VIII.

WOMAN IN THE MINISTRY.

BY

(REV.) ADA C. BOWLES.

The entrance of women upon the work of the Christian ministry in America waited for no ordaining council and imposition of hands, but may be said to have begun with the preaching of Anne Hutchinson. Arriving in Boston in 1634, and being admitted to membership in the church, she forthwith began the advocacy of her peculiar doctrines, which carried with them her commission to preach. Believing that “the power of the Holy Spirit dwells in every believer, and that the inward revelations of the spirit, the conscious judgment of the mind, are of paramount authority,” what need could she feel of other sanction? Large numbers of women gathered to the meetings in which she boldly discussed the sermons of the preceding Sabbath, as was the custom of the men of the congregation, and set forth her own belief. The dispute among her followers and their opposers, according to Bancroft, “impressed its spirit into everything. It interfered with the levy of troops for the Pequot war; it influenced the respect shown to the magistrates, the distribution of town lots, the assessment rates, and, at last, the continued existence of the two opposing parties was considered inconsistent with the public peace.”

In 1637 a synod of the church was called at Newtown and, although Cotton, Vane, and Wheelwright, together with all but five members of the Boston church, had become warm partisans of Mrs. Hutchinson, her tenets were among the eighty-two opinions condemned as erroneous. A few months later, she was summoned before the General Court and, after a trial of two days, sentenced to banishment from the territory of Massachusetts.

That her loss was felt by the church which had excommunicated her may be inferred from the effort made to reclaim her by a deputation sent for that purpose to the Island of Aquidneck, afterward called Rhode Island, where she had found a refuge. After the death of her husband in 1642, she removed to the Dutch settlement, then at war with the Indians, by whose hand she, with all her family, save one child (carried captive), cruelly perished.

This experience of the church was not calculated to encourage the public preaching of women, nor incline it, a score of years later, to receive with open-armed hospitality the two Quaker women, Mary Fisher and Ann Austin, whose books and trunks were burned on shipboard, and who, upon landing, were haled to prison, in the same spirit of persecution which had driven them from England to the West Indies, and thence to this so-called “land of liberty.” Vainly searched for signs of witchcraft, they were then banished for heresy.

Yet the mild doctrines of the Quakers were destined to take root upon American soil, and do their full share in the liberalizing of thought and especially in securing to woman that freedom to preach which has made itself felt in other Christian denominations. The name of no preacher among the Quakers, or “Friends,” as they prefer to be called, stands above the name of Lucretia Mott, whose history is too well known to demand more than a word concerning her call to such public service, as given by herself:

“At twenty-five years of age, surrounded by a little family and many cares, I felt called to a more public life and devotion to duty, and engaged in the ministry in our Society, receiving every encouragement from those in authority, until a separation from us, in 1827, when my convictions led me to adhere to the sufficiency of the light within us, resting on truth as authority, rather than taking authority for truth.”

This step into the larger freedom of the Hicksites, or Unitarian branch of Quakers, proved no mistake for one whose heart and life could not measure themselves by theological creeds. To use her own words, “I have felt a far greater interest in the moral movements of our age, than in any theological discussion.” And her eloquent pleadings and practical charities for three-quarters of a century are ample witness of her sincerity. The domestic life of Mrs. Mott was in itself a noble refutation of the assertion that eminent public service by women is incompatible with home making, since few homes could show such perfect conjugal union and such thrifty household management. There are about three hundred and fifty women preachers in this branch of the Christian church at present.

The sect of Shakers, or “United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing,” originating near Manchester, England, about 1770, as an offshoot of the Society of Friends, and following the same spiritual authority, gave to its women an equal share with men in its service and government.

In 1770, Ann Lee, one of the members of this sect, professed to have received a special illumination, in the name of which she was accepted as the “Christ of the female order.” Her followers believing that “God was revealed as a dual being, male and female, to the Jews, that Jesus revealed to the world God, as a Father,” received “Mother Ann” as “God revealed in the character of Mother, the bearing spirit of all the creation of God.” In 1774, obedient to another revelation of the spirit, Mother Ann, with nine of the more prominent members of her society, emigrated to America and began her work in the State of New York, from which center ardent missionaries propagated the new faith.

