women who had left their
husbands. Abélard’s mother and wife
both entered nunneries.
This was
happening in every Christian country, in
�40
WOMAN IN THE MIDDLE AGES
direct proportion to its religious earnest
ness, all through the Middle Ages. We
may fully recognise that this was heroic
conduct, and that it was prompted by
the most elevated motives ; but it was a
disastrous procedure for the cause of
womankind, if not of mankind. Now
that the world at large has discarded the
conventual ideal as an illusion, this
should be obvious. Then, if ever, there
was work for women to do in the world,
and women like Heloise knew it. But
they were persuaded or forced to bury
themselves in convents, where, if they
escaped the degradation which so often
befel those institutions, their devotion
was absorbed in a pitiful struggle against
maternal instinct and the sense of
injustice to their sex.
Nor can this question be left without
some reference to the effect on the world
at large of setting up these unnatural
standards of virtue. The strange idea is
entertained sometimes that it was par
ticularly expedient to set up this trans
cendental ideal in a vicious world like
that of the Middle Ages. It would be
difficult to conceive any theory less
warranted by the actual experience of
the Christian Church. From the days
when St. Jerome and St, Augustine gave
their austere message to the Roman
world such preaching had been a failure.
A few were converted, and realised the
ethereal type set before them at the
expense of a sacrifice of all the best gifts
of life. The vast majority of the people
felt the message to be an unnatural one,
and totally disregarded it. The excesses
of the Fathers were fully sustained by
the medieval theologians. One monk
of Monte Cassino published a vision
of hell (from which Dante probably
borrowed) that had been vouchsafed to
him. In one of its most fearful depart
ments were the souls of men and women
who had not abstained from their con
jugal rights on the eves of holy days 1
Peter Lombard, one of the most weighty
of the schoolmen, laid it down that it
was a venial sin only for married folk to
have intercourse, when children were
impossible, for the purpose of avoiding
incontinence, but a mortal sin to do it
for the pleasure alone. St. Thomas, and
practically all the theologians, held (and
hold to-day) that the pleasure attaching
to procreation was not part of God’s
original design, but a direct consequence
of sin. A woman was made to kneel out
side the church to be “ purified ” after
child-birth before she could again share
in the worship. Naturally, the people at
large felt this conception of love to be
unnatural and untrue, and they followed
their own inclinations.
Prostitution
assumed terrible proportions, and was
virtually sanctioned by Church and State
at times. Burckhardt says that there
were found to be 6,800 prostitutes
(besides innumerable concubines) in
Rome alone in 1490. In German cities
foreign princes were greeted with bands
of them provided by the municipality;
and the Church was content to enact
that they must attend worship at times.
When venereal disease was introduced
from America, it spread through all
classes, from pope to peasant, with the
most appalling rapidity.
I am loth to enter in detail on the
question of the unrestrained licence of
the Middle Ages, but there are still one
or two respects in which it concerns our
subject—namely, the culpability of the
Church and the mischief wrought by its
reactionary conception of woman and
the family. The first is the right of the
baron, and at times of the ecclesiastical
potentate, to the newly married woman
�WOMAN IN THE MIDDLE AGES
41
for one or more days. This was only eleventh century written by a cardinal
seriously attacked in France, and then and warmly commended by the pope—
by the peasants themselves, in the does not concern us. But the growth
sixteenth century. The sacred prostitu of concubinage was a frightful comment
tion practised in some of the Syrian on the Church’s claim to have uplifted
temples was a perverse religious custom, woman. Things came to such a pass
enjoined by the priests. This medieval that parishioners, for the protection of
custom was suffered by the Christian their own families, compelled their clergy
Church in defiance of its sternest ideals. to keep concubines. Even when the
The second important point was the higher clergy met sometimes for ecume
enforcement of obligatory confession in nical councils, the occasion was marked
the thirteenth century. It is unneces by a notable concourse of women.
sary to enlarge on this. The third was
It has been necessary to touch briefly
the fateful and fatal enforcement of on these well-known features of medieval
sacerdotal celibacy. Lea’s History of life in order to bring out the position
Sacerdotal Celibacy must instruct those of woman and the responsibility of the
who desire fuller information about the Church for that position. At the same
effect of this. I will only quote the time, the canon law itself was making
conclusion of Mr. Lecky, that “ the enactments that obviously increased the
writers of the Middle Ages are full of the growing disorder. The Church had
accounts of nunneries that were like raised marriage to the dignity of a sacra
brothels, of the vast multitude of in ment. But, besides undermining that
fanticides within their walls, and of that dignity by the free use of “the axe of
inveterate prevalence of incest among virginity ” and a morbid disdain of love,
the clergy which rendered it necessary it largely neutralised its work by fencing
again and again to issue the most strin marriage about with numerous restric
gent enactments that priests should not tions and impediments, for the lifting of
be permitted to live with their mothers which money had to be paid to Rome.
and sisters.” When Hildebrand failed As early as the ninth century marriage
to induce the civil and ecclesiastical was forbidden—without a bought dis
authorities to enforce celibacy among pensation — within seven degrees of
the clergy, he sent emissaries to stir up kindred. The degrees of carnal relation
the people against them, and frightful ship were reduced, but at the same time
disorders ensued.
Urban II. gave it was enacted that spiritual relationship
nobles permission to enslave the wives (of god-parents and god-children) should
who would not surrender their priest be an impediment. All these restric
husbands. Other nobles levied a tax on tions tended to foster disorder and free
the clergy of their districts under the unions. The same must be said of the
title of permission to keep concubines. Church’s irrational rigidity as regards
The whole proceeding was in itself a divorce. Sexual disorder increased.
contempt of woman, and it had for one Woman became cheaper in the esteem
of its chief consequences an increase of of men, and the narrowing of her interest
her medieval degradation. The terrible to domestic work and the desire to please
growth of unnatural vice among the men proceeded apace.
clergy — described in a work of the
The subject would not be complete
�42
WOMAN IN THE MIDDLE AGES
without a formal reference to the treat
ment of witches. It is possible to exag
gerate the culpability of the Church in
this matter. The age was intensely
superstitious, and it was a part of the
almost universal practice of men, in or
out of Christian times, to regard an
injury as the work of malicious deities,
or evil genii, or devils. When Chris
tianity had, as is usual with triumphant
religions, turned all the old pagan deities
into devils, this practice was inevitably
increased without any direct encourage
ment ; but that the distinctive teaching
of the Christian Bible and Church was
particularly responsible for this awful
chapter of medieval history cannot be
questioned. The mere fact that men
such as John Wesley retained the old
idea in the full light of the nineteenth
century is proof enough of its having a
Scriptural base; nor is there the slightest
doubt that the Church fostered, instead
of moderating, the practice, just as it
solemnly presided at the clumsy and
brutal ordeal and judicial duel. Mrs.
Hill goes so far as to claim that “the
Church was largely responsible for the
terrible persecutions inflicted on women,
and chiefly on the poorest and most
helpless, on the ground of witchcraft,”
through its “dissemination of the theory
of woman’s inherent vice.” Most
certainly this side of the teaching of the
Church had a great deal to do with it.
There is ample evidence for this in the
language of the time. The painfulness
of the facts is not mitigated when we
remember that these “ witches ” were
among the very few who brought relief
to the sick poor in those days. Professor
K. Pearson, in his most suggestive chap
ters on woman in his Ethic of Freethought, puts the indictment in a more
interesting light. The witches were
largely, he thinks, the successors of the
“ wise women ” (the name was given to
them, it will be remembered) who were
held in such honour among the Germanic
peoples before their conversion. Chris
tianity had no further use for them. It
brushed them disdainfully aside, and
represented their communications with
the pagan gods as a social evil. Thus,
by the simple process of giving the name
of devils to the gods of the older religion,
it turned priestesses into witches, doctors
into maleficent hags, and a disposition
that had been respected as almost more
than human into a less than human
viciousness and ugliness.1 The-ghastly
and prolonged outrage on the more help
less women of Europe that ensued must
be considered when one is calculating
what woman owes to Christianity.
Finally, a balanced and impartial
judgment on the position of woman in
the Middle Ages must take account of
chivalry. The progress of historical
truth is impeded by nothing more fatally
than by exaggerating the evil or ignoring
the good of the Middle Ages. When a
Freethinker like William Morris can
represent the golden age of the future as
a sort of revival of the Middle Ages,2
there must have been some beauty and
joy in it. There was a great deal of
both in the later Middle Ages, though
the Church was not at all responsible
for the latter, and was only the director,
1 For a convenient glimpse at the old Germanic
idea of woman’s dignity and closer approach to
the gods, I would commend the relevant pas
sages in Kingsley’s Hypatia. It is almost the
only part of the novel that may be taken as
sound history.
2 But it is hardly necessary to point out that
Morris is thinking of a fourteenth century puri
fied of the horrors I have described; he is not
denying that they were there in the past. Hence
the fallacy of quoting him as an admirer of the
Middle Ages.
�WOMAN IN THE MIDDLE AGES
43
for woman, with this difference, that it
now looked chiefly to her physical beauty,
and made a doll of her. Hence, though
here and there it encouraged culture in
women, and generally relieved the gloom
in which the new religion would enwrap
her “ as a sorrowful and repentant Eve,”
it was not of much lasting use to the
cause of woman. At the most, we may
welcome it as a sign that at this time the
nobles bade the priests keep for them
selves their pessimistic estimate of woman,
and acknowledged that she was, at least,
a pleasant and amiable creature. Women
who have no higher ambition may be
content with that. Others will patiently
observe that, behind all this glittering
show and lip-worship, woman’s legal and
economic and political position steadily
deteriorated.
In summing up, therefore, we must
say that through the whole of this strange
and chequered period we find the patristic
depreciation of woman sinking into the
mind of Europe and breaking out in its
social life. In the better features of the
time women have, as a rule, no part.
They are not benefited by the quest of
the Holy Grail; they have very little
share in the vivid intellectual movement
of the twelfth century, and none in that
of the thirteenth, or in the artistic move
ment that sprang up beside it and
formed the chief glory of the Middle
Ages. Like the Jews, they are gradu
ally driven from every profession and
public office. Theologians and ecclesias
tical jurists obtain supreme power, and
these are the most deadly enemies of
women. Life-long seclusion in the inner
apartments of a man she has not chosen,
or interment in a nunnery that is either
1 Even Hallam says: “ The gallantry of those degraded or unnatural, is the choice
ages was often very adulterous........ The morals (within limits) of the daughter of the
of chivalry, we cannot deny, were not pure”
wealthy. Life-long drudgery, with few
(p. 666).
Hot the creator, of the former. However
that may be, we have to take account of
this great movement known as chivalry,
which is so much urged on us by those
who, for some occult reason, think them
selves bound to defend the Dark Ages.
In some respects, the history of chivalry
lies like a path of light across the gloom
of the period. People are apt to jumble
together a good many things under the
head of chivalry—the Holy Grail, the
troubadours, the knightly champions of
ladies, and so on. We must distinguish.
The movement which centres about the
quest of the Holy Grail was a great force
for good; but it was an ascetic move
ment, and did nothing for woman.
Study Parsifal, or Tennyson’s Holy Grail,
in default of serious history. The trou
badour movement was a defiant denial
of the theological advice as regards
woman, yet was based on much the same
estimate of her. To this movement she
was a centre of sexual charm, a pretty
doll—little or nothing more.
Chivalry proper was a more complicated
matter. It is now, however, recognised
by many historians that it was mainly an
erotic and licentious movement. Dante
was near the truth when he ascribed the
sin of Paolo and Francesca to reading
some of their gay exploits. Professor K.
Pearson suggests that the sole object of
all these knightly adventures was sexual
gratification. Certainly the whole of the
legends are redolent of free love.1 That
there was incidental good issue from it
is obvious; but it was not a movement
that could have been inspired by the
ascetic Christian Church. It was rather
a resurgence of the old Germanic regard
�44
THE EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION
and coarse pleasures, with a long vista
of sticks and whips, and scolds’-bridles,
and ducking-stools, with, perhaps, the
brutal ordeal on the slightest suspicion,
or the ghastly death of the witch, is the
prospect of the daughter of the poor.
Let us see what the next stage of Chris
tian development will do for her.
Chapter V.
THE EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION
Thus far the cause of woman has had
little reason to welcome the supplanting of
the native religions of Europe by Judaic
Christianity. It must be distinctly
understood that I speak of the cause
of woman as a problem of social ethics.
I am meeting the claim that woman has
been freed, uplifted, or ennobled in
some way by the coming of the Christian
Church. To test this I took woman as
she was, and had fair hope to be, in the
fourth century, when Christianity became
a social force. She had then obtained
almost complete control of her person
and her property, had the right to
make independent recourse to law, was
respected in public life when her ability
won a position in it, and had beaten
down in the minds of most thoughtful
men the older feeling of her inferiority.
The average active woman of our day
will say that it remained to secure for
her complete economic independence
and civic and political equality ; and she
will hardly even ask if Christianity gave
any assistance in this direction. But
we may just as confidently meet the
woman with less ambition for her sex,
and say that the coming of Christianity
wrought evil even from her modest point
of view. The teaching of the great Chris
tian leaders, caught up by the medieval
theologians, embodied in the canon law,
and thence conveyed to the civil law,
stamped afresh upon the mind of Europe
the idea of woman’s inferiority. Only a
desperate champion of the Church will
find consolation in the thought that
some few evaded the pressure by unsex
ing themselves in nunneries and becom
ing abbesses or saints. The sacrifice of
all the joy of life is a heavy price to pay
for a little dignity.
We must take a broad view, but not
a vague one. We must not think that
all was well because we can quote a few
prominent names of queens or ladies
from English history; or because we
catch a glimpse of feminine culture here
and there in the course of a thousand
years ; or because the Church canonised
women in whom it believed their human
nature to have been suppressed. The
fact is that, on the one hand, the
Christian Church did nothing for woman
which the Stoic and neo-Platonist
moralists were not doing—except to
build nunneries ; and, on the other, it
re-introduced the ideas they were success
fully uprooting, undid the whole of their
reform of the law with regard to her,
suffered the most violent and unjust
�THE EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION
45
woman’s social position. He says that,
if we would understand the Renaissance
society, it is essential to realise that
“ woman was held in equal esteem with
man.” There is no talk among them of
the “ emancipation ” of woman; but the
absence of such phrases only means that
it was assumed that the recovered Greek
culture was equally accessible to both
sexes. Women’s higher education at
that time was substantially the same as
man’s. Many women abstained from
marriage in order to devote themselves
more fully to culture. We find them
constantly in learned conversation with
men. Few turned very eagerly to art,
but literature and philosophy were
assiduously cultivated. The wives of
the distinguished princes of the time
are associated with their fame, and a
“crowd” of other women became pro
minent—“ even if their only distinction
lies in their harmonious blending of grace,
beauty, culture, morality, and piety.”
In some senses, in fact, the women
of the Renaissance were exceedingly
“advanced” from the modern point of
view. There was the inevitable attempt
to set up the Greek institution of the
hetaira, and many of these courtesans
were highly cultured and much respected.
But apart from this eccentricity there
was a general consciousness of charm
and of energy in the women, which was
completely antithetic to the Church ideal.
There was even a tendency to welcome
the title “virago”; though, of course,
the word had not then degenerated to
our present usage of it.
This movement is very interesting in
that it shows us* the old Greek culture,
that had promised so much for woman
on the whole, reviving again in Europe
1 Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien. It and at once making for the greater free
contains a special chapter on the position of
dom and culture of woman. I have
women (section v., ch. v.).
usage of her to spread, and by its absurd
conception of love and marriage and
celibacy occasioned a vast amount of
disorder. By the fourteenth century
woman (on the average) was not morally
higher than in the fourth, and she was
much lower in all other respects. We
now begin to ascend once more from the
valley of the Middle Ages, and we must
see how much Christianity had to do
with this tardy return to the path of pro
gress.
The question naturally occurs at once,
whether the Reformation brought any
advantage to the cause of woman; but
we may first give a passing glance at the
effect of the Renaissance. This hardly
extended beyond Italy, and was not
permanent. There are women writers
who think the revival of Greek culture
in the Renaissance had, if anything, a
bad effect on the position of woman.
Mlle. Chauvin, usually so well informed,
commits herself to the statement that
“ education, so generous in the convents
of the Middle Ages, was now restricted
to the catechism, to writing, reading, and
a little arithmetic.” She is wrong in
both terms of the comparison. Profane
culture was usually very much discouraged
in the convents of the Middle Ages; and,
in fact, the amount of teaching done by
these institutions was trifling in com
parison with their number and the
number of their inmates. On the other
hand, it is not difficult to discover that
the higher culture was very much
encouraged among the women of the
Renaissance.
Burckhardt1 gives a very different, and,
of course, far more authoritative, account
of the effect of the Renaissance on
�46
THE EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION
already mentioned an earlier revival of
it. While Christian countries were sunk
in the morass of the Middle Ages, the
Moors in Spain “offered all Europe a
shining example of a civilised and en
lightened State,” as one historian puts it.
In their social order women, like the
Jews, were free and respected. This
Arab civilisation was, as is known,
founded on Greek culture, which, in
active now in the land of its birth, had
gone round by Syria to the Mohamme
dans, and been brought by these to
Spain. In the thirteenth century direct
relations with Greece began to be
renewed. About the middle of the
fifteenth century the Turks took Con
stantinople, and Greek scholars flocked
to Italy.
It was thus the humanist
culture of the older world that lit again
the hope of woman in Europe for a
season. But, though prelates leaned
freely enough to the new culture in its
least austere forms, it was in strict an
tagonism to the formal ideal of the
Church, and excess and disorder were
bound to ensue. Lucretia Borgia must
not prevent us from appreciating the
better elements of the Renaissance, any
more than the Messaline can be thought
to stand for the women of pagan Rome.
The Renaissance brought back to Europe
the broader view that was characteristic
of the last days of paganism. As in its
first years, the Christian Church again
failed in its obvious duty (as far as the
cause of woman is concerned) to place
the new liberty on a moral foundation
and purge it of mere abuses.
The
Reformation in the north of Europe,
and the Counter-Reformation within the
Church in the south, revived the Judaic
ideal in all its narrowness, and drew a
veil once more over woman’s prospects.
That the Church of Rome was quickly
and thoroughly purged of all tendency
to a humane alleviation of the condition
of woman—except through the usual
narrow way of asceticism, if that can be
called an alleviation—needs no lengthy
proof. It was the last branch of the
Christian Church in our own day to
withdraw its opposition. But the ques
tion of the effect of the Reformation on
woman’s position is not so clear. While
Mrs. Cady Stanton thinks that the
Reformation “ loosened the grasp of the
Church upon woman, and is to be looked
upon as one of the most important steps
in this reform,” her colleague, Mrs.
Gage, says that the old idea of woman’s
inferiority and natural iniquity “took
new force after the rise of Melancthon,
Huss, and Luther.” While Mr. Lecky
thinks it is the great merit of Protes
tantism to have restored a truer view of
marriage and the sex-relation, and Bebel
says that “ the legitimate wife, who had
long since become an enemy of the
Catholic sensuality of the later Middle
Ages, gladly welcomed the Puritan spirit
of Protestantism,” we find Professor K.
Pearson maintaining that the Reforma
tion led to an increase of prostitution,
and gave woman only the choice between
that and a dull domestication, and that
Luther’s ideas encouraged sexual licence.
On some points, however, the contradic
tion is more apparent than real.
The Reformation being, above all, a
concentration of the Bible and a protest
against paganism and philosophy, its
general bearing on the woman-question
can be almost determined in advance.
Protestantism shrank in horror from the
new Greek culture, or any culture that
was not Biblical. Hence, as the New
Testament laid down no principles on
the subject, and certainly did not undo
the harshness and injustice of the Old,
�THE EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION
47
the clergy, monks, and nuns, but in its
turn tended to encourage the contempt
of woman. The destruction of all this
fine structure by Luther was,- therefore, a
social and moral service. One grave
excuse for licence—celibacy—was swept
away, and the Protestant Churches, in
setting up a more sober and rational
standard of conduct, could appeal with
more effect to the people.
