The Priesthood Of Woman

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Title:     The Priesthood Of Woman
Author: E. Lynn Linton [More Titles by Linton]

If the female philosophers who plead for the emancipation of their sex would stoop from the sublimer heights of Woman's Rights to arguments of mere human expediency, we fancy they might find some of their critics disposed to listen in a more compliant mood. We can imagine a very good point being made out of the simple fact of waste, by some feminine advocate who would point out in a businesslike way how much more work the world might get through if only woman had fair play. Waste is always a pitiful and disagreeable thing, and the waste of whatever reserved power may lie at present unused in the breasts of half a million of old maids, for instance, is a thought which, with so much to be done around us, it is somewhat uncomfortable to dwell much upon. The argument, too, might be neatly enforced, just at present, by illustrations from a somewhat unexpected quarter.

The Papacy seems determined to carry out its concordat with Woman. If we are to credit the latest rumors from the Vatican, Rome has grown impatient of the class who now present themselves at her doors as candidates for canonization, and has fallen back from the obscure Italian beggars and Cochin Chinese martyrs whom she has recently delighted to honor on the more illustrious names of Christopher Columbus and Joan of Arc. A little courage must have been needed for this retreat upon the past, for neither the great navigator nor the heroine found much support or appreciation in the prelates of their day; and the somewhat uncomfortable fact might be urged by the devil's advocate, in the case of the latter, that if Joan was sent to the martyr's stake, it was by a spiritual tribunal.

On the other hand, there is the obvious desirableness of showing how perfectly at one the Papacy is with the spirit of the age in this double compliment to the two primary forces of modern civilization--the democratic force of the New World, and the feminine force of the Old. The beatification of the Maid of Orleans in its most simple aspect is the official recognition, by the Papacy, of the claims of her sex to a far larger sphere of human action than has as yet been accorded to them. Woman may fairly meet the domestic admonitions of Papal briefs by this newly discovered instance of extra-domestic holiness, and may front the taunts of cynical objectors with a saintly patron who was the first to break through the outer conventionalities of womanhood.

But the figure of Joan of Arc is far more than a convenient answer to objections such as these; it is, as we have said, in itself a cogent argument for a better use of feminine energies. No life gives one such a notion as hers of the vast forces which lie hidden, and as it would seem wasted, in the present mass of women. It is impossible to be content with little projects of utilization such as those which throw open to her the telegraph-office or the printing-press, or even with the more ambitious claims for her admission to the Bench or the dissecting-room, when one gets a glimpse such as this of energies latent within the female breast which are strong enough to change the face of the world.

It is difficult to suppose that the woman of our day is less energetic than the woman of the fifteenth century, or that her piano and her workbag sum up the whole of her possibilities any more than her spinning-wheel or her sheep-tending exhausted those of the Maid of Domremy. The ordinary occupations of woman strike us in this light as mere jets of vapor, useful indeed as a relief to the volcanic pressure within, but insufficient to remove the peril of an eruption. There must be some truth in the spasmodic utterances of the fevered sibyls who occasionally bare the female heart to us in three-volume novels, and the gaiety and frivolity of the life of woman is a mere mask for the wild, tossing emotions within. It is a standing danger, we own; and besides the danger there is, as we have said, the waste and the pity of it.

A little closer examination, however, may suggest some doubt whether this waste of power is not more apparent than real. In the physical world, Mr. Grove has told us that the apparent destruction of a force is only its transformation into a force which is correlative to it; that motion, for instance, when lost is again detected in the new form of heat, and heat in that of light. But the theory is far from being true of the physical world only, and, had we space here, nothing would be easier than to trace the same correlation of forces through the moral nature of man. For waste, then, in the particular instance which is before us, we may perhaps substitute transformation.