When we consider the essential doctrines of this sect,—human brotherhood, exemplified in a community of goods, non-resistance, non-participation in government, strict celibacy, and perfect chastity,—we must confess that Ann Lee, possessing not even a rudimentary education, must nevertheless have been gifted with extraordinary powers of persuasion thus to have secured the founding of the various communities of Shakers in the United States, among which her name is still reverenced in its deific relations.

If allowed to follow what might be called natural lines, for the highest ecclesiastical freedom for women, the Roman Catholic Church would seem a proper starting point. Its exaltation of “Mary, Mother of God,” the canonization of devout women, its many sisterhoods, its deep indebtness to women in every age and every land, seem a fitting foundation upon which to build an ecclesiasticism which should at least consider woman to be as well endowed by her Creator for a celibate priesthood as the sex ignored in providing the world’s Redeemer. Yet no church more rigidly excludes women from the priestly office or gives less indication of change in this regard; nor can it be expected in a non-progressive system, crystallized around the dogma of infallibility.

Nor shall we, though continuing along the lines of natural expectation into the largest Protestant church of America, the Methodist Episcopal Church, find a radical change, although Susanna Wesley was called the “real foundress of Methodism” in England, and Barbara Heck is given equal credit for the first impulse given the church in America. Landing in New York in 1760, in company with the first local preacher and class leader, Philip Embury, Mrs. Heck seems to have “kept the faith” more loyally, in the midst of the distractions and downward tendencies of the new life, than did the preacher. Five years passed and, so far as known, he did nothing to keep together the few Wesleyans, or add to their number. There was much moral degeneration, which no doubt greatly troubled the soul of Mrs. Heck. On a certain occasion, while visiting at a house where were gathered a number of friends and acquaintances, finding them engaged in card playing, “her spirit was roused, and, doubtless emboldened by her long and intimate acquaintance with them in Ireland, she seized the cards, threw them into the fire, and then most solemnly warned them of their danger and duty. Leaving them she went immediately to the dwelling of Embury, who was her cousin. After narrating what she had seen and done, under the influence of the Divine Spirit and with power, she appealed to him to be no longer silent, but to preach the Word forthwith. She parried his excuses and urged him to begin at once in his own house and to his own people. He consented, and she went out and collected four persons who, with herself, constituted his audience. After singing and prayer, he preached to them and enrolled them in a class. He continued thereafter to meet them weekly,”[151] and thus began the work of Methodism in America. When the rigging loft, which had succeeded the house for preaching purposes, had also been outgrown, it was “Barbara Heck, the real founder of American Methodism,” who was ready with plans for a chapel, which still stands, a sacred memorial of her zeal and that of the man recalled to his duty by her burning words.

Nor can the work of the Countess of Huntingdon be overlooked in this connection, although the scene of her labors was in another land, since its fruits were here so largely shared through the work of Whitefield. Not merely as the builder of sixty-four chapels, the founder and supporter of a college for the education of ministers, many of whom were maintained by her, is she to be remembered. In the volume just quoted from, we read that, “Under the influence of Whitefield and the Countess of Huntingdon, the Calvinistic non-conformity rose, as from the dead, to new life, which has continued ever since with increasing energy. By the same means, with the co-operation of Wesley, a powerful evangelical party was raised up in the establishment, and most of the measures of evangelical propagandism which have since kept British Christianity alive with energy, and extended its activity to the foreign world, are distinctly traceable to this great revival.... About the end of its first decade, a scarcely parallel interest had been spread and sustained throughout the United Kingdom and along the Atlantic coast of America.... It had presented before the world the greatest pulpit orator of the age (if not of any age), Whitefield; also one of the greatest religious legislators of history, Wesley, a hymnist, whose supremacy has been but doubtfully disputed by a single rival—Charles Wesley; and the most signal example of female agency in religious affairs which Christian history records, the Countess of Huntingdon.”[152]

