_The Scriptural Argument_.
To state our faith more definitely, we believe that in Eden woman enjoyed an equality with man; that she took advantage of her privilege, and, transgressing the law of God without consulting her husband, proved treacherous to her high trust, opened the gate of perdition to the enemy of souls, and brought upon man and the race the curse consequent upon sin, and the ruin wrought by the fall. In consequence of this, God pronounced a curse upon her; gave her sorrow in child-bearing, as he gave to man fatigue in toil; changed the relations hitherto subsisting between man and woman, and compelled her to live henceforth in another; to sink her own individuality, and merge it in that of her husband. This is the language. Unto the woman he said, "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." This is her portion of the curse. This portion endures. Man from that moment became ruler. The wife's desire was to the husband, so that whatever she desires is naturally referred to him. He became adviser, lawmaker and head. The right or wrong of God's action it does not become us to discuss. It is right because God did it. Dispute the right who will, but the curse lives. The serpent crawls on his belly and eats dust. The wife has sorrow in conception; her desire is to her husband, and he rules her; and man, by the sweat of his brow, eats his bread.
But, says some one, did not the coming of Christ change the status of woman, and place her again on the same equality which she enjoyed when Adam led the beautiful Eve to her nuptial bower, and found it impossible to exist without what the poet describes as
"Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self, Thy wish exactly to thy heart's desire?"
If we have not mistaken the relations subsisting even in Eden between the original pair, woman was not the ruler even there. Milton has truthfully said,--
"For well I understand in the prime end Of Nature her the inferior, in the mind And inward faculties which most excel, In outward, also, her resembling less His image who made both, and less expressing The character of that dominion given O'er other creatures; yet when I approach Her loveliness, so absolute she seems, And in herself complete, so well to know Her own, that what she wills to do or say Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best: All higher knowledge in her presence falls Degraded; wisdom in discourse with her Loses discountenanced, and like folly shows; Authority and reason on her wait, As one intended first, not after made Occasionally; and to consummate all, Greatness of mind and nobleness their seat Build in her, loveliest, and create an awe About her, as a guard angelic placed."
With woman, as God made her, we are not acquainted. Glimpses of her pristine beauty, and characteristics of her former excellence, shine forth; but sin has marred the original picture, and defaced the model fashioned by the Creator's hand. The ruin wrought by the fall brought Christ to earth. He opened a way back to Eden--not on earth, but in heaven. The curse remains. The race is under it, because sin is in the world. The law, formed after the fall, is the expressed will of God.
Christ did not come to do away with it, but to fulfil it. Then, as now, it was a law of love, of good will, of peace. When Christ came, woman's condition was deplorable. She was the abject slave of man in nearly all the world. Yet Christ made no attempt to break down their original arrangements. He knew that without a change in woman herself, no external changes in her condition could be of any benefit to her.
He recognized the great fact that she herself must be educated to a better life, that she must have a character which in itself would command respect, and make her worthy of a higher place and a larger liberty. Truly has it been said, "Institutions, of themselves, can never confer freedom upon a people. They must be free men, capable of liberty, and then they will be able not only to make their own institutions, but keep and defend them also. So the emancipation of woman can be effected only by breaking the bonds of her ignorance, frivolity, and vice. A character must be given her, and then the iron door of her prison-house will open to her of its own accord, and she will find that the angel of liberty has been leading her forth indeed." In this direction Jesus labored. Paul, in his Epistles, gave emphasis to the teachings of the Old Testament, and so he wrote, "Let your women keep silence, in the churches, for it is not permitted them to speak; but they are to be in subjection, as the law also says; and if they will to learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home; for it is a shame for women to speak in the church,"--I Cor. xiv. 34, 35.
Against this command many arguments have been brought to bear, and despite this apostolic command, some women insist upon their right to preach. It is a significant truth, that whoever does this, enters upon a conflict with public sentiment born of God, and subjects herself to terrible mortification. The refusal of lending Universalist divines to share the exercises of an ordination with a woman, illustrates this principle. The recognition given to man as the head of the household, involves the loss of woman's individuality, and of her right to a support. It opens a window to life, and shows why our higher nature revolts against woman being compelled to labor in the field. That is man's place, and the labor elevates him. It degrades a woman. The praises of agricultural toil for man find a place in song and story; but labor in the field is destructive of womanhood, of motherhood, and of wifehood.
We have seen that the Scriptures declare, 1. That it is not well for man to be alone. He is not complete until woman is joined to him in marriage. 2. Woman was made for man. Manliness is an attribute that belongs to man; it disgraces a woman. To be womanly, is the noblest tribute that can be paid to woman; but it disgraces a man, because God, the Creator, placed this characteristic within the heart and soul and nature, just as he gave a difference of nature, mould, and form, to the outward appearance of man and woman. He made them for a particular purpose, and not for the same purpose. They were not made in the same manner, nor of the same material. If woman be the weaker vessel, she is of the finer mould. God made man in his own image, and woman was created to be his helpmeet.
