Men, Women, and Gods Part 18

Appendix C.

1. "Sappho flourished b. c. 600, and a little later; and so highly did Plato value her intellectual, as well as her imaginative endowments, that he a.s.signed her the honors of sage as well as poet; and familiarly ent.i.tled her the 'tenth muse'"--Buckle,

2. "Wilkinson says among _no_ ancient people had women such influence and liberty as among the ancient Egyptians."--Buckle.

3. "The Americans have in the treatment of women fallen below, not only their own democratic principles, but the practice of some parts of the Old World."--Harriet Martineau.

4. "Mr. F. Newman denies that Christianity has improved the position of women; and he observes that, 'with Paul, the _sole_ reason for marriage is, that a man may, without sin, vent his sensual desires. He teaches that, _but_ for this object, it would be better not to marry;' and he takes no notice of the _social_ pleasures of marriage. Newman says: 'In short, only in countries where Germanic sentiment has taken root do we see marks of any elevation of the female s.e.x superior to that of Pagan antiquity.'"--Buckle.

5. "Female voices are never heard in the Russian churches; their place is supplied by boys; women do not yet stand high enough in the estimation of the churches.... to be permitted to sing the praises of G.o.d in the presence of men."--Kohl.

6. "Christianity diminished the influence of women."--Neander, "Hist, of the Church."

Appendix D.

Within the reign of the present sovereign Mrs. Gage tells us of a young girl being ordered by the Petty Sessions Bench back to the "service" of a landlord, from whom she had run away because such service meant the sacrifice of her honor. She refused to go _and was put in jail_.

Appendix E.

1. "Women were taught by the Church and State alike, that the Feudal Lord or Seigneur had a right to them, not only against themselves, but as against any claim of husband or father. The law known as _Marchetta_, or Marquette, compelled newly-married women to a most dishonorable servitude. They were regarded as the rightful prey of the Feudal Lord from one to three days after their marriage, and from this custom, the oldest son of the serf was held as the son of the lord, 'as perchance it was he who begat him.' From this nefarious degradation of woman, the custom of Borough-English arose, in which the youngest son became the heir.... France, Germany, Prussia, England, Scotland, _and all Christian countries_ where feudalism existed, held to the enforcement of Marquette. The lord deemed this right as fully his as he did the claim to half the crops of the land, or to half the wool of the sheep. More than one reign of terror arose in France from the enforcement of this law, and the uprisings of the peasantry over Europe during the _twelfth century_, and the fierce Jacquerie, or Peasant Wars, of the _fourteenth century_ in France owed their origin, among other causes, to the enforcement of these claims by the lords upon the newly-married wife.

The edicts of Marly transplanted that claim to America when Canada was under the control of France. To persons not conversant with the history of feudalism, and of the Church for the first fifteen hundred years of its existence, it will seem impossible that such foulness could ever have been part of Christian civilization. That the crimes they have been trained to consider the worst forms of heathendom could have existed in Christian Europe, _upheld by both Church and State_ for more than a thousand five hundred years, will strike most people with incredulity.

Such, however, is the truth; we can but admit well-attested facts of history, how severe a blow soever they strike our preconceived beliefs.

"Marquette was claimed by the Lords Spiritual,* as well as by the Lords Temporal. _The Church indeed, was the bulwark of this base feudal claim_. With the power of penance and excommunication in its grasp, this demand could neither have originated nor been sustained unless sanctioned by the Church.... These customs of feudalism were the customs of Christianity during many centuries. (One of the Earls of Crawford, known as the 'Earl Brant,' in the _sixteenth_ century, was probably among the last who openly claimed by right the literal translation of _droit de Jambage_.) These infamous outrages upon woman were enforced under Christian law by both Church and State.