Remembering that the churches established by this gifted woman were not known by the names of the men associated with her, but as “Lady Huntingdon’s Connexion,” some evidence of the leadership of women will be apparent in the American Methodist Church. Strange to say, this is far from being the case. Although Wesley had encouraged the preaching of women, and although few men could equal the successful labors of many of them, the Methodist Episcopal Church of America is singularly backward in recognition of its women. According to its “Discipline,” “the pronouns he, his, and him, when used with reference to stewards, class-leaders, and Sunday-school superintendents, shall not be construed so as to exclude women from these offices.” Notwithstanding this, “in many American churches to-day, a woman class-leader would be almost as great a curiosity as John the Baptist, with his raiment of camel’s hair, and a leathern girdle around his loins.”[153]

Women of unquestioned ability, liberal education, and purity of character have in vain applied for ordination, though supported by the record of much successful pulpit and pastoral work as licensed lay preachers, and by many influential friends of the laity and clergy. One of these, of national reputation,[154] to whom this sanction of ordination was refused, has since been ordained by the Protestant Methodist Church, which, having done so, however, steadfastly declines to add to the number, having apparently exhausted its liberality by this extreme application of the spirit of Wesley.

The small sect of primitive Methodists which adheres most strictly to the methods of Wesley have always employed women preachers as a means of reaching the depraved classes; this being one of the points of difference upon which it separated from the main body.

The United Brethren in Christ, or German Methodists, as formerly called, when their membership was more largely of that element, are to be distinguished as appointing the first woman as “circuit rider,” which was recently done by Bishop Kephart of the Wabash Annual Conference, held at Clay City, Ind. The appointee is a young woman eminently adapted to the work and is one of several ordained women elders in this church.

So far as known, the Baptist Church has taken no steps leading to the admission of women to its ministry, save in that division known as Free Will Baptists, which has ordained a small number of women in various parts of the country under its democratic system of government. The Free Baptist General Conference of 1886 adopted the following resolution: “That intelligent, godly women who are so situated as to devote their time to the ministry, and desire to be ordained, should receive such indorsement and authority as ordination involves, provided there are no objections to such indorsement other than the matter of sex. Many of the Baptist clergymen, however, as those of all leading denominations, save the Episcopal and Roman Catholic, freely admit women to their pulpits to speak upon great moral questions, and would welcome them to the ranks of the ministry. Women are also prominent in its conference and prayer meetings.”

The Presbyterian Church has been a strongly conservative body, slow to sanction radical change in its polity, but if the Pan-Presbyterian Council, held not long since in London, voices the general sentiment of this large and important denomination, women are to enjoy a more equal power in its administration. For a long period they were carefully excluded; but for a number of years past a more liberal policy has welcomed them to a free utterance in the conference and prayer meetings, which they sometimes conduct, and at synods they often speak upon missionary and other topics. At a Synod of the Reformed Presbyterians held in 1889, it was decided by a vote of 93 to 24 that the ordination of a woman as deacon is in harmony with the New Testament and the constitution of the Apostolic Church.

There are also indications that the long-frozen ground of orthodox Congregationalism is thawing toward a springtime of more generous recognition of its women. The recent opening of the Hartford Theological Seminary, and the almost immediate presentation to it of a prize scholarship to be competed for by women alone, are notable signs. The general recognition of the fitness of women preachers in missionary fields, the significant fact that Oberlin College, which graduated its first woman theological student[155] nearly forty years ago and has added but one other since, prints this year, for the first time, the names of these two women upon the Triennial Catalogue, are other straws upon the rising tide of favor toward the woman ministry. Under the Congregational system, any individual church may ordain for itself a woman whom it may choose for its pastor, and this has been done in several instances past, either by the deacons of the church or by a council called for the purpose, the present year recording more such ordinations than any preceding year.[156]

The German Lutheran Church, as represented in a recent session of the Missouri Synod at Baltimore, feeling compelled to recognize the trend of evangelical Christianity toward a woman ministry, presented for discussion the question, “How far and under what conditions do we allow women to teach?” The decision reached was that they must not teach at all in the pulpit nor in the congregation. As there is absolute parity of the clergy of this church, and the congregation is its ultimate of authority, it is by no means certain that this position can be uniformly maintained.