3. We have noticed the change in the relations which was the product of the curse. Woman in Eden was the source of influence. After it, man became the head, and her desire was unto him.
4. Since the fall, labor has been multiplied to man, sorrow to woman; but such is the kindness of God, that these two facts are sources of perpetual joy in the home. The wife is proud of her toiling husband, the man is tender of his suffering wife; and in the bliss of childhood happiness both find their reward.
These statements shrine all the facts of the separate histories of man and woman. It were easier to change earth to water, and sea to land, than it is to make a womanly woman consent to appear manly. Her God made her a woman. It is not a fault. It is a glory. The bird that skims the wave would not exchange places with the bird that goes to meet the sun; but this is not to bring a charge against the eagle or the swan.
One more truth, and then we will pass to the consideration of the lessons discoverable in woman's nature. All the Scripture requirements, such as refer to the plaiting of the hair, to being uncovered in public, are said to refer to the customs of the East, and not to bind woman in this age of progress. The principle covered by those requirements then, rules now. Paul said, Let not a Christian woman break through any of the restraints of womanhood, and so appear as do the harlots, with uncovered faces and with plaited hair, who mingle freely with men, and are shorn of that modesty and weakness so becoming woman. Woman's right to be a woman implies the right to be loved, to be respected as a woman, to be married, to bring forth to the world the product of that love; and woman's highest interests are promoted by defending and maintaining this right.
There are those who object to the word _service_, and claim that those who take the Bible as authority wish to reduce woman to slavery. No charge could be more absurd; and God's care for woman is manifest, both in the teachings of the Bible and in the constitution of the race. Woman owes to Christianity all she enjoys. Leave her to be subject to the conditions imposed on her by unregenerated manhood or womanhood, and you leave her to become either a thing in society, or else reduce her to a level with the beasts of burden. In old savage and pagan tribes the severest burdens of physical toil were laid upon her. She was valued for the same reason that men prize their most useful animals, or as a means of gratifying sensual and selfish desires. Even in the learned and dignified forms of modern paganism, the wife is the slave rather than the companion of her husband. She is kept apart from him. The education of her mental faculties is neglected. She is not allowed to walk with him; she must walk behind him. She must not eat with him, but eat after he has done, and eat what _he leaves_. She must not sleep until he is asleep, nor remain asleep after he is awake. If she is sitting down, and he comes into the room, she must rise up. She must bow to no other god on the earth besides her husband. She must worship him while he lives, and when he dies she must be burned with him. In case she is not burned, she is not allowed to marry, and is considered an outcast. There is little social intercourse between the sexes, little or no acquaintance of the parties before marriage, and, consequently, little mutual attachment.
Women are not allowed to learn to read, because there can be no solid foundation laid for future influence.
Under the Crescent the condition of woman is worse rather than better, for in pagan India she is permitted to share in the hope of religion; but in Mohammedan countries it is a popular tradition that women are forbidden paradise; and it requires some effort for the imagination to conceive how debased and wretched must be the condition of the female sex to originate and sustain such a horrible and blasphemous tradition.
Even in the refined and shining ages of Greece and Rome, where the cultivation of letters and the graces of polished style, the charms of poetry and eloquence, the elegances of architecture, sculpture, painting, and embroidery, the glory of conquest and the pride of national distinction, were unsurpassed,--even then and there, woman was but the abject slave of man, the object of his ambition, avarice, lust, and power.
Truly has it been said that nothing more surely distinguishes the savage state from the civilized, the East from the West, Paganism from Christianity, antiquity from the middle ages, the middle ages from modern times, than the condition of woman.
In China, she is used as a beast of burden. The Chinese peasant woman goes to the field with her male infant on her back, and ploughs, sows, and reaps, exposed to all the changes of the weather. In Calcutta, women are the masons, and maybe seen daily conveying their hods of cement, and spreading it on the tops of their houses.
In a country where no European man can labor, where the native rests until compelled by his conqueror to work, seven thousand of these women might have been seen, in 1859, climbing to the edge of ravines, with baskets of stone on their heads, to fill, with these tedious contributions, thousands of perpendicular feet, in order that a railroad might wind among the mountains.
In Australia, she carries the burden which man's indolence refuses; and in Great Britain, the condition of women among the lower classes, revealed by the statistics of her mines and of her manufacturing districts, is such as to make a moralist blush. Behold her, with a strap around her waist, dragging the coal-cart in the mine, and so ignorant, that when asked if she knew Jesus, replied, "He never worked in our shaft."