But, partly owing to the perverse
Biblical idea of woman, partly owing to
economic changes which now set in, or
were increased, woman does not seem to
have gained much by the Reformation.
Bebel admits that German women were
“ in general no better off than before,”
and Mrs. G. Hill makes the same ad
mission for the women of England.
Mrs. Gage concludes that the Reforma
tion altered, but did not improve, the
condition of women. The exclusion of
women from trades and other than
domestic employments was now com
pleted. Bebel admits that this was not
due to religious influences, and, as a fact,
he does not realise that it was mostly
accomplished long before the Reforma
tion. Whatever the causes of it, this
total restriction of women to domestic
work made their life duller, stunted their
capacities, and completed their fatal
economic dependence on men. “What
the Greeks accomplished in the age of
Pericles—the domestication of woman—
the Germans achieved in the age of
Luther,” says Professor K. Pearson. It
is a perilous comparison of two very
different ages, and is hardly just to the age
of Pericles and Aspasia; but it expresses
1 I shall hardly be misunderstood to the the fact for Germany. Whether, as
extent of being thought to put the married
state above the unmarried. It is a matter of Professor Pearson goes on to say, it had
taste. I am only attacking the idea that there the effect of driving more women than
is anything superior or elevated in physical
virginity, or that there is anything inferior or in ever into public disorder is very much
any way lowering in physical love.
disputed. This, at least, is clear: it
it was to the very clear teaching of the
latter that the Reformers turned. Luther
had no personal vein of refinement to
correct or moderate the impression of
woman left by his assiduous study of the
Old Testament. He was frankly con
temptuous. “ No gown worse becomes
a woman than the desire to be wise,” he
said. So fully did he and the other
reformers submit to the Old Testament,
where the New did not expressly abro
gate it, that they were willing to permit
polygamy. Milton, on our side, pointed
out that the New Testament had not
withdrawn this privilege of the saints.
It seems indisputable that the Reformers
held that low estimate of woman in her
self which we should naturally expect
their constant brooding over the Old
Testament to engender.
But, on the other hand, Luther ren
dered a limited service in rejecting the
old patristic and medieval nonsense
about love and marriage. It is quite
unjustifiable by the facts of history to
say, as many do, that the preaching of
virginity was advisable in the fourth
century, but was very properly withdrawn
in the fifteenth. This familiar sophism
of our day rests on the assumption that
the fourth century was much more im
moral—more impenetrably immoral—
than the fifteenth. Such a belief is
wholly incorrect. The gospel of vi rginity
was an unfortunate error from the first.1
A contempt of marriage was the inevit
able accompaniment of the praise of
virginity; and this contempt of marriage
not only led to the terrible disorders of
�48
THE EFFECT OF THE REFORMA TION
robbed the life of woman of much of its
remaining colour and variety, and it
reduced her to the position of a mere
breeder of children. Moreover, with
the closing of the convents, and the pro
hibition of earning money in respectable
fashion, a larger number of women had
to remain unmarried, yet dependent on
their male relatives.
This suppression of the nunneries is
cast against the Reformers as an injury
to the cause of women by many writers ;
but the opportunity of distinction or
employment which the nunneries had
provided is altogether exaggerated by
Mdlle. Chauvin and those who deplore
the suppression. That the nunneries
often gave a most welcome place of
retirement to distressed, or sensitive, or
ill-situated women is quite clear. These,
however, were a small fraction of the
whole. But when the nunneries are
looked upon as providing an outlet for
woman’s energy, and a wider than
domestic interest, a still smaller fraction
is taken for the whole. The amount of
teaching and other philanthropic work
done in medieval nunneries was ex
ceedingly small. All the great active
congregations of Catholic nuns have
been founded since the Reformation.
The life led in the bulk of the huge
convents of the Middle Ages was one of
idleness and impossibly lengthy spiritual
exercises.
It tended constantly to
disorder. Moreover, the superioress of
a small nunnery had an occupation of
little interest, far less interesting than
that of such a household as she would
probably have presided over if she had
married. The number of abbesses with
real power, with positions of distinction,
and with fiefs to administer (and possibly
a community of monks), was very limited.
It is impossible to regard this closing of
the nunneries as an important restriction
of woman’s sphere of interest. And the
disorders it swept away were so great,
the service rendered in destroying the
morbid illusion that had led them to
sacrifice home and pleasure was so
important, that it is difficult to under
stand how any woman can rebuke the
Reformation on this ground. As a priest,
I have seen hundreds of brave and noble
women struggling in nunneries to live up
to their terrible ideal—most of them
probably induced to make their vows
before they were eighteen. I do not
believe one of them would welcome an
inspection of convents or a forcible sup
pression ; but I know that, if their own
Church would surrender the great illusion
that God is pleased with all this un
natural struggle and sacrifice, there would
be many happier women in the world,
and happier men, and better children,
than there are to-day.
On the whole, then, the Reformation
made little difference to the cause of
woman, and it is a stern indication of its
failure to do so that “ for three centuries
after the Reformation the history of
woman in Germany was a blank,” as
Professor Pearson says. German women
lagged far behind their English and
American sisters in demanding justice,
though they make up for that to-day.
In England women have always been
freer than among other Christian peoples.
The old Teutonic spirit never wholly
yielded to the pressure of priests. In
the reign of Elizabeth England is said
to have been “ the Paradise of women.”
But I must repeat that we have to
beware of brilliant exceptions, either of
vice, or virtue, or power. The unjust
and tyrannical system which J. S. Mill
described in his Subjection of Women
had existed among us for ages. English
�THE EFFECT OF THE REFORMA TION
common law in regard to married women
is a notorious instance of the distortion
of a humane civic law by priestly dicta
tion. From the time of the conversion
of the Anglo-Saxons woman’s position
deteriorated. After the Norman inva
sion it became much worse. In the
later Middle Ages it sank lower and
lower, the Throne alone being left open to
her. The Reformation brought no legal
relief or political interest. A statute of
Henry VIII. forbade “womenand others
of low condition ” (I quote from Mrs.
Gage) to read the Bible. From Mrs.'
Hill’s picture of this period it seems that
no change took place in woman’s social
position; and, as on the Continent, the
withdrawal of employment and closing
of the nunneries made matters worse
for marriageable daughters and the un
married. For a time a higher culture
was encouraged, and life became more
interesting for the women of the wealthier
class. But the coming of Puritanism
again “ obscured the clearer thought
which the Renaissance had brought,” as
Mrs. Hill says. Once more the grim
Biblical idea of woman prevailed. The
Old Testament had greater influence
than ever now that printing had been
invented. American women, and many
English women, will* still have recollec
tions from life in the new world, to which
Puritanism migrated, of its influence on
their position. Milton is an instructive
example of its work, even on the most
intelligent. With the Restoration came
scepticism and licence—and the inevit
able betterment of woman’s social posi
tion. Nothing is more significant of
the perverse attitude of priests towards
woman than this constant recovery of
her position in intervals of irreligion and
laxity.
However, as we look back on the last
49
2,000 years of the social history of woman,
we quickly learn that her fortunes must
not be measured by this rise and fall of
public opinion. Such movements are
only interesting in letting us see the
character of the influences at work. The
temporary improvement of public feeling
brought its pleasure—the brighter life
that was inaugurated by the Carolingians
in France in the eighth century; by the
Minnesingers in Germany in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries; by the gay
homage of the troubadours, or the
gallantry of knights-errant, or the freedom
of Tudor or Stuart or Bourbon Courts.
All these things brightened her path for
a time, but the swift reversal was a warn
ing. When the coming of an eloquent
preacher or the return of a serious moral
consciousness meant the extinction of
woman’s hour of sunshine, it was time
to demand a change. In every single
instance of the improvement of woman’s
position during the Christian era the
change was effected by a departure from
the principles which men were understood
to hold. Anything more profoundly un
satisfactory and more mischievous socially
it would be difficult to conceive. The
attitude of man towards woman must be
grounded on principle; and it must be a
principle that admits the dignity and full
humanity of woman. Throughout all
these changes of outward bearing towards
woman, the fact of her legal, civic, poli
tical, and professional inferiority re
mained unchanged. It may seem to
many women who are happily married a
sweet thing to depend wholly on the love
of the stronger sex, but all men are not
angels, and the temptation to selfishness
is strong; nor can anyone question the
evil of virtually compelling women to
seek marriage as a livelihood, or reason
away their desire to have a voice in
�50
THE CHURCHES AND THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT
public affairs. “ I do not like women
to meddle with politics,” said Napoleon
unctuously to Madame Condorcet. “You
are right, General,” she answered; “ but
in a country where it is the custom to cut
off the heads of women it is natural that
they should wish to know the reason why.”
As soon, therefore, as the coarser
medieval feelings had been mastered,
and the humaner spirit of the nineteenth
century asserted itself, the cry of radical
change in the position of woman was
raised. A few isolated writers had antici
pated the cry during the preceding two
centuries, though these were generally
sceptics or heretics. The transfer of
inspiration from the Fathers and School
men back to the Bible had made no
difference to the cause of woman. The
sex still waited for some strong voice to
take up the cry where it had died away
on the lips of the dying paganism. This
was done in the earlier part of the nine
teenth century. In country after coun
try the strain was taken up. The old
injustice must be abolished. The insult
and the wrong of woman’s legal and
political disabilities must be righted, and
the restrictions on her education and her
activity must be swept away, or at least
placed on that ground and in that
measure which careful experience should
recommend—if it recommended any
restriction at all. Was this long-delayed
cry for reform due, in the cant phrase of
our day, to the fact that the preceding
seventeen centuries had misunderstood
the Christian doctrine of woman, and the
Christian Church of the nineteenth cen
tury had tardily realised it ? Did the
clergy at last perceive and avow the
injustice of their long-drawn error? Did
they take up the new-born demand for
truth and equity, and throw themselves
with a moral zeal into the task of undoing
the evil they had wrought ? How far
have the women of our day, who cling
so strangely to the Churches, to thank
them for the great advance made in the
course of the nineteenth century ? It is
the last stage of the first part of my
inquiry into the attachment of women to
traditional religion, and I approach it in
a fresh chapter.
Chapter VI.
THE CHURCHES AND THE MODERN WOMAN
MOVEMENT
The nineteenth century has been chiefly
remarkable, on its moral or social side,
for two tendencies—the decay of religion
and the sturdy growth of justice and
humanity. For the moment I do not
say that these were connected tendencies;
but of the fact that they are characteristic
of “ the wonderful century ” it seems
hardly possible to doubt. The proper
authorities on each subject assure us of it.
The clergy declare the one, and humani
tarians gladly proclaim the other. These
two tendencies are wholly concerned
with the inquiry we now enter upom
�THE CHURCHES AND THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT
For among the wrongs which the knightserrant of the last century set out to
redress the subordination of woman was
not the least. Men were busy undoing
the industrial evils which the creation
of machinery had caused. They were
looking abroad to the condition of the
blacks; they were shuddering at the
horrors of warfare; they were stooping
to consider the lot of the lower animals ;
they were setting the Turk’s house in
order; they were flashing the new search
light of a zeal for justice on the hill-tops
and in the deep valleys everywhere.
And suddenly a voice rang out with the
peal of the clarion :—
The social subordination of women stands out
as an isolated fact in modern social institutions;
a solitary breach of what has become their funda
mental law; a single relic of an old world of
thought and practice exploded in everything
else, but retained in the one thing of most uni
versal interest; as if a gigantic dolmen, or a vast
temple of Jupiter Olympus, occupied the site of
St. Paul’s, and received daily worship, while the
surrounding Christian churches were only re
sorted to on feasts and festivals.1
Then men turned their search-light
upon their own homes, and a long
struggle began. It is not my place to
study the new woman or the advanced
woman, or in any way the discrepancy of
ideals among the women of our time. I
have to deal with the generally admitted
fact that a great injustice has been partly
remedied, and to determine the part the
clergy have played during the fight. No
doubt there are few who will expect to
find that this great reform was initiated
or very strongly supported by the clergy.
A few years ago the Women’s Suffrage
Society published a little work that was
made up of quotations from eminent
living clerics in favour of women’s suffrage.
1 J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women, p. 36.
j
51
A very interesting companion volume
might be issued containing the expressions
of the clergy of fifty years ago. How
ever, the little work was instructive
enough. It assumed that there is still
a widespread feeling among Christian
women that the clergy object to their
having a voice in the appointment of
the administrators of their country. If
this is true in the early years of the
twentieth century, we know what to
expect in the nineteenth. Nevertheless,
it is advisable to make some inquiry.
If my suggestion is correct, it will be
said, the French Revolution of 1789
ought to have started the work of reform.
It was the first great rebellion against
clerical control. Many writers express
a lively disappointment that this is not
found to be the case; but it is hardly
just to blame a movement that failed in
its own direct issues for not succeeding
in one that was, in the circumstances,
bound to be regarded as a secondary
issue. The conservatism of Voltaire and
Rousseau, though unfortunate, is not
wholly surprising. They lived in one of
those periods when the real injustice to
women was rather concealed behind a
great deal of practical liberty and universal
respect. This did not diminish with the
Revolution, and so the ideas of Rousseau
excited little resentment. Even so fine
a woman as Madame Roland accepted
them.
Moreover, the work of the
Revolution was terribly hampered by
the financial ruin that hung without ces
sation over the country, and the universal
and prolonged war in which the French
were involved. It took years to make
a constitution, and it could never be
launched when it was made. Finally,
the more violent factions seized the
power, and made any grave constructive
work like the settlement of woman’s
�52
THE CHURCHES AND THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT
position impossible.
Several of the
leaders of French thought at the time—
and they among the least religious—did
plead for the political equality of woman.
Thus did, especially, Sieyes and Con
dorcet. Even many of those who set
down woman as inferior said, as Diderot
did, that this was possibly due to defec
tive education, not innate, as the Church
described it. However, I no more
believe that every humanist is a wise
man than I take every clergyman to be
unwise. The opposition of such men as
Mirabeau and Danton was deplorable.
But the terrible and exceptional difficul
ties of their task may be understood
to have somewhat concentrated and
narrowed their energies.
It is more profitable to inquire into the
actual birth and progress of the reform.
It would obviously be impossible to
cover the whole ground of the agitation
in Europe; and, indeed, the documen
tary evidence has not yet been collected.
Some day the wromen of every country
will raise to the memories of their respec
tive pioneers such a memorial as that
raised by Mrs. Cady Stanton and her
colleagues in America. As, however,
the earlier work was chiefly done in
America and England, and sufficient
evidence for my purpose is available
here, it will be enough to deal with
them.
The story of the redress of women’s
wrongs in the United States is a painful
story of Might endeavouring by every
fair or foul means to stifle the voice of
Right. It is told chiefly by Mrs. Cady
Stanton, Mrs. Gage, and Miss Susan B.
Anthony, in their History of Women
Suffrage. I am only concerned with it
under two aspects: with the character
of those who started and bore the brunt
of the battle, and with the attitude of the
clergy. There is a paragraph on page
499 of the first volume which reads only
too like a summary of the whole story.
Speaking of the vicious opposition which
the early workers encountered in New
York, the writer says : “Throughout this
protracted and disgraceful assault on
American womanhood the clergy baptised
each new insult and act of injustice in
the name of the Christian religion, and
uniformly asked God’s blessing on pro
ceedings that would have put to shame
an assembly of Hottentots.” The clergy
of New York were not, as will be under
stood, exceptionally stupid or reactionary.
Smaller and less enlightened towns were
not likely to improve on their conduct,
as a rule. In fact, especially in its earlier
stages, the struggle leaves an impression
on one’s mind as if it were a conflict of
heretics and sceptics against the clergy
and a laity that made equal use of the
Bible.
The Americans were first compelled
to face outright the question of justice to
their wives and sisters by the dramatic
invasion of their country by Frances
Wright, an able and fearless young
Scotchwoman, in 1820. She aroused
the most lively interest and resentment
by mounting the platform in various
parts of the country and delivering a
series of eloquent lectures on behalf of
her sex. It was the first time a woman
had addressed a public meeting in the
States; the first time anyone had
ventured to denounce that legal status
of the American woman of which I have
earlier quoted the description. The
descendants of Washington’s soldiers
received her with expressions of horror,
but the work was begun. She was
shortly followed by the brilliant and
charming Polish Jewess, Mrs. Ernestine
L. Rose, and by the sternest fighters the
�THE CHURCHES AND THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT
53
stonecraft, George Eliot, George Sand,
and Lucretia Mott.”
I will not go on to discuss the reli
gious view's of those other distinguished
American women who bring the memory
of the great campaign down to our day;
but to judge from the writings of Mrs.
Gage and Mrs. Cady Stanton, if not of
Miss Anthony, I fear that the good
Christian aforesaid will shudder not
less painfully over their graves as well
as over those of my friend, Mrs.
Biddulph-Martin, and her sister, Lady
Cook, or Lady Florence Dixie. But
let us turn to the other side of the ques
tion, and see whether Christian orthodoxy,
if it did not inspire the reformers, lent
any inspiration to their opponents. This
is sufficiently clear from what I have
already said, but a little may be added.
No one would seriously expect the
Catholic clergy, with their rigid retention
of medieval ideas, to countenance such a
movement as this, until it had undeni
ably established itself; but the Protestant
clergy of America were hardly less unjust.
“ A few of the more democratic denomi
nations,” says Mrs. Cady Stanton in the
Woman’s Bible, “accord women some
privileges, but invidious discriminations
of sex are found in all religious organisa
tions, and the most bitter and outspoken
enemies of women are found among
clergymen and bishops of the Protestant
religion.” This is not quite so true of
England, as we shall see, but it is not an
unfair statement of the case in America,
and the statement is made by one who
knew. I do not find a single clerical
supporter of the cry for justice to women
in America until seventeen years after
Frances Wright opened the campaign,
1 These have lately been republished in cheap and for many years after 1845 clerical
and handy form, and may be had in paper cover supporters were very rare. The earlier
for 6d. from the publishers for the Rationalist
and most arduous stages of the fight are
Press Association.
Quaker community has given to the
world—Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelly, and
the Grimkes. No one who has read
Frances Wright’s remarkable lectures On
the Nature of Knowledge1- needs to be
told that she was anything but conven
tional in religion. She is described in
the History as having “ radical ideas in
theology,” as having the compliment,
“ infidel,” cast at her wherever she went,
and as numbering the clergy “among
her most bitter enemies.” Ernestine
Rose is described as “equally liberal” in
theology. Robert Dale Owen says that
her scepticism went as far as disbelief in
a future life. She too was hailed as an
“ infidel ” in every part of the States, and
she fully deserved the title. She was
from her fourteenth year a very thorough
“unbeliever” in the Bible and the theo
logy which were set against her. The
third great pioneer, Abby Kelly, was a
liberal Quaker—very liberal, even for
that undogmatic sect. Many a man and
woman was expelled from the Churches
for listening to her stirring addresses on
the Sabbath. Her biography tells us she
was “ equally familiar with the tricks of
priests and politicians.” And the fourth
great pioneer of the woman movement
in America, the noble Lucretia Mott,
was equally, and with equal justice,
greeted as an “infidel,” even by her own
Quaker community. She held a vague
deism, but very independent views as
regards the Bible. One of the contribu
tors to the History is moved to some
irony when she describes a Christian
writer of the time as “shuddering over
the graves of such women as Harriet
Martineau, Frances Wright, Mary Woll
�54
THE CHURCHES AND THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT
distinguished by “infidels” and Quakers
laying down their lives in restless,
brilliant struggles for the cause, while the
orthodox look coldly on or jeer and
calumniate. When, in 1837, Abby Kelly
and Lucretia Mott and the Sisters Grimke
were delivering their anti-slavery lectures
in Massachusetts, a special pastoral letter
was circulated among the clergy urging
them to denounce everywhere the new
woman-movement. It called attention
to “ the dangers which at present seem
to threaten the female character with
widespread and permanent injury,” and
spoke of the impending “degeneracy
and ruin ” of the sex. It took its stand
on Scripture, it expressly stated: the
New Testament, it claimed, clearly
pointed out woman’s true sphere. J. G.