To this church is due the credit of introducing into the country as early as 1849 the order of Deaconesses as maintained in Europe during the last fifty years. By the persistent efforts of Mr. John D. Lankenau of Philadelphia, an enthusiastic supporter of this institution, America is now provided with the finest “Mother-house” in the world, the immediate result of which has been a rapid increase of the order in various denominations, in all parts of the country. This magnificent edifice, built by Mr. Lankenau as a memorial of his wife, at a cost of half a million of dollars, has been presented as a free gift to the German Hospital Corporation of Philadelphia. “The western wing of the building is used as a home for aged men and women, the eastern wing as a residence and training school for the deaconesses, the chapel uniting the two, and the whole being known as the Mary J. Drexel Home and Mother-house of Deaconesses.”[157][158]

The Protestant Episcopal Church has for many years recognized the value of “sisterhoods” of consecrated women, more or less closely affiliated, for carrying on its various branches of philanthropic service, from which the growth and efficiency of the church has received no small degree of impetus and importance. Among these sisterhoods are numbered two orders of deaconesses, one of which has been changed into the “Sisterhood of St. John the Evangelist”; which, in view of the growing hospitality of thought toward preaching by women, carries in its title a certain suggestiveness. Fourteen sisterhoods, a religious order of widows, and two orders of deaconesses are reported in 1888 for this church.

The church polity of the “Christian Connection,” better known as the Christian Church, as its name implies, is placed upon a broad foundation, by which each church is an independent republic, and women are thus eligible to its pulpits; one woman, ordained to its ministry in the State of Illinois, having at the present time charge of three prosperous churches.

The Universalist Church has been the first to open the doors of its theological schools for the training of women for the ministry, and by its established forms ordain them to its full fellowship. This was not, however, considered a part of its ecclesiastical system until made practically such by the admission of the first woman candidate,[159] who, denied entrance to the Meadville Theological School (Unitarian), applied in 1860 to the President of St. Lawrence University to be admitted to its theological department. In his reply, the fair-minded president candidly wrote: “No woman has ever been admitted to this college, and, personally, I do not think women are called to the ministry, but that I shall leave with the great head of the church.... I shall render you every aid in my power.” A graduate of Mt. Holyoke Seminary and of Antioch College, at which she received the degree of A.B., this well-equipped pioneer for a larger place for women in the Christian church soon verified her credentials, and the president, always her steadfast friend, preached her ordination sermon. Since her ordination, she has enjoyed a number of successful pastorates, with the duties of which marriage and motherhood have not proved incompatible.

About fifty women have been ordained in this church, and all its schools and colleges, save one, are now co-educational. There is also, with scarcely an exception, among its clergymen a feeling of cordial fellowship toward women preachers.

Would the limits of this article permit, sketches of the work accomplished by its pioneer women preachers would furnish not uninteresting reading, since their fields of labor have been some of the most difficult in their respective churches. They have been called to the building of new churches in unbroken fields, or to those so dead or dormant as to be apparently beyond the reach of men workers, and yet we hear of no failures among them to raise these churches to new life and prosperity or to organize new material upon strong foundations. In one notable instance, in a suburb of Chicago, a ten years’ pastorate has resulted in the building of one church edifice which, speedily outgrown, has made necessary a more spacious and elegant one; and there is no disposition to exchange this successful woman minister for a masculine successor.

The Universalist Register for 1889, contains, in its list of ministers, the names of thirty-five women, being the largest number of ordained women for any year, and the largest number in any denomination.

In just a decade after its refusal to admit a woman, the Meadville Theological School (Unitarian) opened its doors to women students, since which time it has received sixteen. About one third of these have graduated, while others have taken but a partial course as wives or prospective wives of ministers, in order to be more truly “help-meets” in the pulpit work of their husbands. “Among these graduates,” writes a member of the faculty, “every woman has been above the average. Our experience indicates that for success in our ministry, care should be taken to encourage only such women as, together with personal fitness for the work, can easily maintain this high rank.”