Do we turn to America, we find that in the providence of God her fortune has been advanced and improved by the extension of the era of free government, and by the diffusion of the principles of the gospel of Christ.
True, in the past, throughout the South, a negro woman worked in the field as a beast of burden; but emancipation and the diffusion of the principles of Christianity changes all this in the South, as it has changed it in Turkey and in the East. The colored man builds for his wife a house, and toils for her in the field or shop, while she keeps the house, and beautifies the sanctuary of the heart.
Now, in all this land, woman's right to be a woman is recognized, and "woman's right to be a man" is opposed, though eloquent orators of either sex may declaim in its behalf. God's law, natural and revealed, is against it. Woman's nature will be woman's nature no longer when she shall desire it.
An illustration of this fact was recently furnished. A female orator had just left the platform for the horse-car. She was tired, and, doubtless, needed a seat. She had been speaking in favor of woman's rights, and had berated the opposite sex for their unwillingness to grant them. Worn out with fatigue, and excited, her lace red, her eyes flashing, she looked around for a seat. The car was full, and among the number sitting down was a workingman.
She spoke so that all could hear her, saying, "You are not gentlemen, or you would not let a woman stand." The workingman looked up, and replied, "Did I not just hear you speak in behalf of woman's rights?" The woman, supposing she had found a friend, replied in the affirmative. "Well," said he, "I will stand up any time, with pleasure, for a housewife or a kitchen girl; but you contend for an equality of rights with men; take it, and stand up among them." The shout of approbation proved that the argument was not on the side of woman. She did not herself believe in the theory advanced. Down in her heart she felt that, because she was a woman, she was entitled to be treated with love and respect, with honor and consideration.
The right which exempts her from certain things which men must endure, _grows out of her right to be a woman_. We feel that it is her privilege and her right to be relieved from the necessity of working in the field, from doing many things which it is manly in man to do.
We do not object to woman's sharing in the toil of the store, the shop, or the factory. Better this than idleness and want; yet there is a reason for pondering the question whether woman is wise in trying to displace man for her own advantage. If any one must be idle, let it be woman, and not man. It has been well said, "There are in Massachusetts over seventy thousand more females than males, and probably twice that number in the State of New York. It is an unnatural condition of things. At the West the number of men greatly preponderates."
"Our young men go off early in life, leaving fathers, mothers, and sisters behind them. The prospect for their sisters to marry, then, is lessened by every emigration." Now, what shall be done in behalf of these thousands of virtuous, educated, and noble girls? The cry is, make them into clerks, and bookkeepers, and bankers, and give them all the employments of men. Think it over. Suppose now we make these girls into clerks in stores and counting-rooms, say ten thousand in Massachusetts, and twenty thousand in New York--don't we displace so many young men; drive them off to the West; prevent so many new families from being established here; take away thirty thousand chances of marriage from these females, and enhance the evil we are trying to remedy?
Is it a blessing to woman to lessen her opportunities of marriage?
Again, a woman can be idle, and not be lost. Whereas man, if left unemployed, runs to mischief, if not to crime.
The history of those manufacturing districts in England, so eloquently described by Charlotte Elizabeth, where woman is preferred because of the cheapness and skill of her labor, proves this position correct.
The husband lives in idleness, and has the care of the house. The result is, that comfort and neatness are at an end. The children are reared in crime, in indolence; the men pass their time in drinking and in gambling, prostitution abounds, and the health of the community, socially, physically, mentally, and morally, is destroyed.
On the other hand, enter one of those manufacturing towns where the skilled labor of man is rewarded, and where women keep the house with thrift and care, and you behold order, virtue, and prosperity. This is not poetry. It is fact. It proves that God's laws must be heeded and obeyed. "Marriage," said Gail Hamilton, "is a friendship of the sexes so profound, so comprehensive, that it includes the whole being. The inflow of the divine life,
"'Bright effluence of bright essence increate,'
"blends the man nature and the woman nature into an absolute oneness, which shapes itself ever thereafter into the only perfect symmetry.
Thus alone comes humanity in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. Thus marriage forever tends to its own annihilation,--not the annihilation of a stream swallowed up in desert sands, but of a river broadening to the boundless sea. The more perfect its substance, the more yielding its form. As it gathers power it diminishes pomp, till, by a pathway which the vulture's eye hath not seen and never can see, marriage itself leads to the land where they neither marry nor are given in marriage.