Whittier—not very orthodox—answered
their pastoral letter with a poem that cut
like a whip.
I have quoted the comment of the
History on the behaviour of the clergy
of New York. When these noble and
gifted American women came to speak at
the Anti-Slavery Convention at London,
in 1840, they were preceded by a flock
of these American clergymen, whose aim
was to stir up the clergy of England
against this dreadful ambition of a
hitherto docile sex to speak in public.
They succeeded in a painful degree. In
a Convention gathered in the name of
liberty and justice in the most enlightened
city of the world, about the middle of
the nineteenth century, eight American
women, of superb devotion to the cause
and fine oratorical gifts, had to fight for
hours for the right to speak, and lost it.
“ She shall not speak in the convention
[eKKXTjo-ia],” said Saint Paul.
The
clergy opposed them on religious grounds.
One said it would be “ a violation of the
ordinance of Almighty God.” Another
said it was against “ the plain teaching
of the word of God.” Even so late as
1878 we find formidable attacks by the
Protestant clergy, led by the President
of the Baptist Theological Seminary at
Rochester, on the work of the woman
movement in America. The history of
the cause in America bristles with them.
“And to-day,” says Miss Anthony, “from
two-thirds to three-fourths of the members
of the American Churches are women.”
We have not as yet a detailed and
systematic history of the campaign for
justice to women in this country,1 but
probably when it is written it will not
leave so painful an impression on the
mind as does this published by the
women of America. The American
Church had not been shaken to the same
extent by the Deistic and Unitarian
attack on the supernatural idea of the
Bible. Here in the practical work of
effecting reforms in detail a certain
amount of support was given by the
clergy. But here, as everywhere else, here
tics and Freethinkers gave the impulse
to the reform, and the clergy generally
opposed it. The names of Mary Woll
stonecraft and Harriet Martineau should
be written in red letters in the calendar,
if not the canon, of every Englishwoman.
When their orthodox sisters bent timidly
under the yoke, they summoned them in
burning words to stand erect, and make
themselves as much an image of God as
man was. Frances Wright, too, was a
Scotchwoman and Freethinker. More
over, a series of very able and influential
English men supported their cause from
the beginning, and these were nearly all
Freethinkers. Godwin joined himself
with Mary Wollstonecraft; Robert Owen
1 Though the Pioneer Women in Victoria s
Reign of Mr. Edwin A. Pratt deserves honour
able mention as a modest contribution.
�THE CHURCHES AND THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT
pleaded for this as for nearly every other
conceivable social reform. Jeremy Ben
tham and Cobden favoured it. George
Jacob Holyoake began, in 1847, to plead
the cause of woman, and has not yet
retired from supporting it. John Stuart
Mill’s powerful pen was drawn in its
defence in 1869, and lent it incalculable
prestige. Disraeli was one of the first
statesmen to recognise its justice. Such
men as these have earned the gratitude
of the women of England. They trod
down in scorn that ridicule and misrepre
sentation which a man was likely to get
from his fellows in those early days; but
the clergy were silent. Yet to-day so
many women listen without protest to
the clerical calumny that a rejection of
Christianity tends to make men selfish
and sensual, and devoid of idealism. It
was just those who most radically aban
doned Christianity—Owen, Holyoake,
and Mill—that were the most logical and
ungrudging in their plea for woman. It
was the Mary Wollstonecrafts, Harriet
Martineaus, Frances Wrights, George
Eliots, Helen Taylors, and Annie Besants
that distinguished themselves by fearless
ness and unselfishness.
In the task of opening the reforms in
detail a great number of deeply religious
women were engaged, and a number of
eminent clergymen, like Canon Kingsley
and Dean Farrar, went to their assistance.
There is no adequate and convenient
history from which we can estimate the
weight of the clerical opposition, but one
notices, even in Mr. Pratt’s sketch,
recurrent traces of it. For instance, one
of the most arduous reforms, workhouse
nursing, was taken up by Agnes Weston,
a fervent Protestant. Yet over her grave
Florence Nightingale had to say : “ She
had disarmed all opposition, all sectarian
zealotism, so that Roman Catholic and |
55
Unitarian, High Church and Low Church,
all literally rose up and called her blessed.”
Elizabeth Fry found hardly any but the
Atheist, Robert Owen, to support her
at first in what was strictly and properly
a moral reform. The fundamental
reforms of opening employment to
women, and of the more rational edu
cation of women, were led by Miss
Martineau; but there is no need to go
into detail. The battle was begun by
Freethinkers in defiance of the clergy.
The conservative defence was largely
based on the religious conception of
“ woman’s sphere,” as was so clearly
shown in the clerical speeches at the
Anti-Slavery Convention. The women
of England were slow to respond, because
of the ideas the clergy had instilled into
them : it has been found necessary in
our own time to issue a book for the
purpose of meeting this difficulty. And
the state of the controversy in our own
day sufficiently suggests what it must
have been in the days of weakness and
poverty. What proportion of the womenwriters and women-workers of to-day
belong to any orthodox Church ? What
proportion of the clergy support women
in the remaining struggle for the suffrage,
for public offices, for the learned profes
sions, for university degrees ?
On the continent there has been the
same story of general clerical opposition
and general heterodox support. Michelet
and George Sand occupy in France the
places of J. S. Mill and George Eliot.
Saint-Simon, and Fourrier, and the
Communists supported the cause of
woman, and the anti-clerical Socialists
advocate it to-day. “ In France,” says
Signora Melegari, “ those who take the
woman question most seriously are, in
general, Protestants or Freethinkers
but the Protestants are a minority of
�56
THE CHURCHES AND THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT
800,000 in a population of 40,000,000,
mostly of no religion. In Germany
Max Stirner, and Buchner, and other
“infidels,” raised the cry. Marx, and
Engels, and Bebel, and Liebknecht,
Freethinking Socialists, sustained it with
vigour, and their great Social Democratic
movement spreads it among the people.
In Scandinavia Ibsen and Bjornson
shattered the religious prejudice against
it. In Spain none but a Freethinker
will take it seriously. In Italy “ the
influence of religion has tended to keep
the Italian woman in check in the com
petition of the sexes,” says Signora
Melegari. To-day, while the head of
Catholic Christendom issues medieval
decrees about the divinely - ordained
character of the existing framework of
society, the Italian Freethinkers and
Socialists encourage woman to rebel.
Thus we are bound to conclude that
the righting of the most undoubted
wrongs to which woman has been
subjected has been started and has pro
ceeded, not only without the aid of the
Churches, but in face of their determined
opposition. While non-Christian bodies
(such as the International Union of
Ethical Societies) have officially endorsed
the cry of the women, no Christian body
of even the thinnest dogmatic texture
has ever officially entertained it, though
they have often officially opposed it.
While an enormous proportion of the
heterodox writers and speakers of the
nineteenth century have supported it,
the clergy have proved its most bitter
opponents. No Catholic priest has ever
worked for it: few clergymen of the great
Protestant bodies have even so much as
assured their nervous followers, until
these later days, that they were free to
join it. Let us be perfectly clear as to
what this means. There is an idea
abroad, among women with the more
moderate ambition for their sex, that
atheists and heretics sought to propagate
their own views by turning women into
viragos, and that the clergy were bound
to oppose such a manoeuvre. This is
a gross calumny on men to whom the
women of our day owe much. The
men I have spoken of were moved by a
plain and stirring resentment of a great
injustice. The clergy opposed the reform
on the plain and expressed ground that
woman was divinely and scripturally
commanded to remain in the home.
Nor may it be supposed for a moment
that the struggle between those early
pioneers of the women’s cause and the
clergy was similar to that which divides
women to-day between two or more
different ideals. There are those who
feel that the grace of womanhood cannot
be preserved except by a continued
dependence on the strength of the man;
who, while regretting any word about in
feriority, and claiming a certain freedom
for woman to win distinction in art or
science or letters, would nevertheless
keep her from the hardening fields of
public service and professional or indus
trial life. There is an aesthetic ground
for this ideal which should command
our respect, even if we think it erroneous.
On the other hand, an increasing number
of men and women are convinced that
the dignity of woman will not suffer by
engaging in the public service or in the
work of earning her own livelihood;
they claim that the restriction to home
life is an insinuation of inferiority, and
that all the doors of all professions,
academies, crafts, and branches of public
service should be thrown wide open, so
that we may learn by the simple device
of serious and sustained experiment
what woman is or is not capable of doing
�THE CHURCHES AND THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT
without hurt. This is a familiar antithe
sis of ideals, with every shade of inter
vening opinion, and it does not fall
within my plan to discuss it.1
But it would be a serious error to
suppose that this was the controversy
that divided women-workers and their
friends from the clergy in the nineteenth
century. Those very clergymen who
sided with the reformers, such as Farrar
and Kingsley, held the domestic ideal of
womanhood. The fight was for the
removal of a most serious and palpable
injustice. The legal position of women,
especially married women, was indefen
sible ; the right to discuss their position
in public was virtually denied; the
power to take any constitutional step
towards the alteration of the law was
withheld; the education given to them
was absurd and offensive; their economic
dependence on men was so rigid as to
be openly demoralising. The Church
was largely responsible for the long sur
vival of this system in Europe. The
Church was—all our witnesses have stated
it—the chief impediment in the way of
moderating the injustice. In spite of the
fact that for years now educated clergy
men have known the far from super
natural source of those Old Testament
ideas and practices which occasioned the
injustice, few of them have helped to
remove it. The agitation for its removal,
especially in the earlier years, was so
purely secular and practically anti-clerical
as to present a distinctly heterodox
character. All honour to the memory of
those clergymen who, like Kingsley and
Farrar, protested against the injustice to
the full extent of their ideal of woman
1 But I may take the occasion to express my
entire acceptance of the latter ideal. However,
I am writing now as a Rationalist, and must not
linger to defend it.
57
hood. But their lives do not redeem
the sin or the apathy of the Churches ;
they do not heal the bruises or undo the
suffering of those many religious women
who were torn between allegiance to
their beliefs and to their sex and
humanity. The clergy never discovered
any injustice to woman; and only one in
a thousand could see it when it was
pointed out.
*
*
*
*
*
The first part of my inquiry is at an
end. I have investigated the ground for
the contention that Christianity has laid
on woman a burden of gratitude, and
that we may find in this some explana
tion of her peculiar clinging to its hier
archy and its institutions. I have
examined the position that woman
occupied in Europe, and the prospect
that lay before her at the time when
Christianity began to influence legisla
tion and the social order. I have studied
closely the conception of woman’s nature
and education and work which the most
influential leaders of the Church pre
sented. I have sought the immediate
effect of this teaching on the position
and ambition of the women of Europe,
and I have traced the development of
its influence as the centuries passed and
the power of the Church rose to absolute
despotism. Finally, I have described
the tardy revolt against the long injustice,
and determined the part which the
Church played in relation to it. It
seems fair to give this summary of the
story.
In what is called the “ pagan ” world
the position of woman, which had fallen
low, was steadily and solidly improving.
The pagan moralists had come to
recognise and proclaim that woman was
unduly subordinated. Public opinion
�58
THE CHURCHES AND THE MODERN WOMAN MOVEMENT
at Rome was strongly against the old
restrictions on her life. The juriscon
sults and legislators were removing the
old disabilities. The Empire had passed
beyond the period of licence, and in its
more sober mood still upheld the reform.
But the old religion was quite dead as
a moral force, and had clearly to be
replaced. A half-dozen religions, all
spiritual and elevating, were ready to
take up the moral and social action it
had ceased to exercise. All of these,
except Christianity, seemed to be in
sympathy with the new turn of woman’s
fortunes. They had issued from Greece,
or Persia, or Egypt, while Christianity
came forth from a country where woman
was despised. But Christianity contrived
to win the power, and it used the military
force of the converted emperors to crush
the last pulse of life out of its rivals.
Meantime its leaders had erected the
inspiration of the Old Testament into a
dogma, and the shadow of the Hebraic
ideal fell upon Europe. The efforts of
the pagan moralists were decried and
rejected; the excellent ideal of the
Teutonic tribes was allowed to perish.
From the chaotic mixture of the dis
rupted Empire and the invading peoples
emerged at last the strange and semibarbaric structure of feudal and Christian
Europe. From the new legal system
the elements which had been more
favourable to woman in the Germanic
customs and the later Roman code were
gradually expelled. Woman fell to a
lower position in law than she had
occupied in Greece, in Rome, or in the
Germanic systems. Competent autho
rities like Sir Henry Maine attribute this
to the influence of Church law, which
was grossly unjust to and biassed against
woman. Monastic and priestly writers
and the decrees of episcopal councils had
the same influence on public opinion
and social life. The increasing stress
laid by the Church on asceticism and
celibacy, with the widespread disorder
which followed by a very natural reaction,
still further prejudiced the position of
woman. The theological theory of her
inferiority became a fixed principle in
the law and literature and life of Europe.
Here and there her lot was relieved for
a time by the gaiety of troubadours, or
the devotion of knights-errant, or admis
sion into the medieval guilds and crafts,
or a share in the growing culture or the
glamour of court-life. These were hours
of sunshine in a long, gray day. They
were always won in defiance of the
ruling creeds, and generally associated
with a relaxation of morals or a revival
of pagan culture. The Reformation
brought no material change in her con
dition. Her insulting legal disabilities,
her habitual exclusion from the means
of self-support and of culture, and her
utter exclusion from civic or political
rights, lasted from the sixth to the
nineteenth century.
At the end of the eighteenth century
and the beginning of the nineteenth a
determined attack was made on the
unjust system of disabilities. In nearly
every case the campaign was begun by
radical heretics or Freethinkers. In no
case was it begun by clergymen. In
most cases the clergy gave no word of
sympathy until the first odium and bitter
ness of the struggle had been lived down.
In all countries the opposition was largely
placed on religious grounds, and was, to
a painful extent, led by the clergy;
though the question then was of little
more than a vague and elementary claim
on the part of women to draw public
attention to their position and discuss
the justice or injustice of it. To-day,
�THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT
although even Christian scholarship has
denuded the Old Testament of all
authority to rule us, there is an extra
ordinary unwillingness among the clergy
to undo what remains of the evil that
their groundless dogmas have caused.
I conclude that the suggestion that
gratitude is due to the Church from
women is little short of grotesque. Only
a reckless perversion of their social
59
history could suffer it to be entertained
for a moment. The clergy have been
the worst enemies of women. Women
are their best friends to-day. If women
lent them no more support than men do,
they would cease to be a serious influence
in Europe. We must seek elsewhere the
ground of their peculiar attachment to
the Christian Church.
Chapter VII.
THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT
If no class in the community has suffered
so much as women by the errors of the
Christian teaching, we shall expect to
find a proportionately greater strength in
the grounds for their peculiar attachment
to it. Men have been unduly favoured
by the introduction of Judaic ideas into
Europe, yet men do not show to-day any
excessive loyalty to the passing religion.
It is their wives and sisters who lend the
chief support to it. The familiar visitor
from Mars would survey the condition of
our Churches with some perplexity if he
were acquainted with the social history
of women. Let us put ourselves in the
neutral position of our mythic visitor, and
seek the roots of woman’s stricter reten
tion of the ideas which have prolonged
her subordination.
The chief reason we encounter, after
undoing the historical fallacy we have
studied, seems to be a suggestion that
the religious sense or religious instinct is
stronger and more imperious in woman.
This is not a new idea, nor one quite
devoid of foundation. I have spoken of
the great reverence with which our fore
fathers regarded her. It was largely due
to a belief that she was nearer to the
gods than themselves, and more fitted
to receive and interpret the vague
messages that came from beyond. There
have been religions in which the priests
have had to make themselves as unman
like as they could in preparation for their
sacred functions. The fuller attention
that men paid to the material interests of
the family and the city or nation is one
obvious explanation of what has been
called their less spiritual texture. They
have had to delegate the spiritual func
tions to women and priests. But there is
also a radical difference in nerve-structure
between the sexes, and this inevitably
means a difference in what is called
“ soul,” or psychic functions. Mr. Have
lock Ellis, who is not unfriendly to women,
concludes, after careful inquiry, that
woman is ineradicably more emotional
than man. Throughout nature it is
�6o
THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT
indispensable that the mother should have
a finer and quicker sensibility than the
father. But whether this greater emo
tional power is ineradicable or no, it is
an actual fact; and in it we have a
positive ground to start from in studying
the different religious tendencies of men
and women.
For a very slight examination will
show that the religious sense is rightly
associated with the emotions. There
are those who would connect it with
what is called—especially by novelists—
a woman’s “intuition.” A superficial
view of woman’s mind-life has given rise
to the idea that she has this power of
intuition more fully developed than man.
It is a favourite device of the novelist to
save a situation by a flash of his heroine’s
“intuition.” Where the reasoning of a
Sherlock Holmes fails to penetrate, she
sees the solution which will rescue her
lover or husband. It is pretty well
agreed by modern psychologists that this
is really only a quicker process of reason
ing. Intuition means direct vision. One
sees the fact or truth, without having to
gather it from other facts or truths.
Now, in these situations the solution
must have been gathered from other
indications, but the mind has stepped so
rapidly from them to the conclusion that
they have not remained in the memory.
It was a swift process of reasoning; and,
if the attempt is made afterwards, the
steps or stages of it may generally be
recovered. But the religious sense is
not at all a process of reasoning, as every
one who possesses it will say. It is a
real, not a fictitious, intuition. It can
not be resolved, by the most strained
reflection, into an inference from some
thing else.
We must approach the analysis of it
from another side. Why analyse it at
all ? many will ask. Why may they not
go through life with this treasured vision,
though it be denied to so many about
them ? For this very plain reason : the
mind is beset on every side with error
and illusion, and it is a matter of elemen
tary prudence to examine our beliefs.
There never were such searchers after
truth as the old Greeks, yet they con
cluded that truth hid at the bottom of a
deep well, while error lay by every road
side. People would seem at times
anxious to persuade themselves — so
heavy is the pressure of modern thought
—that this question of the truth or un
truth of their beliefs does not vitally
matter. No? You are content to sit in
church, hour by hour, while solemn
worship is offered to an invisible Being;
to teach your child to kneel and lisp a
prayer of direct address to a Deity; to
put yourself in an attitude of abject
entreaty; to build altars and temples,
and support a clergy, and all the rest—
and say it does not matter whether there
is a God or not, and that you do not
care to inquire seriously if it be so ? The
question has only to be put in this plain
form to elicit an answer at once. Reli
gious women do care—care deeply and
anxiously—if their belief is true. But to
care very seriously if one’s belief is true,
and to refuse to make any inquiry into
the grounds of it, is a strange procedure.
Religious people are misled by this
not unnatural confusion. All about them
to-day there is question of “ evidences ”
for Christianity and religion. In any
magazine and journal, in the train or the
drawing-room, on every bookstall, the
restless inquiry is apt to break on them.
And they say very often : We do not
need to wander through these laby
rinthine evidences, because we have a
strong inner sense of the truth of our
�THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT
religion. They somehow fail to see
that this inner sense itself should be
looked at a little before they trust it to
guide them on such momentous issues.
I do not say it has to be proved. It
may be a sense that sees things, and
seeing is better than proving. We
cannot prove the things we hold for
most certain, such as our own existence.
Nothing could be proved, if everything
had to be proved. You must have a
fixed point on which to hang your chain
of reasoning. It is one of many foolish
misrepresentations of the Rationalist to
say that he wants everything proved.
What he does want is that we face
manfully the grounds of our convictions,
whether they take the form of proof or
not. Once upon a time people believed
in dreams as intuitions of the future.
We do not to-day. The ground of the
conviction is unworthy of our trust. At
other times they trusted the authority of
theologians. Here, again, we have all
come to think the ground insufficient.