An amusing incident in the domestic life of one of these women pastors may indicate a possibility of growth in the woman ministry likely to startle conservative minds. A little boy and girl, the children of a mother whose work as a minister evidently contained no surprises for them, were discussing plans for their own future. “I shall help mamma preach,” said the little girl. “I shall preach, too,” stoutly said the small brother. His sister, looking thoughtfully and doubtfully at him, said slowly, “Yes, mens do preach sometimes.”

The woman ministry in America has had no warmer friend than Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, herself a preacher of well-known ability, occasionally preaching in the pulpits of this country, and having preached in Rome, Jerusalem, and Santo Domingo while sojourning in those places. In 1873 Mrs. Howe succeeded in securing a convention of such ministers as were within convenient distance of Boston during Anniversary week, at which addresses were made and the communion observed, Rev. Lorenza Haynes and Rev. Mary H. Graves officiating.

Since that time eight annual conventions have been held in Boston; and in the Hollis Street Church, on June 2, 1882, the “Woman’s Ministerial Conference” was formed, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, president. This is not a working body, but a fellowship of women preachers, whether ordained or not, representing all denominations. Its present officers are: Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, president; Rev. Mary H. Graves, corresponding secretary; Rev. Ada C. Bowles, recording secretary. These, with the additional names of Rev. Louise S. Baker and Rev. Mary T. Whitney, form its executive committee. The title of Rev. is never applied save to those who have been regularly ordained in their respective denominations.

That women bore an important part in the planting and early growth of the Christian church needs no argument. That the plain teaching of Paul should have been so perverted as to mean their exclusion from the office of public teaching is to be explained only by the fact of a departure from the methods of the primitive church, through a purely masculine interpretation and application of regulations which, entirely adapted to the age and country in which uttered, were never intended to be prohibitive of women’s preaching in that, or at any later, period.

The establishment of the Diaconate, in which, as an order of the clergy, women administered the sacraments, interpreted and promulgated doctrines, in connection with the practical work of charity and benevolence, are matters of history.

In its periods of persecution, the church received no more devoted service than that given by its consecrated women. For its sake, they cheerfully accepted martyrdom, in its most cruel forms. Princesses of the blood and other women of noble birth left the allurements of courts for the studious seclusion of the cloister, or, seeking out the poor and needy, they divided with them their substance. No conditions of miserable poverty or loathsome disease hindered the most tender devotion. In all ages and in all lands women have given proof of a loyalty to Christianity as sincere as it was serviceable. By their proselyting power in converting royal relatives, they were the means of bringing not only Rome but France, England, Spain, Hungary, Poland, and Russia under Christian rule.[160]

Is the church to-day less in need of such service than in the past, that it will seek in any way to circumscribe the work of its faithful women by denying to them such sanction, through its prescribed forms, as it bestows freely upon like qualified men, is the question which presses itself persistently forward for settlement.

Certain it is that, as ecclesiastical despotism loses its hold upon the people, they will more readily seek spiritual guidance under a broader law of adaptation and natural fitness, in which women must stand at least an equal chance with men. What the world has already lost by their exclusion from a controlling influence in the church, finds its most painful illustration in the widespread and deep depravity of the masses in our great cities, which the church, in none of its branches, has materially lessened. From the efforts now being made in America for the restoration of the Diaconate of woman, it is safe to argue a change for the better in this respect. The new departure in methods has also an important illustration in the city of Chicago, where, under the leadership of D. L. Moody, gifts amounting to $250,000 have been secured for a theological school and home, to be conducted under the auspices of the Chicago Evangelical Society, which is to be open to both sexes upon the same terms. Its object is the evangelization of the unchurched masses of that great city.

The evils which have resulted to society, and which threaten the very life of the nation by the long neglect to establish proper relations between the vast army of ignorant and degraded beings throughout the land with the active life of Christianity, have become too appalling to be contemplated with indifference, even by the most callous and selfish. The call for service of a most heroic kind is urgent and pressing. For this work of redemption, women have an especial fitness. Invested with all the sanction the church can bestow, supplemented by municipal authority where necessary, let the Christian womanhood of America rise to the level of the demand; “In His Name,” their motto, In His spirit, their inspiration. No pure-hearted, strong-purposed woman but can find a place here to labor as “a minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man.”