Professing herself the most rigid of conservatives, woman gives vent to this heroic energy for which the times offer no natural outlet in the radical modifications which she is continually introducing into modern society. We overlook the manifold ways in which she is acting on and changing the state of things around us, just because we are deceived by the apparent unity with which the whole sex advances toward marriage. We forget the large margin of those who fail in attaining their end, and we act as if the great mass of unmarried women simply represented a waste and lost force. And yet it is just this waste force which tells on society more powerfully than all.

The energies which fail in finding a human object of domestic adoration become the devotional energies of the world. The force which would have made the home makes the Church. It is really amazing to watch, if we look back through the ages, the silent steady working of this feminine impulse, and to see how bit by bit it has recovered the ground of which Christianity robbed Woman. We wonder that no woman poet has ever turned, like Schiller, to the gods of old.

In every heathen religion of the Western world woman occupied a prominent place. Priestess or prophetess, she stood in all ministerial offices on an equality with man. It was only the irruption of religions from the East, the faiths of Isis or Mithras, which swept woman from the temple. Christianity shared the Oriental antipathy to the ministerial service of woman; it banished her from altar and from choir; in darker times it drove her to the very porch of its shrines. The Church of after ages dealt with woman as the Empire dealt with its Cæsars; it was ready to grant her apotheosis, but only when she was safely out of the world. It gave her canonization, and it gives it to her still, but not the priesthood. No rout could seem more complete, but woman is never greater than when she is routed.

The newly-instituted parson of to-day, brimming over with apostolic texts which forbid woman to speak in church, no sooner arrives at his parish than he finds himself in a spiritual world whose impulse and guidance is wholly in the hands of woman. Expel woman as you will, tamen usque recurrit. Woman is, in fact, the parish. Within, in her lowest spiritual form, as the parson's wife, she inspires and sometimes writes his sermons. Without, as the bulk of his congregation, she watches over his orthodoxy, verifies his texts, visits his schools, and harasses his sick. "Ah, Betsy!" said a sick woman to a wealthier sister the other day, "it's of some use being well off; you won't be obliged when you die to have a district-lady worriting you with a chapter." But the district-lady has others to "worrit" in life besides the sick.

Mrs. Hannah More tells us exultantly in her journal how successful were her raids upon the parsons, and in what dread all unspiritual ministers stood of her visitations. And the same rigid censorship prevails in many quarters still. The preacher who thunders so defiantly against spiritual foes is trembling all the time beneath the critical eye that is watching him from the dim recesses of an unworldly bonnet, and the critical finger which follows him with so merciless an accuracy in his texts. Impelled, guided, censured by woman, we can hardly wonder if in nine cases out of ten the parson turns woman himself, and if the usurpation of woman's rights in the services of religion has been deftly avenged by the subjugation of the usurpers. Expelled from the Temple, woman has simply put her priesthood into commission, and discharges her ministerial duties by deputy.

It was impossible for woman to remain permanently content with a position like this; but it is only of late that a favorable conjuncture of affairs has enabled her to quit it for a more obtrusive one. The great Church movement which the Apologia has made so familiar to us in its earlier progress came some ten years ago to a stand. Some of its most eminent leaders had seceded to another communion, it had been weakened by the Gorham decision, and by its own internal dissensions. Whether on the side of dogma or ritual, it seemed to have lost for the moment its old impulse--to have lost heart and life.

It was in this emergency that woman came to the front. She claimed to revive the old religious position which had been assigned to her by the monasticism of the middle ages, but to revive it under different conditions and with a different end. The mediæval Church had, indeed, glorified, as much as words could glorify, the devotion of woman; but once become a devotee, it had locked her in the cloister. As far as action on the world without was concerned, the veil served simply as a species of suicide, and the impulses of woman, after all the crowns and pretty speeches of her religious counsellors, found themselves bottled up within stout stone walls and as inactive as before. From this strait, woman, at the time we speak of, delivered herself by the organization of charity.