So, when people tell us they have an
inner sense or vision, we suggest that it
ought to be examined before being
trusted. Otherwise a religious person
practically says : My conviction is true
because it is a strong one. I am anxious
to believe, and to teach my children,
only what is true; but I decline to look
further into the ground on which I do
believe these things. This would be
neither intelligent nor religious—if it is
true that religion implies a high moral
standard.
Now let us approach the subject from
a rather distant standpoint. We Euro
peans are the children of races which
have held religious convictions for incal
culable ages. I say Europeans, because
the question of this religious sense would
not apply in the same way to some other
61
races. In China or Japan educated
people hardly know what it is. They
have all been Agnostics for centuries.
But in Europe widespead Agnosticism
did not set in until comparatively
recently. Through the very words for
God and soul in our language we can
learn that religious belief was universal
long before history began. Humanity
is more than 200,000 years old, though
when it first framed religious conceptions
is quite unknown. It is safe to think
that our fathers have seen and worshipped
God in the heavens, and dreamed dimly
of a future life, for tens of thousands of
years.
There is no ground for thinking that
ideas like these are transmitted from
father to son. In fact, the whole
question of heredity is very much
unsettled just now, owing to a serious
controversy as to whether acquired
characteristics are transmitted or no.
If, however, you take a long enough
perspective, it is clear that the transmis
sion takes place, and we need not go
into the question of the medium of
transmission. The duckling takes to
the water, and the chicken pecks the
corn, by an inherited disposition. The
new-born infant sucks the breast owing
to a similar inherited tendency. Thou
sands of instincts are explained by
psychologists in this way. If you look
at a number of modern manuals of
psychology on the subject of instinct,
you will find that most of them explain
it to be an inherited habit or disposition.
One of the latest manuals, Professor
Villa’s Contemporary Psychology, which
purports to give the ruling opinion on
each point, thus defines instinct; and
most of the other manuals I have con
sulted bear it out.
This has clearly a curious connection
�62
THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT
with the point we are considering.
Psychologists will require a great deal
more evidence before they lay it down
that ideas are transmitted from parents
to children, as features are transmitted,
for instance, or racial characteristics.
But it is now quite admitted that every
idea has a counterpart in the structure
of the brain. Some cellule, or group of
cellules, or even part of a cellule, is built
in a certain way to correspond to a
certain idea. And when an idea burns
itself deep into the structure, as the
image of God must have done in the
long ages during which it absolutely
dominated the mental life, and is passed
on through unnumbered generations with
perfect docility, we may very well believe
there is a definite mark in the nerve
tissue corresponding to it. Why this
should not be transmitted, like those
modifications of nerve-structure which
make the infant suck or the duck swim,
it is difficult to see. At all events, we
come to this pass: the religious sense
acts so similarly to these automatic
movements that we have agreed to call
it instinct, and instinct is, we are told,
only an inherited disposition of the
nervous or other structure.
I am only putting this forward as a
thought that naturally occurs to one in
connection with the phrase “religious
instinct.” Psychologists are still too un
decided about the transmission to chil
dren of ideas or memories to allow an
honest thinker to put it absolutely. But
the mere recalling of these principles
must give serious ground for reflection
on the religious sense. One may decide
off-hand that it is not a natural pheno
menon at all, and so eludes all explana
tion. It is always easy to make asser
tions. But the only possible ground for
such an assertion as this would be that,
after a searching inquiry, no natural
interpretation of it could be discovered.
I do not mean that even then we should
be justified in saying that the religious
sense was something supernatural—what
we cannot explain to-day our children or
grandchildren may easily explain to
morrow, as the past has shown—but
then there would be some shade of
reason in the assertion. As it is, we find
that the people who are most ready to
invoke the supernatural are just those
who have taken least pains to understand
the natural working of forces. If we
wish to hold our opinions intelligently
and with a proper regard for the dignity
of truth, we are bound to consider our
feelings and views from every side. And
it is clear that we have here a group of
well-known facts with an important bear
ing on the religious sense. Age after
age this belief in Deity has eaten into
the heart and brain of humanity. During
periods far longer than the whole stretch
of history this belief was the very centre
of human life. Think of the dread
worship of Moloch, when (as you read in
the thrilling pages of Flaubert’s Salammbd)
the mother cast her child into the fiery
bosom of the brazen image; think of the
ghastly worship of Tetzcatlipoca, when
the father offered his fairest daughter for
the sacrificial knife (you have probably
read Haggard’s Montezuma's Daughter),
and the mother gave her babe to supply
blood for the sacrament; think of the
human sacrifices of our Druid ancestors
and the ancestors of nearly every civilised
nation. Think, again, of the wild child
like eyes that saw the finger of God in
every stir of leaf or river, in every cloud
and thunder-bolt, in every sickness and
insanity, in every good gift and evil
fortune of life. And when the change
to Christianity came, and the image of
�THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT
God rose in some majesty above the
idols of the past, did it burn into the
more refined natures with less piercing
force ? Shall all this have gone on for
ages and left no impression on the very
fabric of the mind ? Would it be strange
if, when so many habits of life have left
in the organism those hereditary traces
which we call instincts, all this supreme
concern about the supernatural (not an
abstract idea, but an image of terrible
concreteness, with a torrent of accom
panying emotions) has worn a little niche
in the mental structure that craves at
times for its statue ?
For it must be realised that this
religious sense is nothing more than a
bias or disposition, and it is rarer than
religious people think. Newman speaks
in his Grammar of Assent of the spon
taneous appearance of this instinct in
the child. It is absurd to suppose that
any such instinct appears except in
children who have been brought up in a
religious atmosphere; and in such an
environment the seed may have been
at any moment planted from without.
The children of Agnostic mothers—and
they are numerous enough to-day—do
not show a trace of this instinct. I know
women who have been brought up with
out any religious training, and the belief
in God has always appeared to them, in
face of the squalor and misery of life, an
.incomprehensible superstition. So it is
even with those of us who for years gave
the chief place in our life to the thought
of God. To say that any large propor
tion of those who part with it still feel a
craving for it, or an instinct feeling
hungrily out for it, is merely a reckless
fiction. If I may speak of my own
experience, I was for years struggling to
protect my belief from invading doubts,
and building about it buttresses of
63
argument. But from the day when I
was compelled in common honesty to
acknowledge that my struggle was vain,
and that I did not believe in God, the
clouds rolled away. My mental peace
has never since been broken by any
doubt or fear or faintest craving in
its regard. Speaking from a very wide
experience of others who have abandoned
religion, I say that St. Augustine’s famous
phrase, “ Our heart is unquiet until it
rests in Thee,” is only the expression of
the personal experience of a very few.
Moreover, we must make allowance
for the power of external suggestion, and,
when we do honestly attempt this,
“religious instinct ” almost vanishes into
thin air. Think of the mental environ
ment in which a woman’s mind unfolds,
and try to measure the force of the
incessant raining of the thought of God
upon it. As soon as the child begins to
disentangle the confusion of images and
words on its mental screen, it is made to
set aside one image and one word as
belonging to something unique and
dominating.
Then come the early
prayers, the dramatic church-service,
the story-books that are full of God and
his white-winged angels, the uniquelytreated clergyman, the school with God
as the chief element of its discipline, the
confirmation and marriage-service, the
church as the pleasantest centre of social
life—the drip, drip, drip, year in year
out, throughout the whole of life What
is there in the “ religious sense ” that all
this persistent suggestion (I am using
the word in its strict psychological
meaning) cannot account for ? How
can we ever honestly say that we can set
aside the cumulative and most complex
action of all this education in the thought
of God, and still find a native sense or
instinct or intuition to be accounted for?
�64
THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT
It would tax the acuteness of the finest
psychologist, or mind-student, to. achieve
it. Certainly, when we put together the
hereditary bias towards religion which
seems quite likely to be felt at times,
and the effect of education and environ
ment, we have material enough for the
making of a conviction that would seem
to be innate and imperious and inde
pendent of proofs.
But why should these influences affect
woman more deeply than man ? Because,
as every authority on the psychology of
woman says, she is more imaginative,
more emotional, and more sensitive to
suggestion than man; and because her
education is still totally different from
his. It is no part of my plan to discuss
whether the differences between man and
woman are natural or artificial, per
manent or alterable. They are facts of
actual experience, and they are too
obviously connected with the matter of
my inquiry to be neglected. I am not
for a moment supposing that woman is
inferior to man because she is more
imaginative and emotional. It is another
of the absurd misrepresentations of
Rationalists which women are given, to
say that we underrate the value of
emotion.
The four finest poets of
England to-day—Meredith, Swinburne,
Watson, and Hardy—are Rationalists.
Meredith and Hardy have on occasions
sent letters of sympathy to the Rationalist
Press Association; and the work of
Watson and Swinburne is well known.
There is no antithesis whatever, or the
slightest mutual hostility, between reason
and emotion. George Eliot was hardly
less poetic than Adelaide Proctor. A
Rationalist may or may not be emotional,
but he knows that emotion has its
honoured place in life. He does not at
all resemble that bloodless being whom
Professor James calls “the Rationalist"
in his Varieties of Religious Experience.
He calls himself the champion of reason,
because in the past reason has been
too little consulted, and authority and
emotion too much, in the formation of
beliefs. Undoubtedly he admits that
there are more things in life than reason,
because there are more tasks in life than
the formation of opinions.1
Let us see, then, how far we have got
in our inquiry into the disposition which
seems to make woman peculiarly conser
vative and uncritical of religious beliefs.
There is, in the first place, the hereditary
bias which we may expect to find at
times on account of the long ages through
which the idea of God has worked its
way unresisted into the very fabric of the
mind. This would be, if we consult the
general research of psychologists, so
feeble that a direct and reasoned opposi
tion, or the lack of educative stimuli, or
a strong diversion of one’s concern,
would easily neutralise it. But woman’s
nature is so much more imaginative and
sensitive and awake to mystic influences
—woman’s education has ever been, and
largely is to-day, so little adapted to
strengthen the reason, and so much
calculated to foster her imaginativeness
and emotionalism, that we may look
more confidently for traces of such
instinctive bias in her than in man. Her
environment from the earliest years of
consciousness is more saturated with
religious ideas than that of her brother,
and she is more susceptible to the
suggestive force of ideas. She is less
1 Women who think it more profitable to ask
the Rationalist himself what he means than to
consult people who resent the name with sus
picious violence, will receive every attention
from the Secretary of the Rationalist Press
Association, 5 and 6, Johnson’s Court, Fleet
Street, London, E.C.
�THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT
aggressive and daring than man, and so
less apt to follow radical and critical views.
Men, even men who have no religious
belief themselves, have conspired to
keep doubt and criticism away from her
under a vague notion that it would under
mine her obedience to them, or, less
selfishly, that no alternative to a religious
influence in the training of children had
been provided. Woman, too, has always
been brought into closer touch with the
clergy, whose parochial visiting generally
lies among women, and whose romantic
position has always appealed to them
with greater force.
A dozen other
circumstances which have tended to pro
tect and strengthen woman’s religious
convictions more than man’s will readily
occur to any person who reflects. More
over, it must be remembered that it is
chiefly in the ritualist branches of Chris
tianity and among educated people that
the excess of women over men is most
noticeable. In these the aesthetic char
acter of the worship must be allowed to
go a very long way towards explaining
the disproportion. A careful observer
will find that poetry appeals to the sexes
in just the same disproportion as religion
does. This is a fatal difficulty to any
suggestion of a specific religious sense in
woman.
In a word, the differences of nature,
education, and environment are so great
in the two sexes, and especially in those
social classes where the disproportion in
Church-membership is greatest, that it is
absurd to seek any further explanation.
There is no room whatever for believing
that some mystic faculty or other is
granted to woman in more generous
measure than to man. It will be noticed
that I do not even entertain the notion
that she has merited this, or that she
more effectually protects her “religious
65
sense” by a higher standard of character.
Criminologists like Lombroso do not find
woman to be less criminal, when all is
considered, than man. I do not think
any woman will seriously make such a
claim for her sex. I only refer to it on
account of the very offensive and insult
ing suggestion so often made by clerical
writers that there is some connection
between the two. I am dealing on its
intellectual merits with the greater dis
position of woman than man for religious
beliefs; and I submit that all the
influences I have indicated, the real
action of which cannot be gainsaid, fully
account for what is called woman’s “reli
gious sense.”
It seems preferable always to seek a
clear, natural explanation rather than
merely to label a phenomenon with a
mystic and unilluminating phrase. But
there is a more important point to these
observations. We started with the idea
of examining the ground of religious con
viction in order to appreciate its force or
validity. We are now in a position to
see the frailty of what is called the reli
gious sense as a basis for belief. The
moment we analyse it, it dissolves into a
score of influences which bear with them
no guarantee whatever of the truth of the
conviction they generate. The fact that
men have for ages believed in God, and
that a large proportion of our neighbours
still hold that belief, is a peculiar ground
for retaining it ourselves. Yet this is all
the evidential value we can extract from
all the elements which go to make up
the religious sense, in so far as it is an un
reasoning and seemingly innate impulse.
In fact, even if one does not accept such
an analysis of the religious sense, it
remains a quite unreliable support until
we have proof of its validity. There is
nothing so hopelessly confused as the
F
�66
THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN
claim .of religious people—men and
women—that they know things by
“ faith.” They cannot possibly mean,
and do not mean, anything else than
that they have a strong inner conviction
of the truth of religious doctrine. As to
the grounds or sources of that conviction
they seem to be wholly indifferent; yet
it is surely obvious that to retain a con
viction because it is strong, or because
one cannot trace its sources (while
declining to look closely for them), is a
complete reversal of all sane procedure.
This is exactly the position of the person
who relies on the religious sense or reli
gious instinct.
In fine, let me repeat that I am chiefly
pleading for thoughtfulness and con
sideration. The resolve to enwrap one
self in a mystic and groundless belief in
the authority of faith or the religious
sense is self-condemned. Reason we
know from experience to be a serviceable
and generally reliable implement. Faith
has not only no such empirical guarantee,
but it is obviously capable of being dis
solved into a score of familiar agencies.
We know that these agencies do enter
more deeply into the life of woman than
that of man, and so need not be sur
prised that she seems to have a greater
share of this religious sense. It is only
mystic as long as one refuses to examine
it. Once the inquiry is patiently made
—and it is difficult to see on what moral
ground inquiry can be refused—it may,
as I have suggested, turn out to be only
the cumulative effect of hereditary and
outer influences, which not only does
not dispense from examination of the
evidences for religion, but should make
woman especially eager to guard herself
against an irrational admission of its
power.
Chapter VIII.
THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN
If there is no ground for the notion of
an especial indebtedness of woman to
the Christian religion, and if we cannot
discover, in what is called her “ religious
instinct,” any justification whatever for
her attachment to the Churches, we must
pursue our inquiry along other lines. It
will, of course, be understood that I am
not denying the very real and quite
honest share which the two preceding
motives have in the religion of woman.
I have from the first disclaimed the idea
that she merely acquiesces, out of mental
indolence, in religious tradition. Yet it
must be said that women are less careful
than they should be to examine the
grounds on which they know their beliefs
to rest. It is a duty to oneself, one’s
children, and humanity to see that our
convictions are well founded. The pro
gress of the race turns very largely on
the elimination of error and injustice
from life. Women must contribute to
this. They must realise that, as both
history and psychology teach, they are
essentially the conservatives of the race.
�THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN
This fact imposes on them a sterner
duty to reflect on their beliefs and sift
out error. Only thus can they fully
expect that intellectual respect which
men are increasingly anxious to pay them
tO-day. Therefore I plead for inquiry
and discussion.
Religious teaching,
remember, has no peculiar sanctity until
it is known to be true. This sounds very
commonplace and obvious ; but it is an
undeniable fact that, in a confused and
tortuous way, very many people make
the sacredness of religion a plea for
evading inquiry and discussion as to its
truth, and so commit a most deplorable
and foolish inversion.
However, there is one further root of
the attachment of women to the Churches
that we have to examine before there
can be profitable question of discussing
evidences. Many women are convinced
that it will be impossible to train children
without the aid of Christian, or at least
Theistic, teaching. Indeed, as I have
already said, many men, even men with
no religious belief, have sought to keep
unsettling controversies away from women
on this ground. The training of the
character of children is a task of great
difficulty and delicacy, and there can be
no question that a sincere and lasting
belief in God—as it is held by the more
liberal and humane Christians of our
day—can be effectively used in it. It is
not surprising that mothers hesitate to
enter the dangerous field of religious
inquiry, when they know of no alterna
tive to the religious incentives to right
conduct. There is a genuine dismay at
what they think to be a most serious
loss of deterrent and educative thoughts.
But here again I submit that women do
not reflect enough, do not read enough,
and do not inquire enough, on the
problem. Let us see if there is any
truth in the suggestion that the training
of children is seriously endangered by
the abandonment of its religious
elements.
However, I must first enter a protest
against the modern attempt to erect
what Emerson called “the cowardly
doctrine of consequences ” into a prin
ciple. I respect the anxiety of a mother
who fears to lose the help of religion in
the training of her child; but I think the
attempt of certain recent writers to lay it
down as a comfortable maxim that the
question of the truth or untruth of
Christianity must give way to the ques
tion of its practical use is a most
mischievous proceeding. When George
Eliot was asked once why she attacked
the belief in immortality, she replied,
“ Because it is a lie.” Every one of her
great Rationalist colleagues had a
splendid ideal of the dignity and power
of truth. While they were being calum
niated by the clergy, while frenzied cries
were being raised about the materialistic
consequences of their teaching, they
were urging upon England a lofty ideal
of sincerity and truth, which the clergy
were to a great extent practically out
raging. I remember how Dr. Mivart, in
his Catholic days, wrote a work in which
on one page he gave the usual warnings
about the evil consequences of Agnos
ticism, and on another page actually
railed at J. S. Mill for his excessive
idealism ! So to-day, while Rationalists
are fighting for the pure ideal of sincerity
and truthfulness, their opponents are
pleading for the “materialistic” doctrine
of consequences, and the clergy are
betraying on every side the insincerity
into which they are driven. It is a just
Nemesis.
For consider how such a moral theory
is bound to work out, and how it is
�68
THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN
actually working. It is suggested that we
should retain the Christian system as a
moral discipline, whether it be true or no.
There is a certain plausibility about this
as an abstract proposition, but picture it in
actual life. Our ministers shall be told
to continue their solemn addresses to
the Deity with every gesture and sign of
real belief: the Mass or the Communion
service shall be gravely performed : our
preachers shall continue to talk in
accents of particular seriousness of a
personal God and Heaven and Hell and
the Incarnation and Atonement, and all
the rest. And these men, doing this in
theatrical insincerity, we shall continue
to regard—nay, it will now be their one
title to existence and respect—as the
moral and spiritual element of the com
munity. We shall teach our children to
say prayers and tell them we believe in
God and Heaven ; and we shall imagine
that we are in this way sustaining our
own moral dignity as parents and
teachers, and laying the foundations of
moral dignity in them ! Was there ever
a more deplorable outrage on moral
training than this last desperate shift of
religious apologetics ? It is beyond the
paradoxes of Gilbertian opera. It will
be said that the idea is rather to arrest
the progress of criticism, and leave, the
Churches free to recover the lost ground.
That is to say, we informed people, who
know or suspect these things to be
untrue, shall encourage a set of religious
teachers to remain in deliberate igno
rance, and bring up a fresh generation
in the same ignorance; and we shall
carefully fence about their ignorance lest
some stray ray of truth ever penetrate
and unsettle it; and we shall make
believe to share it on occasion, and
strictly keep to ourselves the truths we
have learned. Certainly the twentieth
century is hearing some strange gospels.1
To all this miserable shuffling Rational
ism opposes the gospel of sincerity. It
is too often forgotten, apparently, that
there is a connection between truth and
truthfulness. We seem to fancy, some
times, that we may pride ourselves on
our truthfulness, yet encourage falseness,
or at least encourage that shrinking from
inquiry which is suspiciously close to it.
