chapter iii

., which contains the account of the Garden of Eden and the eating of the apple, they say: "As out of this allegory grow the doctrines of original sin, the fall of man and of woman the author of all our woes, and the curses on the serpent, the woman and the man, the Darwinian theory of the gradual growth of the race from a lower to a higher type of animal life is more hopeful and encouraging."

The Christian doctrine is more hopeful and encouraging still. It reveals the growth of the race from a low type of animal life to the perfect life of the soul.

We do not need to go back to the garden where our first parents dwelt, to look for the substantiation of the eternal truth of this whole wondrous story. Amid the landscape of the civilization of the noblest country that the world possesses, we have the drama repeated. In the work of Anne Hutchinson, Ann Lee, Frances Wright, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Stanton, Susan Anthony, Ellen Dietrick, Lillie Blake, and their fellow- commentators, we have re-enacted the Temptress and the Fall. Woman first aspired. She stretched forth her eager hand to seize the good, and in so doing snatched the evil that grew beside it. The woman in Eden had not learned what maternity taught her later--that she could point the path, but could not lead in entering it. Wherever woman has forgotten this hard- won but glorious lesson, she has been the most dangerous of guides. The conscience, that intellect of the soul, woke first in woman. By her obedience to its voice, the faith that worketh by love had its perfected work, and the promise that was given to her was fulfilled in the birth of Christ. A Creation story without a gospel is chaos without gravitation, primal darkness without the sun. Forward to divinity in human form woman was able, through obedience, to point mankind. Backward to divinity in human form she points again, until humanity itself shall become divine. If she loses the final vision, or substitutes her own, she can neither point nor guide. No wonder woman has been a mystery to the church. No wonder a witch was not allowed to live, while a wizard might; she was more dangerous. No wonder Paul was perplexed by the woman question. No wonder monks fled to the desert. Christ has spoken the final words of woman, "Thy faith hath saved thee." From the anguish of His cross he said: "Woman, behold thy son!" "Behold thy mother," and the beloved disciple "took her to his own home from that hour."

In the Suffrage appeal of 1860, the writers said: "The difference between husband and wife is as vast as the difference between Christ and his Church." Christ himself says that the difference between him and his Church is that of degree, not of kind, and that the resemblance is that of essential oneness. He says: "I am the vine, ye are the branches." Could union be more completely pictured? The fruit-bearing branch cannot say to the strength-giving vine, "I have no need of thee." The vine cannot say, "I have no need of thee." Man in his imperious folly has pictured the relationship as that of oak and vine which have no organic union; but, despite imperiousness and folly, both men and women, through mutual obedience to God, have thus far worked out, and are still working out, the nobler destiny for both.

In summing up their opinion of the Pentateuch, the editors of the Suffrage Woman's Bible say: "This utter contempt for all the decencies of life, and all the natural personal rights of women, as set forth in these pages, should destroy, in the minds of women at least, all authority to superhuman origin, and stamp the Pentateuch at least as emanating from the most obscene minds of a barbarous age." So low can woman fall in ignorance and shameless audacity when the faith that works by love is lost. As the spirit of the Commandments comes to prevail, the decencies of life and the natural personal rights of woman become more secure. Here again Christ has spoken the ultimate word. He says: "Ye have heard by them of old time' Thou shalt not commit adultery,' but I say unto you whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." This is the standard of chastity to which mankind must come. When the Hebrew mother in living faith cast the bread of her own life's being upon the Nile, she was to find it after many days in the great law-giver of her people. The Commandments received through him were the foreshadowing of those greater oracles in which Christ summed up the whole duty of man. The individual liberty which Moses was the first to proclaim to a whole people, in the Pentateuch, Christ, his anti-type, proclaimed to a whole world, and on his proclamation rests to-day the freedom of woman and of the American Republic. The Bread of Life, again cast on the troubled waters of this world, by woman's faith, through Mary the Virgin Mother, is returning after many days.