* "In days to come people will be slow to believe that the law among _Christian nations went beyond anything decreed_ concerning the olden slavery; that it wrote down as an actual right the most grievous outrage that could ever wound _man's_ heart. The Lords Spiritual (clergy) had this right no less than the Lords Temporal. The _parson_, being a lord, _expressly claimed the first fruits of the bride, but was willing to sell_ his right to the husband. The Courts of Berne openly maintain that this right grew up naturally."-- Michelet, "La Sorcerie," p.62

"The degradation of the _husband_ at this infringement of the lord spiritual and temporal upon his marital right, has been pictured by many writers, but history has been quite silent upon the despair and shame of the wife. No hope appeared for woman anywhere. The Church....

dragged her to the lowest depths, through the vileness of its priestly customs.... We who talk of the burning of wives upon the funeral pyres of husbands in India, may well turn our eyes to the records of Christian countries."--Matilda Joslyn Gage in "Woman, Church, and State."

2. From this point Mrs. Gage calls attention to the various efforts to throw off this degrading custom. The women held meetings at night, and among other things travestied the celebration of Ma.s.s and other Church customs; but the end and aim of these meetings being a protest and rebellion against Marquette, the clergy called those who took part in them "witches;"* and then and there began the persecution which the Church carried on against women under this disguise (under Catholic and Protestant rule alike), which extended down to the latter part of the last century, with its list of horrors and indignities extending over all Christian countries and blossoming in all their vigor in our own eastern States, upheld by Luther, John Wesley, and Baxter, who unfortunately had not at that time entered into the everlasting rest of the Saints. And, true to these n.o.ble and wise leaders, the Churches which they founded are to-day expressing the same sentiments (in principle) in regard to the honor and dignity and position of woman.

The arguments of the Rev. Dr. Craven, the prosecutor in the famous Presbyterian trial of 1876, which are given by Mrs. Gage, together with numerous other similar ones, fully establish the fact that woman is to the Church what she always was--_so far as secular law will permit._ And numerous instances (such as the Buckley exhibition at the last Methodist Conference, in which he was sustained by the Conference) prove that they have learned nothing since 1876.

* "There are few superst.i.tions which have been so universal as a belief in witchcraft. The severe theology of paganism despised the wretched superst.i.tion, which has been greedily believed by millions of Christians."--Buckle.

3. I wish I might copy here the sermon to women which the Rev.

Knox-Little, the well-known High-Church clergyman of England, preached when in this country in 1880, in which he said, "There is no crime which a man can commit which justifies his wife in leaving him. It is her duty to subject herself to him always, and no crime that he can commit can justify her lack of obedience." Although a little balder in statement than are most utterances of orthodox clergymen in this age, yet in sentiment and in the reason given for it the echo of "Amen" comes from every pulpit where a believer in original sin, vicarious atonement, or the inspiration of the Bible has a representative and a voice. If self-respect or honor is ever to be the lot of woman, it will not be until her foot is on the neck of orthodoxy, and when the Bible ranks where it belongs in the field of literature.

Appendix F.

1. "The French government, about the middle of the eighteenth century, seems to have reached the maturity of its wickedness, allowing if not instigating religious persecutions of so infamous a nature that they would not be believed if they were not attested by doc.u.ments of the courts in which the sentences were pa.s.sed."--Buckle.

2. Of Louis XV., the eminently Christian king of France, Buckle says: "His harem cost more than 100,000,000 francs, and was composed of _little girls_. He was constantly drunk," and "turned out his own illegitimate children to prost.i.tute themselves."

3. "It will hardly be believed that, when sulphuric ether was first used to lessen the pains of childbirth, it was objected to as 'a profane attempt to abrogate the primeval curse p.r.o.nounced upon woman....' The injury which the theological principle has done to the world is immense.

It has prevented men from studying the laws of nature."--Buckle.

Appendix G.