Or we seem to think that we can confine
insincerity to one particular department
of life, where it is thought to have a
certain use, and be in all other respects
honourable men. This is impossible for
most of us. It is absurd to think that
we can foster or connive at insincerity in
one part of life and not find it extending
to the others; and, when that one
department of life in which we would
suffer falseness is the very province of
moral culture itself, we are perpetrating
a folly and an outrage. Truth cannot
thrive on lies. Men do not gather
grapes from thistles : nor sincerity and
honour from such fictitious culture as this.
But all this modern philosophy is a
fabrication of men, not women. I only
allude to it because it is sought to include
women as its chief victims. I proceed
to deal with that sincere and honourable
concern which so many mothers feel,
with all respect to the dignity of truth, at
the suggestion that they should part with
the most forcible elements of the child’s
training. And first let me draw attention
to the fact that this anxiety is no new
thing in the history of religion. An
interesting light is thrown on it by
the experience of preceding changes.
1 Those who doubt the reality of such teach
ing will find it expressly urged in Mr. W. H.
Mallock’s Religion as a Credible Doctrine, and
quite plainly included in the philosophy of
Professor James’s Varieties of Rebigiotis Experi
ence and Professor Schiller’s Humanism.
�THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN
The cry was raised long ago, when the
Reformers attacked the sacramental
system of the dominant creed. They
were told that they were endangering the
moral culture of Europe. This sacra
mental system, it was said, has become
so entirely and organically a part of the
moral life of the people that you cannot
tear it away without causing grave moral
disorder. How—we can fancy a mother
of those troubled days asking herself—
how can the child be influenced if you
take away the strong curb of the confes
sional, or the piercing ideal of the com
munion ? But the Reformers swept the
sacramental system out of one-half of
Europe, and there was no moral deteriora
tion. The Bible then became the chief
ground of moral culture; and, when
Deists and Unitarians set out to destroy
the belief in the supernatural character
of the Bible, the same anxiety was
expressed. How can you remove this
ground of our structure of moral dis
cipline, and not bring it down in ruin ?
But the idea of there being a super
natural authority in the Bible has gone
from the minds of most people, and there
has been no moral deterioration. The
same fear was expressed, and in louder
tones than ever,, when the attack on the
conventional idea of hell and heaven
began. Surely this doctrine, so vitally in
volved in the sanctions of conduct, could
not be abandoned without harm ? And,
again, the great majority of the people of
England have discarded the belief, and
have suffered no moral deterioration.
It is, in fact, far too little to say that
there was no moral deterioration. There
was moral improvement. The average
level of morality has not been higher in
Europe for many ages than it is to-day.It was probably higher in the earlier
stages of Greek or Roman or Egyptian
69
civilisation. But it has not been higher
in any other century of the Christian
era; and it was far lower in the period
when the power of the Christian Church
was greatest. In the course of the nine
teenth century there has been a steady
improvement. The picture of English
life in the eighteenth century which Sir
Leslie Stephen prefixes to his English
Utilitarians fully shows this; and I
have already quoted Sir Walter Besant’s
opinion to the same effect. Our com
mercial and imperialist age has brought
its own difficulties; but the general
standard of personal morality, among
rich and poor, is higher than it was a
hundred years ago. And in the space
of that hundred years the influence of
the clergy has steadily shrunk. It is
quite clear that religious beliefs which
seem to be the very foundations of moral
life can be dispensed with; and it is
clear that the humanist moral culture
that comes to take their place is remark
ably effective. Nor may we ignore the
fact that the rise of this humanist culture
brings with it a new extension of morality
which had hitherto almost been neglected.
Our age is characterised by the growth
of a strong demand for justice and
humanity in the whole of our social
order. The mitigation, and if possible
suppression, of the horrors of war, the
improvement of the condition and homes
and education of the workers, the cry of
justice to woman, the prevention of
cruelty to animals and children, the ces
sation of the practice of persecuting men
for their opinions, the wiser and more
humane treatment of criminals and
paupers—these are all peculiarly modern
reforms. It is absurd to say that they
are due to. the tardy appreciation of
Christian principles. They have grown
as Christianity shrunk.
�70
THE TRAINING OE CHILDREN
Therefore it seems strange to raise
again to-day the cry that any particular
religious belief is necessary for maintain
ing good character. The plain truth is
that the Christian faith has never had
more than a very restricted moral action
on the world. It has produced saints of
heroic fibre and the most noble character.
It has helped great numbers of people in
every generation to realise a fair ideal of
conduct. But it has never succeeded in
deeply influencing more than a small
minority of its people. I have said
enough in the course of the preceding
historical chapters to justify this, and
am not eager to reopen the subject.
Drunkenness, vice, cruelty, violence, and
fraud have abounded in every age. The
religious woman shrinks from such a
study; she would cling to her belief in
the efficacy of Christian teaching, yet
refuse to examine if history supports her
belief. I can only repeat that the plain
testing of that belief by the facts of his
tory and contemporary life yields a very
different result. Take those sections of
the community where Rationalist ideas
have as yet little penetrated—our villages.
Has anyone the slightest serious doubt
as to the failure of their church-going to
curb their vicious tendencies? I am
writing this chapter in a large fishing and
agricultural village, where three clergy
men exercise a rare power over the
people; yet I find its moral condition to
be extraordinary. Take Spain, where the
Church retains an almost medieval influ
ence. It is a country of notorious cruelty
and immorality.
Further—because an ounce of fact is
worth a ton of logic—let us take a land
where the moral culture has been
separated from religion for centuries—Japan. Neither the native religion of
Japan, Shinto, nor the imported and
widely-popular form of Buddhism, has
attempted to influence the character of
the people to any great extent. Their
priests have confined their attention to
ceremony and worship, and left conduct
to the Confucian teachers and moralists.
Now, these are strict Agnostics. For
centuries every educated man in Japan
has been Agnostic, and, as every writer
on the subject says—whether we take
missionaries such as Dr. Griffis and
Munzinger, or writers like Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Diosy, or Japanese authori
ties like Professor Nitobe or the Marquis
Ito—the morality of Japan has been
entirely trusted to them. What has been
the result? Professor Hearn says that
we must endorse the verdict of Kaempffer
that “in the practice of virtue, in purity
of life and outward devotion, they far
surpass the Christians.” The American
missionary, Dr. Griffis, says that their
“ beautiful lives and noble characters ”
helped to mould his own character.
M. Lamairesse says that “ in sobriety, in
personal dignity, in mutual respect and
reciprocal benevolence, the mass of the
people live above the moral level of the
majority of westerners.” Sir Edwin Arnold
says :—
Where else in the world does there exist such
a conspiracy to be agreeable: such a widespread
compact to render the difficult affairs of life as
smooth and graceful as circumstances permit:
such fair decrees of fine behaviour fixed and
accepted by all: such universal restraint of the
coarser impulses of speech and act: such pretty
picturesqueness of daily existence: such sincere
delight in beautiful artistic things: such frank
enjoyment of the enjoyable: such tenderness to
little children: such reverence for parents and
old persons: such widespread refinement of
tastes and habits: such courtesy to strangers:
such willingness to please and be pleased?
I do not wish to press this high
estimate of the Japanese character,
�THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN
though I have not found a single writer
in English, French, or German, who has
spent many years in the heart of Japan,
that does not agree with it. The Japanese
character has its shades ; but in sobriety,
humanity, sympathy, generosity, cleanli
ness, refinement, kindness, gentleness,
self-respect, and self-restraint the Japanese
are at least equal to any people in the
world. This has been done by a purely
humanist culture. “ Confucius alone
has done all this,” says the German
missionary, Munzinger; and the first
principle laid down by Confucius was :
“To give oneself earnestly to the duties
owing to men, and while respecting
spiritual beings, if there are any such, to
keep aloof from them—this may be
called wisdom.” It is a wisdom that
has had a wonderful success in the Far
East. Considering her long isolation
from the general stream of history—from
that inheriting of extinct civilisations and
that constant comparing of national
experiences which have made Europe
what it is—Japan’s moral progress is
remarkable. Thirty years ago the
Japanese Government sent a commis
sion to Europe and America to study
the moral influence of Christianity.
They were fully prepared to adopt it as
the national religion of Japan if its
spiritual efficacy were proved. Now,
this commission of seventy educated
Japanese was ideally impartial. Most of
its members were Agnostics, who had
no more interest in one religion than
another, yet believed that it might be
advisable to have a religion for the
people at large. But they returned to
Japan after a minute inquiry, and
reported that Christianity (to quote the
words in which Professor Hearn records
their verdict) “ had proved itself less
efficacious as an ethical influence in the
7i
West than Buddhism had done in the
East.”
It only remains to add that this build
ing of the character of the people has
been effected through the elementary
and secondary schools. So great a stress
is laid on the formation of the character
of the children that no preaching or
further moral culture is necessary. No
religion is taught in the schools. The
duty of man to his brother-man is the
one principle recognised. And the same
moral culture is found in China. “Not
to communicate knowledge or learning,
but to mould character, to instil right
principles of action and conduct, is
evidently the object of the Chinese
common school,” says Mr. Holcombe, a
high American authority. In the higher
schools this training of character is con
tinued ; and there is the same absence
of any further preaching. The result of
it is hardly less successful than in Japan,
though China, too, has been so long
deprived of the stimulus of free inter
course with other nations. The standard
of personal character is high. Europeans
who only know Chinamen out of their
country or in the ports, and missionaries
who have to furnish a pretext for “ con
verting ” them, give very wrong impres
sions of the Chinese. Aside from such
authorities as Mr. Holcombe, who are in
sympathy with their ethical system, even
writers like Mrs. Little render a fine
account of the average character. They
are, she says, “ always hardworking, goodhumoured, kindly, thrifty, law-abiding,
contented, and, in the performance of
duties laid upon them, astonishingly
conscientious ”; and she adds that “ the
moral conscience of the people is so edu
cated that an appeal to it never falls
flat, as it often would in England.”
Here, then, we have an object-lesson
�72
THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN
in the moral training of children without
the aid of religion that must far out
weigh all the anxieties of Christian
mothers and all the logic of Christian
apologists. While we are timidly dis
cussing the feasibility of training our
boys and girls on a purely human basis,
we find that it has been done
successfully in China for 2,500 years
and in Japan for several centuries.
While we are wondering how the
world will live without belief in God
as its moral ruler, we find that
the greatest moralist of all time bade
China, 2,500 years ago, “ keep aloof
from spiritual beings, if there are any,”
and the huge empire has, so far as its
ethical culture is concerned, obeyed him
to this day. A man like the Marquis
Ito, deeply versed in the history of China
and Japan, perfectly familiar with the
moral condition of both countries, and
also well acquainted with our religious
development in the West, bids his
countrymen look with unconcern on the
decay of their popular religions to-day,
because their moral culture (Bushido)
will suffice. “ Religion,” he said to Mr.
Stead, “ is a source of weakness.” This
great achievement of a purely Agnostic
moral culture is an eloquent answer to
all our doubts. The higher Confucian
ideal—than which, says Mr. Holcombe,
“ no higher , type may be produced by
any code or system of ethical training ”
—the Chun Tz, or “gentleman,” is a
practical standard, and has been realised
by millions, not by a few ascetic saints.
The literature of both Japan aud China
is rich in models of moral heroism.
And—where Christianity has most con
spicuously failed—the average character
is good. But, as I said, I do not wish
to press the comparison. It is enough
that we have a great example of humani
tarian culture that is far older than the
civilisation of Europe.
It seemed to me advisable to reply at
once to the timidity of religious people,
and to the sophistry of those who en
courage them, with the various series of
solid facts which I have presented. There
is obviously no foundation for the con
cern felt about the moral result of our
abandoning Christianity. The arguments
by which it is sought to justify that con
cern must yield before the array of facts
I have marshalled. It is not a question
for reasoning at all. If there are any
who are so restricted in outlook and
experience that they cannot find in the
lives of the innumerable Agnostics about
them a proof of the efficacy of purely
humanist morality, let them study China
and Japan, and compare the result with
Europe ; and let them see how the stan
dard of character has improved among
us, while religion has decayed. It will
then be a question, not whether we may
train children without religious ideas, but
how we are to train them.1 To this more
practical question I must now devote a
few paragraphs.
In approaching such a subject one is
immediately confronted with the difficulty
that arises from the very different educa
tional conditions in the various classes
of society. I can only meet this by
making a few general observations on
training in the school and training in the
1 For instance, Miss Corelli’s Mighty Atom
could never have been written if she had had the
slightest acquaintance with moral education in
the Far East. Nor would it have been written
if she had had any large acquaintance with
Agnostic gentlemen, or a more accurate know
ledge of the statistics of suicide. On the former
point it is interesting to compare the opinion of
another religious novelist, Mr. Quiller Couch,
who said, in an article in the Daily News, that
there was no friend and counsellor so much
sought in difficult and delicate trouble as the
Agnostic.
�THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN
home, and informing the reader where to
obtain detailed guidance. After what
has been said, the solution of the school
question is obvious. We need to adopt
the principle, with more improved and
more modern methods of application, of
the schools of China and Japan. The
actual training in morals and manners
given in our elementary schools is pitiful
in the extreme, and it is just this that
throws so much responsibility on the
parents and clergymen. Points of con
duct and points of dogma are hopelessly
confused. Sections of the Old Testament
are used, out of which it is impossible
for any but the most skilled teacher to
extract useful moral instruction. Children
are taught as literal truths episodes from
the Old and New Testament which few
scholarly clergymen take to be more than
legends. Teachers are forced to give this
instruction when they do not believe a
word of it, and they have had no training
whatever in the formation of character.
The squabbles of the various sects rage
around the children’s lives until they
grow sceptical and disdainful out of very
weariness. And when they leave school,
and enter the warehouse or workshop,
they hear at once a constant stream of
denial and contempt for what they were
taught to regard as the sole foundation
of right conduct. How we can expect
good results from such a pitiful scheme
as this, and on what sober ground (apart
from sectarian interests) we can insist on
the retention of such a scheme, it is
difficult to see.
Our schools must be wholly relieved
from what has been called religious in
struction. This has been almost useless
in itself, has very often been given by
sceptical teachers, and has most gravely
blinded us to the real absence of moral
training. The time has come to relegate
73
religious instruction to the church or
chapel, as long as people wish it to be
given at all. Then the nation must set
itself the serious task of making the
formation of the character of the children
its first educational aim. “ Self-respect
is the first aim of our educational
system,” said a Japanese Minister of
Education to Mr. Henry Norman. It
will be well for England when its Board
of Education can say the same. The
training of teachers must include, in
the first place, a knowledge of the art of
forming character. The curriculum must
contain daily lessons in morals and
manners—in gentleness, honesty, truth
fulness, cleanliness, decency, respect,
honour, and justice. Masters and mis
tresses shall place their chief pride, not
in the quantity of facts and figures they
can pack into the children’s memories,
but in the number of bright, happy, and
sweet-tempered children they can show.
Education (or the drawing out) of the
child’s aptitudes, moral and intellectual,
shall be the object rather than what an
American writer has called “ Encephalisation,” or the scratching of facts on the
brain-tissues. The vision of Ruskin must
be realised:—
In some far-away and yet undreamt-of hour I
can even imagine that England may cast all
thoughts of possessive wealth back to the bar
baric nations among whom they first arose ; and
that, while the sands of the Indus and adamant
of Golconda may yet stiffen the housings of the
charger, and flash from the turban of the slave,
she, as a Christian mother, may at last attain to
the virtues and the treasures of a heathen one,
and be able to lead forth her sons, saying—
These are my jewels !
But let the reader not suppose that
this is really, as Ruskin thinks, a dream
of a remote and problematic future, a
page from More’s Utopia, or Morris’s
News from Nowhere, or Bellamy’s
�74
THE TRAINING OF CHILDREN
Looking Backward. The work is pro
ceeding. In France a great number of
influential men and women have banded
themselves in a “ League of Sincerity,”
to secure a perfectly honest and practical
training for their children apart from all
those disputed dogmas of the Churches.
In the United States the Societies for
Ethical Culture are showing the way.
In Germany the Ethische Gesellschaften
are attacking the problem. In England,
I am glad to say, we are doing more than
elsewhere.
Besides the formation of
many Ethical, Socialist, and Secularist
Sunday-schools, which give moral lessons
of this type with complete success, there
is a Moral Instruction League that pur
sues the aim on a much larger scale. It
has framed a complete syllabus of moral
lessons, and is gradually, with the help of
trained educationists and experts, cloth
ing this skeleton scheme with a full body
of instructions to teachers and model
lessons. At Leicester and several other
places a scheme of moral lessons has
already been adopted by the Education
Committees. Several books of specimen
lessons have been published, notably Mr.
Quilter’s Onward and Upward (pub
lished at 2S. 6d. by Swan Sonnenschein
and Co.) and Mr. Gould’s Children's
Book of Moral Lessons (three series1)
and Stories from the Bible (published by
Watts & Co.). I would also recommend
the reading of Mr. Hayward’s Secret of
Herbart. Thus a very considerable part
of the work has already been done, and
it has won the warm approval of educa
tionists, and even of some influential
clergymen, such as Dr. John Hunter.2
1 The first series may now be had for sixpence
(paper edition).
2 For further details about the work and aims
of the Moral Instruction League the reader may
apply to the Secretary, Mr. Harrold Johnson,
From the elementary school this
scheme of direct lessons in morals and
manners—not abstract morality, remem
ber, but close and detailed allusion to
life, with constant appeal to history and
the lives of good men and women—
would pass on to secondary schools and
colleges. Every mother who sends, or
may send, sons to these institutions knows
how great is the need for more effective
moral training. From Eton and Harrow
down to the smallest endowed school
they are infected by a vice which is the
despair of teachers, and which often
follows the boys, to their ruin, into
mature life. As a teacher, and one who
has compared notes with other masters,
I know well the terrible prevalence of this,
and I need not go on to other defects.
Religious ideas fail, in most cases, to
influence the character of boys (though
this vice is by no means confined to
boys’ schools).
The most effective
appeal has always been an appeal to
their honour and manliness, and a
rational and straightforward discussion
of it. Read the beautiful pictures which
Professor Hearn gives of Japanese
colleges (in which he has taught for
years) in his works, and the contrast will
be helpful. We need to make a science
and an art of this appeal to the dignity
and honour of the boy or girl; to show
19, Buckingham Street, Charing Cross, London,
W. C., who will gladly give information. I do
not discuss the question of the use of the Bible
for two reasons. The first is that the teacher
under the new order will be instructed to use it
freely, like other good books, where it is fitted for
his purpose. The second is that the great bulk
of the Bible is admittedly of interest only to
scholars; many parts of it are certainly not
suitable to be made accessible to children, and
even the very best parts of it—the parts, such as
the prophecies and some of the Psalms, which
are among the best moral literature of the world
—-can only be fully understood by men and
women who know life. It would be a .tragedy
if a child understood them.
�THE. TRAINING OF CHILDREN
75
them, as they have never been shown believe most mothers will realise how
before, the roots of vice or virtue in their effective all along has been the simple
actual lives, the shadows cast by vicious human appeal to the child. In thousands
habits and imperfect self-control, the of homes in England since the middle of
brighter and happier world they create the nineteenth century the word “ God ”
about them by kindness, generosity, has never been mentioned, and the
honour, and decency.
training has been completely successful.