In lines of a certain beauty, though somewhat difficult in their grammatical construction, she has been described as a ministering angel when pain and anguish wring the brow; and it was in her capacity of ministering angel that she now placed herself at the Church movement and advanced upon the world. It was impossible to lock these beneficent beings up, for the whole scope of their existence lay in the outer world; but every day, as it developed their ecclesiastical position, made even their admirers recognise the wise discretion of the middle ages. Long before the Ritualists themselves, they, with a feminine instinct, had discerned the value of costume. The district visitor, whom nobody had paid the smallest attention to in the common vestments of the world, became a sacred being as she donned the crape and hideous bonnet of the "Sister."

Within the new establishment there was all the excitement of a perfectly novel existence, of time broken up as women like it to be broken up in perpetual services and minute obligation of rules, the dramatic change of name, and the romantic self-abnegation of obedience. The "Mother Superior" took the place of the tyrant of another sex who had hitherto claimed the submission of woman, but she was something more to her "children" than the husband or father whom they had left in the world without. In all matters, ecclesiastical as well as civil, she claimed within her dominions to be supreme. The quasi-sacerdotal dignity, the pure religious ministration which ages have stolen from her, was quietly reassumed. She received confessions, she imposed penances, she drew up offices of devotion. Wherever the community settled, it settled as a new spiritual power.

If the clergyman of the parish ventured on advice or suggestion, he was told that the Sisterhood must preserve its own independence of action, and was snubbed home again for his pains. The Mother Superior, in fact, soon towered into a greatness far beyond the reach of ordinary parsons. She kept her own tame chaplain, and she kept him in very edifying subjection. From a realm completely her own, the influence of woman began now to tell upon the world without. Little colonies of Sisters planted here and there annexed parish after parish. Sometimes the parson was worried into submission by incessant calls of the most justifiable nature on his time and patience. Sometimes he was bribed into submission by the removal from his shoulders of the burden of alms. It was only when he was thoroughly tamed that he was rewarded by pretty stoles and gorgeous vestments.

Astonished congregations saw their church blossom in purple and red, and frontal and hanging told of the silent energy of the group of Sisters. The parson found himself nowhere in his own parish; every detail managed for him, every care removed, and all independence gone. If it suited the ministering angels to make a legal splash, he found himself landed in the Law Courts. If they took it into their heads to seek another fold, every one assumed, as a matter of course, that their pastor would go too. At such a rate of progress the great object of woman's ambition must soon come in view, and the silent control over the priest will merge in the open claim to the priesthood.

It may be in silent preparation for such a claim that the ecclesiastical hierarchy are taking, year by year, a more feminine position. The Houses of Convocation, for instance, present us with a lively image of what the bitterest censor of woman would be delighted to predict as the result of her admission to senatorial honors. There is the same interminable flow of mellifluous talk, the same utter inability to devise or to understand an argument, the same bitterness and hard words, the same skill in little tricks and diplomacies, the same practical incompetence, which have been denounced as characteristics of woman. The caution, the finesse, the sly decorum, the inability to take a large view of any question, the patience, the masterly inaction, the vicious outbreaks of temper which now and then break the inaction of a Bishop, may sometimes lead us to ask whether the Episcopal office is not one admirably suited for the genius of woman.

But she must stoop to conquer heights like these, and it is probable with a view to a slow ascent towards them through the ages to come that she is now moulding the mind of the curate at her will. He, we have been told, is commonly the first lady of the parish; and what he now is in theory, a century hence may find him in fact. It would be difficult even now to detect any difference of sex in the triviality of purpose, the love of gossip, the petty interests, the feeble talk, the ignorance, the vanity, the love of personal display, the white hand dangled over the pulpit, the becoming vestment and the embroidered stole, which we are learning gradually to look upon as attributes of the British curate. So perfect, indeed, is the imitation that the excellence of her work may perhaps defeat its own purpose; and the lacquered imitation of woman, "dilettante, delicate-handed," as Tennyson saw and sang of him, may satisfy the world, and for long ages prevent any anxious inquiry after the real feminine Brummagem.

[The end]
E. Lynn Linton's essay: Priesthood Of Woman

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