"Wherever man pays reverence to woman,--wherever any man feels the influence of any woman, purifying, chastening, abashing, strengthening him against temptation, shielding him from evil, ministering to his self-respect, medicining his weariness, peopling his solitude, winning him from sordid prizes, enlivening his monotonous days with mirth, or fancy, or wit, flashing heaven upon his earth, and mellowing it for all spiritual fertility,--there is the element of marriage. Wherever woman pays reverence to man,--wherever any woman rejoices in the strength of any man, feels it to be God's agent, upholding her weakness, confirming her purpose, and crowning her power,--wherever he reveals himself to her, just, upright, inflexible, yet tolerant, merciful, benignant, not unruffled, perhaps, but not overcome by the world's turbulence, and responding to all her gentleness, his feet on the earth, his head among the stars, helping her to hold her soul steadfast in right, to stand firm against the encroachments of frivolity, vanity, impatience, fatigue, and discouragement, helping to preserve her good nature, to develop her energy, to consolidate her thought, to utilize her benevolence, to exalt and illumine her life,--there is the essence of marriage. Its love is founded on respect, and increases self-respect at the very moment of merging itself in another. Its love is mutual, equally giving and receiving at every instant of its action. There is neither dependence nor independence, but inter-dependence. Years cannot weaken its bonds, distance cannot sunder them. It is a love which vanquishes the grave, and transfigures death itself into life."
These laws are varied by God's word, and written indelibly upon the nature of man. Surely nothing can be more manifest than that they must be obeyed.
II.
_Nature teaches us the Wisdom of adhering to the Divine Plan_.
Anatomists tell us that in the embryo skeleton there is a marked difference of general conformation in the two sexes; that in the male there is a larger chest and breathing apparatus, which, affects the whole organization, forming a more powerful muscular system, and producing a physical constitution which predestines him to bold enterprises and daring exploits. The woman, being differently constructed, finds it natural to content herself in the house, removed from the gaze of the world, and from rude contact with its jostling cares.
There is an outside and an inside world. The work of the street, or the shop, or the field, is no more essential to the well-being of the family than is the work performed in the house. God assigned to man the field, or out-door work, and to woman the home and housework. In proportion as men and women fill well their separate spheres, there is harmony and happiness. Man toils, and provides for the wants of his household. Woman toils, and sees to it that the children are well reared, and that the house is well kept. Woman is respected and supported, not in idleness, but in caring for the wants of those committed to her care. The attempt is being made to disregard these natural laws, by those who claim to have outgrown divine legislation, and who have the hardihood to trample upon the laws of nature. But in vain. When God made our first parents, he made them male and female, and it will not be difficult to believe in the impossibility of the finite being able to undo the work of the Infinite. Each has his and her place, and nothing goes continuously right if husband and wife change places. Keep the positions assigned them by the laws of God and nature, and all will go well.
Give to woman the serious consideration due from every man born of woman's agony, and you build her up in love, endow her with respect, encourage her to cultivate her mind, and to develop the graces of her nature. The mightiest influence which exists upon earth is concealed in the heart of woman. It follows that her elevation and her happiness, her education and usefulness, are objects of deep concern.
We have seen that the legislation of Heaven provides for the gratification of the early longing of the soul for companionship in making marriage honorable and love the holiest of instincts.
It is fashionable to talk against an early love. It is wrong thus to do. "Youth longeth for a kindred spirit, and yearneth for a heart that can commune with his own. He meditateth night and day, doting on the image of his fancy." It is the tendency of an early love to inspire youth with grand aspirations and lofty aims. "They that love early, shall become like-minded, and the tempter shall touch them not. They shall grow up, leaning on each other, as the olive and the vine."
It is only when love is scorned, when passion takes its place, when man forgets that the idol of his heart is a probationer of earth like himself, that it is his duty to be chary of her soul, feeling that it is his jewel. It is only when a man ceases to be a man, and becomes a beast, that he can consent, even in thought, to despoil woman of her virtue; to trample upon the sacred instincts of her nobler nature.
A real woman will delight to make herself worthy of love. In the advancement of her mind, quite as much as in the adornment of her person, she strives to make herself beautiful as well as lovable. If she forgets her duty, and consents to seem to be what she is not, so that her admirer finds that the appearance which charmed him was not real, then the future of that woman is dark indeed. Her husband will discover, when too late, that "the harp and the voice may thrill him, sound may enchant his ear, but, by and by, the hand will wither, and the sweet notes turn to discord; the eye, so brilliant at even, may be red with sorrow in the morning; and the sylph-like form of elegance must writhe in the crampings of pain."
Naturally the man and woman will recognize the rule of God in the choice of their vocation. He will go abroad, and she will stay at home. He will earn the bread, and she will make it. He will build the house, and she will keep it. The difference between their spheres of labor seems naturally to be this: one is external, the other internal; one active, the other passive. He has to go and seek out his path; hers usually lies close under her feet. Yet, if life is meant to be a worthy one, each must resolutely be trod.