When every school in England has It is said of the children of Colonel
Seriously set about this work, we shall Ingersoll that they had never once been
find the burden of the parent grow struck, yet the result was exquisite.
lighter and the need for supernatural Another Agnostic parent, who had reared
motives disappear. Then we shall have his children with conspicuous success,
no longer that terrible difficulty of the showed me the chief principle of their
girl or youth between fifteen (or so) and training hanging on their bedroom walls :
marriage. It has been largely created by “ To thine own self be true.” I have
relying chiefly on supernatural motives never known a mother go back from
for conduct in the younger days, and these humanist to theological ideas for greater
have been questioned and weakened when effect, or envy the woman who could
the age of reasoning and observation honestly talk of God and prayer.
arrived. In many a thousand cases the
I cannot go into further detail, but
“ wicked ” child has only been honest would urge inquiring mothers to follow
and truthful.1 In many millions more it the references I have given. There is
has really lacked any foundation for right no need whatever to fear that the training
conduct. This new training would instil of children will suffer by the disappear
in the mind of the boy or girl principles ance of religion. Rather have we good
of right action which would only be con ground for hope that, if we would briskly
firmed when they became thoughtful and sweep away all this dallying with decaying
observant, and saw the effects in life of creeds and all the insincerity it involves,
viciousness. The parents would deal we shall set ourselves the more seriously
with their children as the teacher does to the task of the formation of character
in the school. Such books as those of as a work interesting and of unspeakable
Mr. Gould and Mr. Quilter will give importance in itself. Then at last we
hints to parents who need them; but I may discover the means to influence, not
an elect few, but also, and more especially,
1 For a very interesting and useful example of the great majority which Christianity has
this see Lady Florence Dixie’s autobiography,
been content to look on as not elect.
Ijain, and her Songs of a Child.
�76
WHERE DO WE STAND IN RELIGION?
Chapter IX.
WHERE DO WE STAND IN RELIGION?
I opened this essay with a glance at the
decay of the Churches from the point of
view of their numerical following. This
has become so apparent to all of late
that the clergy, whose obvious policy it
is to deny it as long as possible, are
making grave comments on it in every
country. But there is another way of
considering the decay of religion, and to
this I would particularly draw the atten
tion of women. I have now pointed
out that they have no special ground
for gratitude to Christianity, that they
possess no peculiar “religious instinct”
which can assure them of its truth without
their troubling to examine its evidences,
and that there is not the slightest reason
to think Christianity indispensable for
moral and spiritual culture. They have,
therefore, as a duty to themselves, their
children, and the world at large, to con
sider in the ordinary way if the beliefs
they do so much to retain among us are
true or not. As a further incentive to
do this, I propose to put before them a
few facts relating to the stupendous
changes which are taking place in the
minds of modern thinkers, and even
theologians, with regard to the doctrines
of conventional religion.
People with little leisure naturally form
their estimate of religious teaching from
the deliveries of the pulpit. It is not
surprising that such people are un
acquainted with the profound changes
which are taking place within the
shrunken area of the religious bodies.
Christian scholarship is utterly transform
ing the body of dogma which the Chris
tian pulpit and Press are urging upon the
people as if it were still agreed upon. It
is safe to assume that the women of
England would hesitate to give that
unwavering credence they do to the
Churches if they were aware of the sur
prising extent to which the familiar reli
gious ideas have already been surrendered.
I will illustrate the point by a number of
quotations from contemporary literature
especially bearing upon the three central
Christian ideas of the Bible, the future
life, and a personal God.
A recent incident in English clerical
life will serve to introduce the question
of modern theological views of the Bible.
Some time ago the Rev. Mr. Beeby was
virtually driven out of the service of the
Church of England by his bishop, Dr.
Gore, for questioning the Virgin-birth of
Christ. Most people in the Church pro
bably thought that the bishop had dis
charged an obvious, if painful, duty in
expelling a clergyman who called into
question one of the most characteristic
features of the Biblical narrative. But
the truth is that Christian scholarship—I
need make no reference whatever to
non-Christian research—has cast so grave
a doubt on the familiar story of the birth
of Christ that it is scarcely honest to
preach it any longer. I remember meet
ing Dr. Mivart, then a professed Catholic,
some five years ago. He literally laughed
at the idea of the Virgin-birth; and
gradually I have learned that this is
almost the typical attitude of scholarly
�»HS
WHERE DO WE STAND IN RELIGION?
Christians. The Dean of Westminster
has recently written that “in the minds
of thoughtful men there is a very serious
disquietude in regard to the doctrine of
the Virgin-birth.......a real unsettlement
of minds in regard to a matter which
hardly occurred to their fathers as a sub
ject of inquiry.” I take the quotation
from an article by the Rev. Dr. Rashdall
in the Independent Review for May, 1903.
Dr. Rashdall himself goes on to say that
it “ constitutes the chief difficulty with
able and educated men who might other
wise be inclined to seek orders in the
Church of England.” He lets us see
his own estimate of the evidence for
the legend when he asks: “ What
credence should we give to some
story about the birth or infancy of
Napoleon Bonaparte which could not be
traced back further than to a Bonapartist
memoir writer who wrote about the
year 1872, and did not mention his
authority ? ” The clerical writers of the
Encyclopaedia Biblica, edited by Canon
Cheyne—almost the one English clergy
man who would tell the people the
plain truth in these matters—disdain
fully set the legend aside as worthless.
The writers of Cone’s Handbooks to the
New Testament in America have little
more respect for it. Professor Usener
says that “for the whole birth and child
hood story of Matthew, in its every detail,
it is possible to find a pagan substratum.”
Professor Loofs, one of the first Biblical
■ scholars of the German Church, says that
“anyone who understands anything about
historical criticism must concede that
the Virgin-birth belongs to the least
credible of New Testament traditions”;
and that “ no well-informed, and at the
same time honest and conscientious,
theologian ” can teach it with the old
confidence any longer. In a word, the
77
story of the miraculous conception and
birth of Christ, in all its details, is now
regarded by all the Biblical scholars in the
German Church, by most of the leading
Biblical scholars in the English and
American Churches, and even by some
of the chief Catholic scholars of the
French Church (such as M. Loisy), as a
late and worthless interpolation in the
New Testament. Yet year by year, as
Christmas returns, we find the ordinary
clergy expatiating on the legend as if no
change whatever had taken place !
Perhaps the next most characteristic
feature of the Biblical narrative is (if we
except the Crucifixion) the account of
the Resurrection. This story is faring
no better than that of the Nativity in the
hands of modern Christian scholars. If
the reader cares to look up the article on
this subject in the Encyclopaedia Biblica,
or in Dr. Cary’s Synoptic Gospels—both
honest and commendable efforts to tell
the truth about the Bible to ordinary
Christian readers—he will find that the
dogma of the Resurrection is practically
given up by Christian scholars. Dr.
Loofs puts it and the Ascension on just
the same footing as the Nativity: they
belong to “the latest and least reliable
traditions of the Gospel narrative ”—in
other words, are worthless interpolations.
Dr. Schmiedel finds the Gospel accounts
full of “glaring contradictions,” which
“show only too clearly with what lack of
concern for historical precision the
evangelist wrote.” Dr. Cary finds “an
utter absence of truly historical condi
tions,” and says of the various features
of the story that they tell “incredible
things ” and “ must be looked on with
suspicion.”
Let me repeat that I am now quoting
only representative Christian scholars—
divines who give the current thought in
�78
WHERE DO WE STAND IN RELIGION?
legitimate subject for this inquiry, and
the result is quite fatal to conventional
pulpit oratory. Archdeacon Wilson, in
his latest popular writings on the Bible,
implores his colleagues to abandon their
futile hostility to the new views. The
Bible, these writers say, remains
“ inspired ”—is still “ the word of God.”
But that can only mean now that it is a
source of moral and spiritual helpfulness
—which Rationalists do not deny—not
that it possesses any historical weight,
until this has been won for it here and
there by the ordinary methods of criti
cism.
I have confined myself to the New
Testament partly because this is the sole
source of our knowledge of Christ, and
partly because it is now almost super
fluous to discuss the inspiration of the
Old Testament. One of the first Biblical
scholars of the Catholic Church, Father
David, once said to me: “ The Old
Testament was not written for us, but
for the Jews, and the sooner the Church
can quietly drop it overboard the better.”
One is not yet free to say these things
quite openly in the Catholic Church, but
they are said daily in the various branches
of the Protestant Church. No educated
clergyman now questions that the earlier
books of the Old Testament, as we have
them, were written in the fifth century
before Christ; that the really earliest
books in it, Amos and Hosea, were
written about the ninth century; that
the earliest documents we can trace as
having been used in writing the Penta
teuch (or Hexateuch) date from about
the ninth century; that the stories of
Genesis and Exodus have no historical
value; that none of the Psalms can be
1 This is very ably argued, and with a great proved to have been written by David,
weight of scholarship, by Mr. J. M. Robertson, and most of them come down to the fifth
in his Christianity and Mythology and Pagan
and fourth centuries; that Kings and
Christs.
the higher circles of the German Church
and the growing thought of English
Christian scholarship. It is clear from
this that the teaching about Christ and
the Bible, still rhetorically delivered
from our pulpits, is little short of dis
honest; yet this is all that religious women
are able to acquaint themselves with, as a
rule. The traditional figure of Christ is
dissolving rapidly. Its most familiar and
striking features are gone beyond recall.
The Gospel story of his life is a latewritten biography, full of contradictions
and interpolations, or “layers of tradi
tion,” as these Christian authorities put
it. The untrustworthiness of the Gospels
has now been admitted in principle, and
it is impossible to foresee where it will
end, or how much of the figure of Christ
will be left. If I were to step outside
the range of strictly Christian writings, I
should find that there is a growing ten
dency to regard Christ as a pure myth.1
But it is enough for my purpose to rely
on Christian works. In these the dis
solution of the venerated historical figure
is proceeding rapidly. The authority of
the New Testament as a record of his
life is daily diminishing. The critical
principle, which has long ago destroyed
the idea of there being any supernatural
value in the Old Testament, is now
applied freely to the New Testament.
Even less scholarly popular writers are
beginning at length to apprise people of
the change. An article by Canon Henson
in the Contemporary Review, on “ The
Future of the Bible,” insists that it is
useless to dream of putting any check
on this process of critical dissolution.
The New Testament, like the Old, is a
�WHERE DO WE STAND IN RELIGION?
Chronicles have a very precarious and
limited historical value, and Daniel,
Ruth, Jonah, Job, and Tobit none at all.
However, more serious consequences
follow from the analysis of the New
Testament, and so it was taken up with
more reluctance and has been more
fiercely resisted. I have shown that the
work has now proceeded far enough to
revolutionise Christian teaching. Doubt
is thrown on all the miracles, and we are
urged to “ concentrate on the sayings of
Jesus,” and to remember that it is his
life rather than his death that matters.
I say this is nothing short of a revolu
tion ; and I believe it will be little short
of a revelation to the great majority
of the supporters of the Churches. It
means a retreat to a conception of Christ
and of the Bible which may be held by
any Rationalist; while it will be news to
most readers of the Christian Press that
such a man as Professor Haeckel, on
whom such bitterness has been poured,
only differs by slight shades in his esti
mate of the Bible and of Christ from the
leading scholars of the German Church.1
And while the clergy are thus them
selves dissolving the conventional figure
of Christ and the authority of the Bible,
philosophers are submitting the belief in
1 Readers who wish to verify or follow up
what I have said in this section will do well to
read the Encyclopedia Biblica (under almost
any article), remembering that this is a work
written by Christian scholars for ordinary Chris
tian readers. In America Dr. Cone’s Handbooks
will be more accessible. The article of Canon
Henson in the Contemporary for February, 1904,
and the recent sixpenny and threepenny books of
Archdeacon Wilson and the Rev. Walter Welch,
show in a popular form the resistless pressure of
the critics. The works of Cheyne, Sayce,
Bennett, Driver, etc., are all useful, and all
orthodox. The Rationalist Press Association
publishes (at one penny) an excellent summary
of the conclusions of the Encyclopedia Biblica,
and (at a shilling) Mr. Leonard’s New Story of
the Bible.
79
God to a scarcely less drastic treatment.
Here again I prefer to give an idea of
contemporary thought rather than argue
myself, and, as far as possible, to quote
writers who are by no means Agnostic
or Atheistic. I have earlier referred to
the effort of Mr. W. H. Mallock to find
a new base for religious belief, so that he
will be understood to be a sympathetic
writer; he is, in fact, one of the most
persistent critics of Rationalism. Yet
he says, in his Religion as a Credible
Doctrine, of the conventional belief:—
We must divest ourselves of all foregone
conclusions, of all question-begging reverences,
and look the facts of the universe steadily in the
face. If theists will but do this, what they will
see will astonish them. They will see that if
there is anything at the back of this vast process
with a consciousness and a purpose in any way
resembling our own—a Being who knows what
he wants, and is doing his best to get it—he is,
instead of a holy and all-wise God, a scatter
brained, semi-powerful, semi-impotent monster.
This is hard language, but it is in
substance consonant with what many
definitely religious philosophers are say
ing to-day. The late Mr. Fiske, for
instanee, said in the same connection :
“The fact stands inexorably before us
that a Supreme Will, enlightened by
perfect intelligence and possessed of
infinite power, might differently have
fashioned the universe, though in ways
inconceivable by us, so that the suffering
and the waste of life which characterise
Nature’s process of evolution might have
been avoided.” Mr. Fiske is compelled
to retreat upon the belief that God is
not an all-powerful Being distinct from
Nature and man ; and this is, as a fact,
the position in which religious thinkers
are meeting to-day. Professor Le Conte,
another of the chief religious thinkers of
America, gives the same pantheistic and
impersonal idea of God : “ The forces
�8o
WHERE DO WE STAND IN RELIGION?
of Nature are naught else than different
forms of one omnipresent Divine energy
or will.” Professor Royce, a recent
Gifford lecturer, writes : “ We need not
conceive the eternal Ethical Individual
[man] as in any sense less in the grade
of complication of his activity or in the
multitude of his acts of will than is the
Absolute.” Professor Upton, a Hibbert
lecturer, has the same pantheistic idea.
Professor William James, another recent
Gifford lecturer, tells us “ we must bid a
definite good-bye to dogmatic theology,”
and openly rejects monotheism altogether
at the end of his Varieties of Religious
Experience.
These are among the most important
recent pronouncements of religious
thinkers on the conception of God.
They completely destroy the idea of
God current in the Churches, and sub
stitute one which makes prayer and
worship altogether irrational. If we and
Nature and God are one, the idea on
which the Churches build is wholly
erroneous, and their system of worship
must crumble away. They can only
maintain that God is a Person by giving
an entirely new meaning to the word.
And these men, it must be remembered,
are the highest authorities in this matter,
as such men as Canon Cheyne and Pro
fessor Schmiedel are on the Bible. It
only remains for me to show how their
conception is spreading among all
classes of educated people — not to
speak of professed Agnostics. The Rev.
Mr. Ballard has lately said that he looks
to science to restore this belief in God
that philosophy seems to have under
mined.
But there was never so
desperate a hope as this. The general
silence of scientific men on religious
questions is ominous—oppressive. All
the energy and devotion of the clergy
seems unable to induce them to use a'
particle of their great authority over the
mind of our generation in favour of reli
gion. But, even when they do present
their views, it is usually to betray how
widely they are removed from current
theology. Take four of the chief expres
sions of opinion in recent years. Sir
Henry Thompson not long ago published
an essay on The Unknown God, in which
he said that “ the religion of nature must
eventually become the faith of the future,”
and that in it “a priestly hierarchy has
no place, nor are there any specified
formularies of worship.” Lord Kelvin
recently made a brief speech which was
loudly acclaimed as favouring religion.
But not only was his reference to a
“creative Power” no nearer to the
Church teaching than is that of Mr.
Herbert Spencer, but he spoke in the
name of a science (biology) which is not
his own, and he was immediately con
tradicted by all our most distinguished
biologists.
Dr. Russel Wallace, the
spiritist, has recently written again in
defence of religion, but he, too, based
his argument on a science which is not
his own, and he was immediately silenced
by the proper authorities on the matter.
Later still Professor Lloyd-Morgan wrote
in the Contemporary Review. He told
his Christian readers that they must for
ever give up the idea of religion obtain*
ing the support of science, and grounded
his vague theism (somewhat similar to
that of the philosophers I have quoted)
on a precarious metaphysical argument.
To these well-known pronouncements I
can only add a profession of materialism
(in Nature, June 5th, 1902) by Sir
W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, and a confession
of heterodoxy by Dr. Jonathan Hutchin
son (which I heard in a lecture by him at
Haslemere). These are the only phrases
�WHERE DO WE STAND IN RELIGIONS
that have broken the silence of the
scientific world of late years in England
On religious questions — and they are
significant.1
When we pass out to the larger world
of generally educated people, we find
indications innumerable that the current
idea of God is failing. Mr. H. G. Wells,
who has so closely observed contemporary
life for the purpose of forecasting the
future, says in his Anticipations that “the
prevailing men of the future will presume
to no knowledge whatever, will presume
to no possibility of knowledge, of the
teal being of God,” and that they “will
content themselves with denying the
self-contradictory absurdities of an
obstinately anthropomorphic theology,”
such as “ that God is an omniscient
mind.” Thus one of the best-informed
observers of our time believes that within
the present century Agnosticism will be,
as in Japan, the religion of all educated
people. And when one glances into our
literature one finds justification enough
for the forecast. Not only philosophers
and scientists, but even poets, reject
the older conception of a personal God.
The Unknown God and the Hope of the
World of Mr. W. Watson are well known.
He thrusts aside—“ A god whose ghost in arch and aisle
Yet haunts his temple—and his tomb,
But follows in a little while
Odin and Zeus to equal doom ;
A god of kindred seed and line,
Man’s giant shadow, hailed divine.”
And Watson’s poem is founded on the
* Since this work was written Sir Oliver Lodge
has spoken, apparently, in defence of religion.
Here again, however, we only find an attenuated
theism and a belief in a future life on spiritist
grounds. Not only does Sir O. Lodge reject all
the characteristic Christian dogmas (such as the
miraculous birth of Christ),.but his conception of
God and of the future life would have to be
pronounce/! rank heresy by the official theologian.
chief idea of Tennyson’s pantheistic In
Memoriam. Meredith and Hardy and
Swinburne are, as I said, equally
Rationalistic. In fact, we find theology
itself invaded by the new feeling. Sir
Henry Thompson gives in his essay a
curious observation of Dr. Jowett to Dr.
Caird, two divines whose conception of
God was very different from that of the
liturgy. A Congregationalist minister of
the North of England openly preaches
Monism from his pulpit. On all sides,
in every branch of literature, we find
signs of the surrender of the old idea of
a Personal God set over against man and
Nature; and without such a conception
the system of Church worship cannot
honestly endure.
An even greater change is visible when
we come to examine current thought
about a future life. Here the religious
philosophers I have just quoted make a
very feeble pretence of defending the old
idea. Professor Royce “gives up the
question, of immortality as insoluble by
philosophy,” says Professor Le Conte;
and Le Conte immediately adds that
“perhaps it is.” Professor W. James
sees no evidence for it.
Professor
Miinsterburg says: “Only to a cheap
curiosity can it appear desirable that
the inner life, viewed as a series of
psychological facts, shall go on and on
and “ Science opposes to any doctrine of
individual immortality an unbroken and
impregnable barrier.” Mr. Fiske finds
man to be immortal only in the sense
that he is a part of the whole, which is
eternal. When some of the chief reli
gious thinkers of our time are thus
reduced almost to silence, we can find
little beyond fantastic and desperate
speculations in the ordinary apologist.
Thoughtful men are avoiding the subject
to-day. Among those who are, by their
G
�82
WHERE DO WE STAND IN RELIGION?
profession, the best acquainted with the
mind of man—our chief psychologists—
there is not one who argues for personal
immortality. Some turn in despair to
spiritist phenomena, but, generally speak
ing, the old confidential vision of the
future has almost gone. The scientific
evidence against the popular conception
of life in heaven or hell forms, as Miinsterberg says, “an impenetrable barrier.”
Only trust, or groundless faith, can over
leap it.
It is clear, then, that a profound change
is taking place even among thoughtful
men who are still counted religious. The
clerical habit of giving people to under
stand that the structure of belief is essen
tially unchanged, and that only a few
among the philosophers and scientists
and literary men of our time sanction
the popular revolt against it, is disin
genuous. Outside the ranks of the
professional defenders of the Christian
belief, the clergy, hardly a single thinker
now supports the old beliefs in the form
in which they are still presented in the
official teaching of the Churches and by
ordinary preachers.