Strange that we should forever turn back, as if the application of any essential truth were finished. The child walks by faith. The childhood of the world walked by faith, and left in the Bible the evidence of things that are not seen but are eternal. The Suffrage movement has a quarrel with the Bible because the Creator is there represented, for the reverence of the race, under the guise of a Heavenly Father, and not a Heavenly Mother, or rather, not as a human pair, equal in dignity and power. If the first impulsion of love toward God had come into this world through the mind of man, he would have represented the divine love that his soul conceived under the guise of that being on earth whom he most loved. But love was born with the "disabilities" of woman; it was evolved through motherhood; and the same impulse that gave it, exalted, not itself, but what it loved and trusted. "I have gotten a man from the Lord" said the first recorded mother, who had learned to know the Lord through motherhood; and the boy she bore was taught to look up with confidence to the strength and protection of his father. She told him that the pity of his father, which made him bring food and raiment, and which guarded his home, was an image of the feeling that was felt for him by the divine being. Could man have learned the lesson first, we can see that the story would have been different, because man has named every beautiful and gracious thing for woman. Virtue, temperance, truth, purity, love, faith, hope, liberty, grace, beauty, charity, the inspirers of art and science, of music and literature, of justice and of religion, all are feminine. When man says: "Our Father which art in heaven," he prays as his mother taught him. Through the self-abnegation that was unconscious of its sacrifice, woman was to be the instrument for bringing human life up, on, to the God who, being spirit, could act upon a clay-bound mind only through the highest human thing that love could know. Men, as well as women, have misunderstood and misinterpreted this. The love that "is not puffed up," "doth not behave itself unseemly," cannot proclaim its own virtue--to arrogate it is to lose it. But the secret of the Lord has been with those who feared Him, and it has led the world aright in spite of blunder and of sin.

If man, in his ignorant conceit, has fancied that this was the subjection of woman, it has been a part of his mother's lesson to correct that impression. If woman, in her folly, has allowed herself to make the same mistake, that, too, is working out its cure through the love that so arranged human nature that "a man should leave father and mother and cleave unto his wife, and they twain should be one flesh," and that "_her desire_ should be to her husband" in those matters wherein the mutual interest required that he should bear sway. If there is a minister of religion who holds to the perverted notion that, because woman ate the original apple in disobedience to God's command, she was the bringer of original sin into the world, and for that was and is punished by arbitrary subjection to the authority of man, that minister does not deserve the support of women. The fact that he would have few listeners, and fewer followers, if women were not the bringers and the maintainers of religious faith is sufficient proof against such an exposition of scripture. As a matter of fact, while the dogmatism of belief, like the dogmatism of unbelief, has made assertions that have dishonored both divine and human nature, the practical working of formulated faiths of all names has been to approach the standard laid down in the Old and the New Testament. The model of being set by Christ is that of a little child. "Except ye become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven." The natural characteristics of the child are faith, and hope, and love--the virtues that abide. When the virile apostle to the Gentiles "put away childish things," he kept these childlike qualities. If woman first attains them in perfection, she is superior; if man, he is superior. In the race toward the final goal, to be equal in accomplishment it is needful to be equal in obedience. The keynote of Paul's preaching was obedience--the obedience of all human beings to God in Christ, the obedience of all men and women to lawful civil authority for the sake of Christ and the promotion of his kingdom,--the obedience of men to one another in the churchly offices, for the sake of that "decency" that he loved and enjoined--the obedience of the equal wife to the husband who was the external representative of family life.

With Eastern nations the veil was the sign of retirement, of domestic life, and it was assumed by wives when they were in the street or in a public assembly. In heathen and barbarous countries it was also deemed a sign of woman's subjection and inferiority. The Hebrews were the first people to attain any truly spiritual conceptions, and they began to have a commensurately higher idea of the possibilities of woman's nature and work. When Christian women, in their new-found freedom, would have thrown aside the veil, just as Christian men, in their new-found reverence for God, would have repudiated the heathen wife, Paul said to them both that Christian liberty was individual,--it changed the character, not the sex relations. In arranging for church discipline, he advised that men should uncover the head, and women should wear the veil. But he said, in reference to that veil, that "woman should have _power_ on her head, because of the angels." The angels are spoken of in the New Testament as veiling their faces in the very presence of the Creator. In that truer symbolism of Christianity, man was to uncover his head in token of reverence to God and acceptance of the responsibility of the guardianship of the earth. Woman was to cover her head in token of her acceptance of man's guardianship and of her dominion over his heart, to which she had revealed God's will.