The Bishop of
London could not, if he cared to try,
induce three first-class thinkers—philo
sophers, scientists, or historians—in
England, the United States, France, and
Germany, to subscribe to-day to the
Apostles’ Creed in the sense in which it
is still given in the Churches. The
whole structure of belief is crumbling.
When the ablest religious philosophers
tell us that a Personal God of the older
type is impossible, and when the leading
Biblical scholars in the Churches add
that the accounts of the Creation and
Fall are legends borrowed from paganism,
and that the New Testament was written
by men with a “ lack of concern for his
torical precision,” the very foundations |
of the faith are weakened, if not des
troyed. These men may themselves
think out a number of symbolic senses
under cover of which they may still
repeat the old formulae. The world at
large is not sophisticated enough to do
so. It is only because they do not know
that the structure of religion is so shaken
and riddled—because they are falsely
told that it is only Rationalists who
doubt the personality of God, and the
personal immortality of man, and the
miracles of Christ, and the miraculous
birth and resurrection, and the reality of
heaven and hell, and the Fall and the
Atonement—that women cling to the
Churches. It is time they knew that
all these things are taught within the
Churches to-day.
Nor may women suppose that at least
the clergy themselves retain an implicit
faith in the old beliefs. Perhaps one of
the saddest features of this age of transi
tion in religious ideas is the scepticism
which the clergy have to conceal behind
a bold profession of faith.
Far be it
from me to join in the suggestion that
the clergy are generally dishonest. I
have moved among them as a colleague,
and know that there are thousands, not
only of simple-minded, but of intelligent,
clergymen, in every denomination, who
retain a literal belief in the old creeds.
But I know just as well that there are
numbers who have no such belief, and
are at times radical sceptics. I know of
ministers of several denominations who
disbelieve the doctrines they serve. I
know Catholic priests and Anglican
clergymen who have made an honest
attempt to earn their living as ordinary
laymen, and who, when the attempt
failed, have returned with their scepticism
to the ministry. The impotence of a
clergyman when he abandons his own
�WHERE DO WE STAND IN RELIGION?
profession is so pathetic that, for every
one who leaves and suffers, scores remain
behind. They are in many cases writh
ing under the burden of creeds in which
they do not believe. Not long ago a
Mr. Ryder seceded from the Church of
England.
In a little work (entitled
Chart and Voyage) which he then wrote
and addressed to his late colleagues he
fully bears out my own experience. In
fact, the well-known traditions of the
Broad Church in England (offering a
score of reasons why one may honestly
profess to believe what one does not
believe), and the occasional outbreak and
submission (as with the Dean of Ripon)
of some clergyman or prelate, tell their
own tale. Happily, greater freedom is
now being won by the clergy; and
women who care to follow the proceed
ings of such bodies as the Churchmen’s
Union will discover how far contempo
rary liberalism has invaded the Churches.
On one point, the analysis of the Bible,
almost all the destructive critics are
clergymen, so that here, at least, there
can be no question of antipathy to
Christianity.
I see no sound moral reason why these
things should be hidden from women.
Mrs. C. Perkins Stetson, in her Women
and Economics, makes a fine protest
against the masculine notion of tying one
half of the race to the starting-post while
the other half runs. We are discarding
that error to-day, and learning to welcome
into the doing of the world’s work those
women who desire to take their part in
it. One of the first qualities for this—
not that it is already too common among
men—must be an alertness to new ideas,
a promptness to discover and to tread
new avenues of progress. Advance is
made by cautious and well-considered
change. The conservative instinct is
83
good; but to be entirely useful it must
be found combined with a sober pro
gressiveness. The world is only now at
the beginning of the consciousness of its
mighty powers and of the great ideal of
universal happiness which is breaking in
a hundred partial lights on the mind of
our generation. “ We must seek in the
past a pledge of the future, not the future
itself,” as Mazzini said. “ Let us be
great in our turn.” It is neither whole
some nor just that we should seek to keep
woman in comparative ignorance, even if
she prefers to restrict her share in the
world’s work to the domestic sphere.
These principles seem to me to have
as great, if not a greater, application to
religious questions than to others. The
Church has, in spite of all the terrible
blunders I have referred to, played a
great part in the history of Europe.
Some day, when the din and heat of the
present religious controversy have ceased,
we shall appraise and appreciate its
influence for good. At the present day
it is almost a disservice to the cause of
truth and progress to bestir oneself in
this direction. No sooner does a sympa
thetic Agnostic or Positivist writer evince
a recognition of some benefit done by
the Church, but his words are at once
torn from their text, and forced into an
admission of the case for the Church as
it is perversely and untruly stated by the
ecclesiastical historian. On the one
hand, in fact, the Neo-Catholic is ready
to spring upon every syllable of sympathy,
and urge the retention of his beliefs in
a “ symbolic ” sense; on the other, the
“ Pragmatist,” that strange outcome of
the confusion of modern philosophy,
hovers by in order to prove that this
recognition of service must outweigh all
our criticisms of the falsity of doctrines.
In such circumstances we can hardly be
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THE HUMANISM OF TO-MORRO W
expected to dwell impartially on whatever
good Christianity has done.
It is enough, for the moment, to say
we recognise that it has had in some
directions a good influence. But that
influence becomes questionable the
moment it rests on beliefs that are felt
to be untrue, or that have to be shielded
from criticism. To prolong the period
of transition, to linger in a stage which
is so conducive to insincerity, seems to
me to be little short of a moral catas
trophe. Let us have a “ League of
Sincerity,” to use the pretty name adopted
by a French association which has been
founded on these principles. “Truth
will prevail ” is a splendid act of faith in
the ultimate soundness of human nature.
But “ Truth shall prevail ” is a living
and ennobling principle for women and
men. To meet the moral dangers which
the new world-problems and the new
commerce and industry and the new
freedom of discussion are bringing upon
us, we need, above all, a strong sense of
honour and sincerity. If we play fast
and loose with that vital principle in the
very province of spiritual culture, it is
folly to expect it to triumph in other
fields of life.
Chapter X.
THE HUMANISM OF TO-MORROW
The reader will often have experienced
the sensation of rising occasionally from
the narrow, crowded streets of some
great city to the summit of a hill or
monument from which the whole may be
surveyed.
How the eye looks trium
phantly over the huge blocks that had
restricted it ! How the infinite and in
tricate details fall into a plan that can be
grasped in one sweep of vision ! How
many features reveal themselves that were
invisible from below ! One experiences
some such sensation in moments of calm
and comprehensive meditation on the
world-movements of our time. While
we live in our daily little grooves, in our
little hives of domestic or civic activity,
our experience gains in richness of detail,
but loses, and often suggests wholly
erroneous ideas, from its narrowness.
The mere accident of our living near
some active church or chapel, with an
attractive preacher, colours our whole
thought, and makes us feel that all the
talk of a decay of religion must be un
founded. The views of our own little
social circle are vaguely felt to reflect the
temper of the world at large. We all
know so well the fallacy of generalising
on a narrow experience. And as we
extend our vision, as we look out on the
literature of the world, as we rise from
our groove and take a broad view of the
situation, the narrow limits melt away,
and we see things in something like true
proportion.
There is no intellectual interest of our
time in which this is more true than in
the matter of religion. For instance, let
us imagine a Roman Catholic of this
country, who fancies his “ bark of Peter ”
is sailing serenely on the waves of
�THE HUMANISM OF TO-MORRO W
modern thought, transferred to a scene
that was witnessed in Rome in the
autumn of 1904. Thousands of Free
thinkers of France, Spain, and Italy, with
a group of the first scholars in Europe
at their head, had gathered there for
their annual Congress. France had
sent more than a thousand delegates,
bearing with them the official adhesion
of the Municipal Council of Paris. Spain
had sent hundreds of enthusiastic dele
gates. Of Italians there were many
thousand representatives, with the
official adhesion of whole municipalities
from various parts of Italy. The Pope
had protested solemnly against the hold
ing of such a Congress under the shadow
of the Vatican. In reply, the Italian
Government announced that it would
extend to the Freethinking pilgrims all
the privileges it had ever granted to
Roman Catholic pilgrimages. What a
mighty change since the day when a
pope could keep an emperor on his
knees for hours in the courtyard at
Canossa!
This Congress was a visible and
tangible proof of the disintegration of
Catholicism that is proceeding with
extraordinary speed on the Continent.
The vastest and most wealthy and most
powerful Church in the world, with its
magnificently-organised celibate ministry,
its roots deep in the soil of Europe, its
splendid monuments of medieval art, its
alluring ritual, its wide economic and
political influence, is tottering to its fall.
In France it cannot now count more
than one-fifth of the people as even
nominal supporters. In Italy it is
rapidly falling into the same position.
In Spain more than a thousand centres
of Freethought are undermining it. Only
the conviction that an enormous and
powerful section of their populations
85
were in sympathy with this anti-theo
logical Congress could have moved the
French and Italian Governments to
extend to it the open and generous
patronage they did. Within a year or
two the Church will be disestablished
in France. Within a few years more it
will be equally excluded from the public
life of Italy, and, within a few decades,
of Spain. Then it will have to press
heavily on the allegiance of its nominal
supporters, and we shall see it shrink
into a mere shadow of the great frame
that once dominated the life of Europe.
Not only in England, America, and
Germany, where Protestantism had pre
pared the way for free discussion, is reli
gion melting away before the sun of
modern knowledge; it is vanishing more
rapidly still in the now thoroughly
awakened Latin nations. The abandon
ment of the old beliefs is a world-move
ment.
I have already given (pp. 13, 14) one of
the chief indications that this movement
is undermining religion in England no
less than on the Continent. When we
compare the results of the census of
church-going taken by the British Weekly
in 1886 with the results of the census
taken in 1903 by the Daily News, we find
that the Churches have lost nearly half
a million worshippers in less than twenty
years in London alone. One of the
Anglican leaders who was asked to com
ment on the result of the census said
that it really only meant that, now the
social pressure was removed, only those
who had sincere religious convictions
went to church. But there was no more
social pressure in 1886 than there is
to-day; Canon Scott-Holland was think
ing of a century ago. Moreover, while
the Churches have largely ceased to be
in a position to exert social or economic
�86
THE HUMANISM OF TO-MORROW
pressure, they have, on the other hand,
provided themselves with a new weapon
—social attractiveness. Large numbers
of Anglican Churches now have a ritual
that draws numbers of even the indif
ferent. Nonconformist Churches have
gone out among the people in a most
spirited endeavour to win their support.
“ Pleasant Sunday Afternoons ” and all
kinds of concessions have been made to
the spirit of the age. The clergy have
taken an active share in social and
philanthropic work beyond all the dreams
of their predecessors. The last twenty
years represent an untiring, feverish effort
on their part to extend their influence.
Yet we have this irrefragable statistical
proof that they have (when the Jews are
omitted from the Daily News census)
lost nearly half a million worshippers in
the metropolis alone in that period.1 All
their vast resources and all the devotion
of their clergy have disastrously failed to
stem the tide.
An observant glance will discover
almost daily other solid indications that
the movement is a very real and very
serious one. In the summer of 1904
the Daily News (the chief organ of the
Nonconformists) published a leading
article on the prospect of this country
abandoning Christianity. The Daily
Telegraph published a significant corres
pondence on the subject, “ Do We
Believe?” Dr. Jessopp declared at a
1 It is necessary to make this calculation clear,
as the results of the census have been put by
religious people in a most misleading form. In
1886, out of a population of 3,816,483, some
1,167,312 attended places of Christian worship.
The population of this area has increased to four
millions and a half, yet (excluding Jews, who are
wrongly included in the census) only 950,000
now attend church or chapel or hall. With the
increase of the population, the figure should be
about 1,400,000, if the Churches had merely
held their ground against indifference and active
revolt.
medical dinner: “Yours is a rising, mine
a decaying, profession.” The Rev. F.
Ballard, one of the active protagonists of
Christianity, asserted in Great Thoughts:
“ The outlook is a serious one........ The
modern atmosphere is, in general, tend
ing away from rather than towards
all that is distinctive of Christianity.”
Another protagonist (the Rev. R.
Williams) wrote that “ already it is the
fact that the cultured laity, on the one
hand, and the great bulk of the demo
cracy, on the other, are outside the
Churches.” The Bishop of London has
declared that in his old diocese only one
working man in fifteen goes to church.
A weekly journal (the Clarion) opened a
drastic attack on religion, and the sole
effect was an increase of its circulation
by thirty per cent. The Rationalist
Press Association has sold, without effort,
nearly a million copies of anti-theological
works in a little over two years; while
the various theological publishing con
cerns established to meet its work have,
with all their huge resources and means
of circulation, been unable to draw any
where near the Rationalist circulations.
I may take a further striking illustra
tion of the real decay of religion that is
concealed behind the fictitious optimism
of the Churches from the position of the
Church of Rome in this country. In
this case, not only the actual members
of the Church, but thousands of people
outside it, believe that there is continuous
growth. Yet never was there so empty
and unfounded a claim. The number
of Catholics in this country sixty years
ago is given by a Jesuit writer (Month,
July, 1885) as about 800,000. The
population of England and Wales has
nearly doubled since that time, so that,
without any further accession, the Catholic
population ought now to be more than
�THE HUMANISM OF TO-MORRO W
a million and a half. But since 1841
nearly a million Irish Catholics have
immigrated to this country, and, as most
* of these came between 1851 and 1861,
their descendants should add another
million and a half, at the least, to the
Catholic population. Thus, without
counting a single convert, from the
Oxford Movement onwards, there should
be three million Catholics in this country.
There are actually less than a million
and a quarter. The proportion of
Catholic marriages, of clergy, and of
school children agree in giving this
result, as I showed in the National
Review (August, 1901). The Catholic
Church is crumbling away in this country
as surely, though less rapidly, than in
France and Italy. It is the dispersion
of the Irish nation that has misled people
in England and America as to the posi
tion of Catholicism. There ought to
be, on a normal growth of the popula
tion, nearly 17,000,000 people in Ireland
to-day, mostly Roman Catholics. There
are actually less than four millions and
a half. The missing twelve millions are
in England, Australia, and the United
States. Yet with this vast accession of
Irish men and women, and all the
converts that have seceded from the
Church of England, the Catholic popu
lation dwindles away. And this huge
leakage increases in our time, and, in
the main, represents an addition to the
great multitude that now acknowledge
no ecclesiastical allegiance.
I have endeavoured in this essay to
engage the attention of women in this
vast transformation of the religious insti
tutions of our time. They contribute
far more than men do to the mainte
nance of those institutions; yet they
are far less ready than men to show a
reasoned belief in religious doctrines.
87
I have assumed that this was largely due
to three fallacies which the clergy dis
seminate among them, and I have invited
them to a patient analysis of those
fallacies. It seems clear that they have
no sounder reason than men to refrain
from examining the grounds of their
convictions. There—except that I have
added a few observations that should
tend to shake the fictitious firmness of
their attitude—I must leave them. If
they will write to the Secretary of the
Rationalist Press Association for a list
of the sixpenny works published by that
body—of which more than 800,000 have
been sold during the last two years—■
they will find an abundant and excellent
literature with which to continue their
study of religion. It only remains for
me to meet the last and inevitable pre
liminary inquiry : What will come next,
when religion is destroyed ?
I have said that I agree fully with
Emerson in rejecting “the doctrine of
consequences.” The human mind is
not so poor that we should suppose it
is less capable to-day of devising moral
structures than it was two thousand, or
ten thousand, years ago. Falsehood is
not so beneficent an element in life that
we should ever deem it indispensable.
It would be, as Emerson says, mere
cowardice to shrink from sacrificing a
familiar and, perhaps, treasured untruth
because of the dislocation that would
follow. This could not be other than
temporary.
Yet a rational concern about the
future is inevitable in the case of seriousminded men and women. None but a
cynic or a fool could contemplate with
complete indifference the destruction of
beliefs or principles on which civilised
life has even partly rested for many
centuries. It is one more of those
�88
THE HUMANISM OF TO-MORROW
perverse calumnies of the Rationalist,
of which we have seen so many, that he
is a man with a morbid love of destruc
tion, or a “hatred of Christianity,” as
the clerical Press generally puts it. He
is moved by two impulses; and both of
them are noble and full of promise for
the world. The first is a passion ’for
truth, a restless impatience of untruth.
That is one of the most imperative
needs in the life of our age; and, if the
Rationalist were eventually proved to be
wrong in all his criticisms, he would,
nevertheless, have contributed to the
moral spirit of the world. The clergy,
for reasons which are now clear, have
ceased to lay that stress on truth and
truthfulness which the unchanging cir
cumstances of life demand of the moral
teacher. The Rationalist has taken up
that part of his gospel. What I have
been able to quote about the part which
Rationalists have played in rousing the
conscience of the modern world on the
woman question will sufficiently illustrate
the general beneficence of this element
of their motive.
The second impulse is one that may
be traced without difficulty in the earliest
protests of Rationalism against dogma—
in the martyr-creeds of Giordano Bruno
or Arnaldo di Brescia—and that grows
into clearer consciousness in the great
critical movement of our time. It is a
desire for the advance of humanity.
“ Man has put himself in the place of
God,” said the present Pope a few
months ago. In a sense it is true.
Humanity has at length taken over the
control of its own destiny. It is not
merely because the Church has in the
past hindered the progress of humanity—
fettered and opposed science, preached
submission to disease and poverty, and
diverted the devotion of the finest souls
in Europe to an ideal that it now itself
discards. The Churches of our day are
not the Churches of a hundred years
ago. Even Catholicism will transform *
itself within fifty years, or perish. We
could overlook the past; only taking
care that it never return. But, quite
apart from the past errors of Christianity,
we have the most indisputable grounds
for opposing it to-day. We see this : if
man can be persuaded that he is the
maker of this world (on its moral side)
and there is no other world beside it, he
will begin to work at its amelioration
with an energy he never knew before.
Test this principle, and the application
of it which most nearly concerns women.
If this social order, which oppresses them,
is purely man-made, how straight and
clear the way becomes for the task of
re-making it; and how supremely impor
tant do we find the acceptance or rejec
tion of this idea to have been in the early
stages of the present women movement.
Extend that principle to all the evils of
our social order, and you have the key
to the much-calumniated effort of the
Rationalist to remove Christianity.
There is, to take the matter on a lower
plane, a lack of intelligence in the idea
that the individual or the society will
tumble to ruin when belief in God or a
future life decays. It is surely worth
considering whether the Rationalist
would not have this world better rather
than worse, when he comes to think it is
the only world he will ever know. When
you look at it without prejudice, it seems
an extraordinary notion to imagine that
humanity should allow this life to take
on the traditional features of hell because
it discovers there is no heaven. It might
occur to intelligent folk that we should
be rather minded to build our Golden
City here and now, when we find the
�THE HUMANISM OF TO-MORROW
long-cherished vision of one in the clouds
to be a mirage. The truth is that the
mind of Europe has been vitiated by the
dogma of the Fall. All that is evil and
brutal in life and history has been
ascribed to “ human nature
all that
was elevated and refined and heroic has
been denied to human nature, and attri
buted to “ grace ” or miracle. This has
begotten a dreary pessimism in the mind
of Christian people. They find them
selves incapable of thinking that man can
be generous or just or temperate without
the hope of a reward in heaven or the
stimulus of pleasing God. The mind of
the Rationalist is not warped by this
illusion. He takes men as he finds them.
There are natures so diseased, so per
verted by the spiritual selfishness of
Christian teaching as popularly conceived,
so debased by an environment that has
remained poisonous throughout the
whole dominion of the Church, that they
do, and will, act viciously and unintelligently when the violent and crude curbs
have been removed. They never really
did act spiritually.
But the Rationalist sees that the
natures which could respond to the finer
appeals of modern Christianity are
increasingly accessible to sentiments of
humanity. This is not a theory, but a
fact. The world grows more humane
as it discards Christianity. That is the
subtle grievance of the modern priest.
The present high but narrow-minded
Pope, in his perplexity, says it is the old
practice of the devil imitating the angels
of light. Reasonable people will avoid
such fantastic notions, and recognise that
humanity has at bottom a sound instinct.
I have not said, of course, that the world
grows more humane because it discards
Christianity. I believe the fact is that it
•discards the old dogmas because it is
89
growing more humane. But, in either
case, it is one of the most undeniable
facts of modern history that humanism
in philosophy has been accompanied,
step by step, with humanity in character.
The Rationalist believes that, when our
philosophy of life is wholly humanist,
the humanity of men and women will be
greater than ever. He would tear the
veil from the heavens and reveal its
emptiness, because he knows that then
at least men will turn to the brightening
and gladdening of earth. He is fully
and splendidly justified by the results
that have steadily followed his demolition
of the structure of dogma. There never
yet was an age of such deep and wide
spread scepticism as this which witnesses
a solemn Congress of the Freethinkers of
Europe in the centre of Catholicism«
And there was never yet an age so much
adorned with humane and unselfish
reforms, so full of promise of peace,
justice, and gladness.
Before passing to a more definite
suggestion, let me repeat that I am
pleading for a complete humanism. If,
we take the women-writers of our time as
a rough index to the mind of educated
women, it seems clear that there is a
growing tendency to relinquish ecclesiasticism and the more elaborate dogmas of
the Church, but to concentrate almost
intolerantly on the belief in God. A
considerable number of the women*
writers of to-day take up this position ;
the novels of Mrs. Humphry Ward or
’ Miss Corelli will sufficiently illustrate it.
This is only a prolonging of the process
of the dissolution of beliefs. I have
given a glimpse of the state of philo
sophic thought in regard to the belief in
God. The dogma of a Personal God is
being just as certainly undermined as the
dogma of the infallibility of the Pope or
�90
THE HUMANISM OF TO-MORROW
the Bible; and the new philosophic idea
of Deity is one that cannot possibly
sustain a superstructure of prayer or
worship, or of any practical relation
whatever between man and God. Now,
it may be that the future will decide to
believe in this impersonal and diffused
Deity of these modern religious thinkers;
and it may very well be that it will regard
even this as no more than the vanishing
ghost of the dead God. But, in either
case, it is surely most ill advised to insist
that the practical conduct of life shall
still be based on a disputable and greatly
disputed speculation. In the solid facts
of life and history, in the plain teaching
of experience as to what is needed to
bring gladness into our lives, we have a
broad and massive foundation to build
upon. This is Humanism.
And, if I am asked to stoop to the
demand of plain common sense for
details, it is not impossible to do so.
There is much light mockery of Human
ism for its faith in the saving power of
Science. It must be understood that
, this phrase chiefly means that we are
going to substitute a most careful study
of the conditions of happiness for the
haphazard appeals and transcendental
preaching of the past. Science is not a
new goddess, nor a patent medicine for
life’s disorders. It is knowledge, but
knowledge gleaned with particular care.
On the practical side it is opposed to
quackery: it is effective or practical
knowledge gained, not by chance experi
ment, but by a most rigorous series of
tests. We mean, then, that we are
going to study this life, and extract from
it the secret of happiness or unhappiness
with a care and rigour that have not been
applied to the task before. He who
scorns this hardly commends his own
philosophy of life. But, further, it is
quite possible to catch a glimpse of the
various ways -— for no sensible man
expects to find some one panacea for all
the ills of life—in which this work may
be conducted. I have foreshadowed one
of the most important of these already in
dealing with the training of children.
The education of the future will have to
regard the whole child—body, mind, and
character—as its province. Our educa
tionists are only too willing to embrace
and achieve this ideal of their work. It
is easy to see, too, how the educational
scheme will grow on another side; how
the little systems of scholarships that are
spreading out from every great school
and education authority will grow on
until they form a complete provision for
the higher education of those for whom
the higher training is fitted. A score of
other tendencies in our actual social life
will readily occur to any observer.
Within this century war will be abolished,
and twenty million men withdrawn from
its bloody business to the arts of peace.
Institutes of Social Service and Socio
logical Societies are being founded, which
will correlate all the efforts for social
reform that are being made throughout
the world, and provide scientific guidance
to reformers. Garden Cities and other
experiments in betterment are being
multiplied. We are only just realising
that the social malady which Christianity
has quite failed to cure—that spreading
evil whose symptoms are drunkenness,
prostitution, gambling, fraud, cruelty, and
poverty—is a complex and deep-rooted
disease that has never yet been under
stood, and so could not possibly have
been cured.
The elimination of this disease is now
seen to be possible. It is the work of
Science—of knowledge acquired with
infinite skill and applied with sympathy
�THE HUMANISM OF TO-MORROW
and humanity. Ignorance or prejudice
alone can scoff at this ennobling task
that our godless generation has set itself.
In every one of the reforms I have
mentioned we have a new centre of light.
Already the rays spread and meet over
the intervening darkness. Before long
we shall have this Knowledge, or Science,
of the roots of our social malady; and
we have already a great fund of humane
and generous effort to apply it. What
part the Churches will play in this
depends solely on themselves. Because
they at present insist on complicating
our life with their speculations about a
life beyond, because they tend to produce
insincerity, which is poison to our social
organism, humanitarians are ignoring
them more and more. And until they
have utterly ceased to lead the world
astray from the task of its own advance
ment, until they have ceased to divert
our resources and energies from the solid
work of life to the futile tasks of worship
and prayer, we shall oppose them relent
lessly. In a spirit of sacred and healthy
impatience — that spirit in which the
great French nation is now casting off
its Church — mankind will tolerate a
clergy no longer. The sphere of their
influence will go on shrinking until it
becomes a mere fraction of life. But if
they will abandon their dogmas, they
may have an important share in the
noble work that lies before humanity.
A distinguished Catholic prelate told
me that he and a few other liberal eccle
siastics were discussing at Paris the future
of the Church. “It is like this,” said
one of the most influential among them.
“ The Church actually presents the
appearance of a venerable ivy-clad abbey.
There are those who, shocked at its too
obvious antiquity, would bring it down
altogether. There are others, the ordi
9i
nary faithful, who would leave it as it is.
But the better ideal is, as we propose,
reverently to remove the ivy (the dogmas),
and let the solid structure face the sun
light once more.” There are many who
would see an important truth in this
theory of the modern Church and its
needs. They believe the religious in
stinct to be an essential part of life, and
the Churches to be, in some form or
other, eternal. They would remove the
creeds from them and make a religion of
devotion to a moral ideal, to humanity,
or to labour, or even of the sense of the
mystery of life. A great number of
modern writers take religion in this
broader sense — Sir J. Seeley, Mr.
Spencer, Mr. Lowes Dickenson, Sir
Henry Thompson, Mr. Watson, and
many others. To meet this attitude a
number of the actual Churches will very
clearly continue to exist in the form of
Positivist and Ethical Churches, and it
will be possible to adapt to their purposes
all the finest music and some of the
ritual of the Catholic Church. There
need be no fear whatever that secession
from the Churches means emotional
starvation. Already a number of such
institutions exist, many of them being
churches or chapels that have shed their
ancient creeds. In these every kind of
service will be found, from elaborate
ritualism to simple lectures on questions
of ethics, politics, and literature. These
congregations, in their various ways,
foreshadow the evolution of the great
Christian bodies.
For my part, I dream of a great federa
tion of humanist agencies for rational
culture. It seems to me that this new
“ religious ” feeling, which is consulted
by the bodies I have named, is only the
lingering impression of the profound and
world-old illusion which found its last
�92
AN APPEAL
and highest form in Christianity. Care
ful observation of the working of Posi
tivist and of the more ritualist Ethical
Societies, of the general attitude of those
who leave the Churches, and of the
history of religion in the Far East,
convinces me that religion is unnecessary
in any shape or form. I believe there
will be a very fair growth of congrega
tions with a humanist religious service,
but it seems impossible to think that the
bulk of humanity will ever return to any
discipline that calls itself religion, or
anything with the remotest resemblance
to a priesthood.
The experience of
Japan and China proves conclusively
that it is possible to solve the problem
of character through the educational
system. Their schools, it must be
remembered, though admirable in aim,
are narrow and conservative in method.
The same aim carried out by the more
elastic and subtle methods of the finest
Western education should give a superb
result. No further system of moral
training or appeal should be necessary.
Literature and public opinion would, as
in China and Japan, do what remains to
be done. Yet there will probably be an
enormous growth among us, as the
Churches decay, of Sunday Lecture
Societies, Rationalist, Secular, Ethical,
Humanitarian, and other Societies. If
all these could be gathered into one
national federation in each country,
offering mutual help and comparing
experiences, but having no shadow of
priestly influence and no dogma but the
free and rational guidance of humanity,
we should have a. successor to Chris
tianity that would retain all its advantages
and avoid all its defects. As the need
for attacking theology and dogma dis
appeared, it would become a vast con
structive, educative, and deliberative
movement, watching over the progress
of our ideas and institutions.
Chapter XI.
AN APPEAL
At the close of his interesting and
shrewd Anticipations, Mr. H. G. Wells,
our modern prophet, predicts that by
the end of the twentieth century all
educated men will have discarded Chris
tianity, but women will be as much
attached to it as ever. This is an
appalling estimate of their intelligence.
For my part, I do not share it for a
moment, but there is no doubt that it is
very widely held. In a vague way it is
felt that the growing disproportion of
the sexes in attendance at public worship
supports the prediction. Woman is
more religious than man, more emotional,
less intellectual. This is handed about
as a truism to-day. Men raise their
eye-brows when you venture to suggest
the prophecy may prove abortive.
I invite the women who may read
this essay to consider seriously what
underlies this current estimate of them.
At the bottom it is an insinuation that
they either cannot discriminate between
�AN APPEAL
truth and untruth as easily as men can,
or that they are singularly indifferent
about the truth or untruth of the ideas
they hold most dear. The one alterna
tive is an imputation of inferior intel
ligence ; the other is not a compliment
to their moral nature. How long are
women going, not merely to tolerate,
but to repeat with a laugh, these sugges
tions of mental inferiority, so long as
men gild them with flattery of their
persons or their charming ways? Just
as I write this chapter the journals
announce that a brilliant woman-writer,
Mrs. Craigie, has been helping a group
of conservative lawyers to prove that
woman is unfit to serve on the jury.
No doubt she would promptly reject any
personal application of the stigma, but
she fastens it on her sex generally with
pitiful rhetoric. The figure of Justice,
she points out, has always been regarded
as a female, but blind-folded, figure.
That is to indicate, she approvinglyadds, that woman “ cannot see straight.”
Mrs. Craigie is a Roman Catholic. She
probably accepts entirely the prediction
that the Catholic Church is going to
survive the storms of the twentieth
, century, and that it will be composed,
mainly, of a male pastorate and a vast
female following—with a few artists.
This is a matter which women must
face courageously. When men predict
that they themselves will, as a body,
desert the Churches, they do not mean
that they shrink from their moral
restraints. They mean that the culture
of the modern world has reached a
point at which we can foresee the total
collapse of the teaching of the Churches
from the intellectual point of view. In
other words, they believe or suspect that
the ideas still preached from the pulpit
are untrue; and that they themselves
93
are sufficiently alert in mind and suffi
ciently informed in thought to see this
untruth, and act on the discovery. Can
any woman hesitate to recognise what
the prediction really means as regards
herself? It means, in plain English,
that these men believe she has either
not mind enough to perceive, or know
ledge enough to appreciate, the change,
or else she is so wedded to emotional
gratification (vaguely called “ spiritual ”)
that she deliberately ignores the suspicion
cast on her beliefs. Can any woman
contemplate without a stir the irony of
such a spectacle as these prophets are
calling up from the mists of the future ?
If there ever were such a division of
humanity as regards religion—if all the
more active, more trained, more informed
minds were to be ranged against Chris
tianity, and all the less active minds,
and less educated people, and more con
fusedly emotional natures were gathered
about the clergy—there would be no
need for Rationalistic criticism.
As I have said, I think the estimate is
hopelessly false, and I believe that Mr.
Wells has since greatly moderated his
forecast. Women are being profoundly
stirred over this great question of the
truth or untruth of traditional religious
views. The Rationalist lecturer, who but
a few years ago addressed almost exclu
sively masculine audiences, now often
finds thirty, and even fifty, per cent, of
his audience to consist of ladies. Gradu
ally it is breaking on their minds that
the old discarded ideal of “woman’s
sphere” was the ideal of the clergy ; that
there is some significance in the fact that
the attack on it was led by Rationalist
women; that there is still a painful
absence of clerical support from their
most cherished causes. When a Women’s
Suffrage Society has to publish a special
�94
AN APPEAL
proof that clerical leaders to-day do not
oppose their aim, one begins to think.
Gradually it is becoming clear to women
that a great controversy rages in the
world about them as to the truth of the
ideas they have too tamely received, too
dogmatically imposed on their children.
Let women rise and shake from their
sex once for all this stigma of indiffer
ence to intellectual movements, this
honied insinuation of mental inferiority,
this suspicion that they care not whether
the basic ideas of their spiritual life are
true or untrue. There are men about
them on all sides to-day who welcome
their determination to lift themselves
from the groove in which their life has
run, and claim their share in the world’s
work. It is not their fault that hitherto
their sphere of interest, of education, and
of action has been so narrow. It is the
work of men, especially of priests; and,
in the mighty task of breaking the inertia
of their sex generally, they very justly
call for the aid of men. But it is none
the less true that to-day the fields of
culture are open to all who will walk into
them. Light is cheaper to-day than it
ever was in the history of the world. No
masculine selfishness (except in rare
cases) now fences off the thoughts of
the world from woman’s life.
There is here, perhaps, a double com
plaint and the need for a double appeal.
Active women, trying almost in despair
to quicken the lethargy of their sex, com
plain that men will not help to undo the
evil they have so largely wrought. The
complaint is a just one. The Rationalist
who would rouse woman from her un
questioning acquiescence in superstition
must be content—nay, should long—to
see her roused and active on every great
issue of life. Many women are to-day
looking with a new yearning over the
narrow enclosures we have built about
them. They are demanding—and it is
a noble demand—that we admit them to
work at our side in the building of the
Golden City that is to be. They have
the fullest right to ask the aid of men in
the work of spreading that feeling among
their sisters, and of casting down the
fences by which we have so long kept
them out of public life. Rationalism
must be comprehensive, if it claim to be
based on a principle, and not on mere
feeling.
On the other hand, we men have an
equal right to ask women to be compre
hensive. Not very long ago I heard a
conversation between two women-workers
in a London club, in the course of which
one of them spoke of a man who offered
help in their cause as “an Agnostic.”
“ Oh ! I draw the line there,” said the
second lady, with a shudder. She was
probably completely ignorant that
Agnostics and Atheists were among the
first friends of her cause when to espouse
it meant the ridicule of one’s fellow-men.
In any case, it is time that women ceased
to draw lines such as this that are wholly
without justification. It is time that
they saw the fallacy of asking men to
examine their cause rationally and dis
passionately, while they themselves fence
off one set of their opinions or preju
dices as immune from criticism. What,
after all, does the Rationalist ask of
them ? Merely a candid inquiry into
the grounds of their convictions. The
ideas that shirk inquiry are half con
demned from that fact alone. Truth
never grew paler and thinner the more
you looked into it. “ A fine jewel,” to
use the words of a religious thinker, Sir
Oliver Lodge, “ only flashes the brighter
when turned about so as to expose every
facet to the light.” How many women
�AN APPEAL
have distinguished themselves in the
religious controversy of our time? They
now write able works on astronomy, law,
history, art, economics, sociology, fiction.
Yet, with all their preponderant attach
ment to religion, not one of them has
put forward a serious defence of her
theology.
Finally, I would point out to the
thoughtful women of our time that men
are taking their attitude towards religion
as a measure of what their influence
would be in other provinces of life. As
yet they are excluded from exerting any
direct influence on political, civic, or
economic life. What use would they
make of it when they have obtained it ?
If you would know, many men reply,
study their action in the only matter
on which they have influence—religion.
The women, co-operating with the clergy,
make the religion of each succeeding
generation. Do they do this with eyes
wide open, with a full sense of responsi
bility, from deliberate and rational con
viction ? They do not, as a rule. Com
paratively few of them read much of the
literature that is poured out annually
on the subject of religious evidence.
Women’s journals dare not mention the
current impeachment of conventional
theology. They take the authority of
■priests or of tradition almost without
question. They suffer, and cause, end
less pain by their unreasoning denuncia
tion of every friend or relative that
“ loses the faith.” How, in the face of
all this, can they expect men to welcome
their influence in other matters ? They
say, in effect: We do not wish to reason
about religion. We will not examine
95
the bases of our convictions. We will
not even ask ourselves whether they are
only based on authority or tradition, and
if the authority or tradition is sound.
We will go on acting on these convictions
I in the matter of religion without using
our judgment on them. But we will do
precisely the reverse in political and
civic affairs if you will grant us a partici
pation therein. In those matters we will
lightly accept no authority, will brush
our minds clear of all prejudice or con
ventional bias, will weigh our convic
tions and act with a full sense of respon
sibility. It is time that women saw the
incongruity and unwisdom of this posi
tion.
I do not need to be reminded that
almost all I have said applies to very
many men, and, on the other hand, by
no means applies to all women. I am
trying for the moment to reach that large
class of women who shrink from the dis
cussion or examination of their religious
ideas. I plead that they at least ask
themselves seriously why they shrink
from such inquiry. As mothers of the
race, they have a profound and far-reach
ing influence on its progress in ideas,
and they have a corresponding responsi
bility. The days are gone for ever when
ascetic priests could exclude them from
the “sacrament” as unclean, and Puritan
divines could bid them keep their lips
sealed on all public questions. Let them
rise to the height of their opportunity,
and prove that they are not too docile to
priestly dictation, too indifferent to truth
or untruth, too confused in mind to dis
criminate between them, to be admitted
into the work of the world.
��Worlds by Lady Florence Dixie.
COMPANION VOLUMES.
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In the Coming Day the Rev. J. Page Hopps writes of them: “The writings of this child
suggest the presence and inspiration of a master spirit, fierce for. freedom, daring in criticism, and
splendid in spiritual adventure. The poems are full of dash and fire, whether treating of Nature
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—both crammed with the rankest imaginable heresies. Throughout this whole book there is hardly
a line—perhaps not a line—which is mere composition. It is all powder and shot and morning and
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“The Story of Ijain.”
i r
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any assistance on the steep and stony path of religious evolution as she has done. She met the
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that it was cold and hollow, and without any redeeming power. No one can read The Story of
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au
the way through the tangled maze of creed to a purer and more human conception of
what religion should be and ought to accomplish. This story should be read by all who wish to
answer the questions that arise in the minds of little children on religious subjects, and who wish to
take part in the mental evolution of the souls that grow up under their care.—E. Untermann, in
Appeal to Reason. ”
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jis characteristics of the drama Mr. G. J. Holyoake writes : “ Her conception of womanly
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The reader will see in The Last Watch on the Heights of Avenamore the beauty,
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�
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Victorian Blogging
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
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The religion of woman: an historical study
Creator
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McCabe, Joseph [1867-1955]
Dixie, Florence [1857-1905]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 95, [1] p. ; 22 cm.
Series title: R.P.A. Extra Series
Series number: No. 7
Notes: Part of the NSS pamphlet collection. First published London: Watts, 1905. Portrait of McCabe on front cover. Publisher's advertisements inside front cover, and on unnumbered page at end. Printed in double columns. Some marginal markings in pencil. Issued for the Rationalist Press Association.
Publisher
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Watts & Co.
Date
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1905 (1912)
Identifier
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N449
N450
Subject
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Religion
Women's rights
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (The religion of woman: an historical study), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
NSS
Women and religion