Paul adds: "For as the woman is of the man, so is the man also of the woman; but all things are of God." This relation was one of the mysteries that Paul said he did not comprehend, nor could he, till the lessons he taught should work out their results, and might serve as commentary.

Life itself, as well as all that life could come to mean, depended upon woman's consenting. The word "obey" in some marriage services seems, like what it really is, a survival. Obedience has brought its reward, and the consent of the heart is more than the consent of the lips. But if there is no consent of the heart to wifehood and motherhood, in time there will be no chivalry, no progress, no final emancipation for the race. Consenting is also commanding, and woman loses her life in order to find it in the fulfillment of her wish. It was consent to her own teaching. The chivalrous and tender-hearted Paul, who spoke of women with reverent affection, who adopted as his own the mother of Rufus, was repeating the lesson of every Jewish mother from Sarah to Deborah, and from Deborah to the women who were last at Christ's cross and first beside his tomb. Deborah, who was the judge, prophetess and poet, but first of all "a mother in Israel," under whom her degenerate people had peace for forty years, rebuked Barak and said, to their humiliation: "This day shall the Lord deliver Israel by the hand of a woman." From this teaching Paul uttered his rebuke to the wayward church at Corinth: "It is a shame for a man to cover his head, inasmuch as he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of the man." And he added, in speaking of the wearing of the veil, "For this cause ought the woman to have power" "because of the angels." In the Epistle to the Ephesians Paul admonishes the Church to be "imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, even as Christ also loved you, and gave himself for you, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour." Again, he says: "Therefore, as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything." And as if to make doubly certain that no one should think that such submission implied bondage or inequality, he adds "Husbands, love your wives even as Christ also loved the Church and _gave himself for it_." Again, he says: "So ought men to love their wives, as their own bodies.... Even as the Lord the Church," adding with almost strained Oriental vehemence, "for we are members of his body, of his flesh and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh."

The comment most readily suggested is, that through this teaching the use of the veil has now no such significance. The uncovering of the head is a token of respect, largely to woman. The retention of the bonnet is not dreamed of in connection with woman's relation to man, nor does it suggest woman's power in the moral world. The obedience through which love "constrained" a mind that had been bred to forms, was free. If anybody now holds that woman was intended to glorify God indirectly, through man, or to serve God by serving man, he makes an assumption long discredited, and not in accord with the spirit of Christ and of Paul. Man is as much the glory of woman as woman is the glory of man, and they reveal equally the glory of God.

In speaking of the proprieties of life, Paul said: "Does not nature herself teach you?" "If a man have long hair, it is a shame to him." "If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her." The badge of womanhood is a glory, and the "short-haired women and long-haired men" of the early Suffrage movement transformed the symbols of dignity and honor into those of contempt and disgrace.

Canon law grew up during the Middle Ages, when came the great

"Death-grapple in the darkness, 'twixt old systems and the Word."

The wondrous church that rose on the ruins of Roman militarism, and overthrew Norman feudalism, gave evidence, in its code, of the bitterness of the conflict and the rudeness of the time. The legal fiction that, in acknowledging the oneness of husband and wife, yet made the husband that one, was a perversion of Scripture.

It has been publicly said by Suffragists from the first, that the tenets of the Church of Rome, in which Canon law had its origin, were inimical to woman suffrage; and they have further said that those who canonize women and worship the Virgin Mother, should naturally have been friendly to the Suffrage idea. I suppose no one will deny that the spirit of the Roman body is that of a state church. I have no more to say in criticism of it as a Christian denomination than I have of others; but that organization which has held temporal and spiritual power to be co-ordinate and interdependent in government, presents a political phase that has direct bearing on my theme, and I make my few comments as a historian. The Church that inculcates Mariolatry would have far more ignorant women to add to our body of voters than any other. It has done less for woman's education and general advancement than any other, but its claims are not therefore modest. The school elections in Staten Island last year gave an object- lesson in regard to its intention to use the suffrage. In Connecticut, the school election presented another evidence of the intense interest felt by the Catholic clergy in public-school matters. In California, in the late canvass for woman suffrage, that Church assisted largely in carrying on the work to secure the amendment. While many of its individual members are among the noblest friends that civil and religious freedom have in our country, this church, by its traditions, and by its latest pronunciamentos, shows itself as a force that, for its own selfish reasons, may be reckoned on the side of woman suffrage in its conflict with woman's progress.

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