1. "The narrow range of their sympathies [the clergy's], and the intellectual servitude they have accepted, render them _peculiarly unfitted_ for the office of educating the young, which they so persistently claim, and which, _to the great misfortune of the world_, they were long permitted to monopolize.... The almost complete omission from female education of those studies which most discipline and strengthen the intellect, increases the difference, while at the same time it has been usually made a main object to imbue them with a pa.s.sionate faith in traditional opinions, and to preserve them from all contact with opposing views. But contracted knowledge and imperfect sympathy are not the sole fruits of this education. It has always been the peculiarity of a certain kind of theological teaching, that it -inverts all the normal principles of judgment and absolutely destroys intellectual diffidence. On other subjects we find if not a respect for honest conviction, at least some sense of the amount of knowledge that is requisite to ent.i.tle men to express an opinion on grave controversies. A complete ignorance of the subject-matter of a dispute restrains the confidence of dogmatism; and an ignorant person who is aware that, by much reading and thinking in spheres of which he has himself no knowledge, his educated neighbor has modified or rejected opinions which that ignorant person had been taught, will, at least if he is a man of sense or modesty, abstain from compa.s.sionating the benighted condition of his more instructed friend. But on theological questions this has never been so.

"Unfaltering belief being taught as the first of duties, and all doubt being usually stigmatized as criminal or d.a.m.nable, a state of mind is formed to which we find no parallel in other fields. Many men and most women, though completely ignorant of the very rudiments of biblical criticism, historical research, or scientific discoveries, though they have never read a single page, or Understood a single proposition of the writings of those whom they condemn, and have absolutely no rational knowledge either of the arguments by which their faith is defended, or of those by which it has been impugned, will nevertheless adjudicate with the utmost confidence upon every polemical question, denounce, hate, pity, or pray for the conversion of all who dissent from what they have been taught, a.s.sume, as a matter beyond the faintest possibility of doubt, that the opinions they have received without inquiry must be true, and that the opinions which others have arrived at by inquiry must be false, and make it a main object of their lives to a.s.sail what they call heresy in every way in their power, except by examining the grounds on which it rests. It is possible that the great majority of voices that swell the clamor against every book which is regarded as heretical, are the voices of those who would deem it criminal even to open that book, or to enter into any real, searching, and impartial investigation of the subject to which it relates. Innumerable pulpits support this tone of thought, and represent, with a fervid rhetoric _well fitted to excite the nerves and imaginations of women_, the deplorable condition of all who deviate from a certain type of opinions or emotions; a blind propagandism or a secret wretchedness penetrates into countless households, poisoning the peace of families, chilling the mental confidence of husband and wife, _adding immeasurably to the difficulties which every searcher into truth has to encounter, and diffusing far and wide intellectual timidity, disingenuousness, and hypocrisy_."--Lecky.

2. "The clergy, with a few honorable exceptions, have in all modern countries been the avowed enemies of the diffusion of knowledge, the danger of which to their own profession they, by a certain instinct, seem always to have perceived."--Buckle.

3. "In the fourth century there arose monachism, and in, the sixth century the Christians succeeded in cutting off the last ray of knowledge, and shutting up the schools of Greece. Then followed a long period of theology, ignorance, and vice."--Puckle.

4. "Contempt for human sciences was one of the first features of Christianity. It had to avenge itself of the outrages of philosophy; it feared that spirit of investigation and doubt, that confidence of man in his own reason, the pest alike of all religious creeds. The light of the natural sciences was ever odious to it, and was ever regarded with a suspicious eye, as being a _dangerous enemy to the success of miracles_; and there is no religion that does not oblige its sectaries to follow some physical absurdities. _The triumph of Christianity was thus the final signal of the entire decline both of the sciences and of philosophy_."--"Progress of the Human Mind," _Condorcet_.

"Accordingly it ought not to astonish us that Christianity, _though unable in the sequel to prevent their reappearance in splendor after the invention of printing_, was at this period sufficiently powerful to accomplish their ruin."--Ibid.

"In the disastrous epoch at which we are now arrived, we shall see the human mind _rapidly descending from the height to which it had raised itself_... Everywhere was corruption, cruelty, and perfidy....

Theological reveries, superst.i.tions, delusions, are become the sole genius of man, religious _intolerance his only morality_; and Europe, crushed between sacerdotal tyranny and military despotism, awaits in blood and in tears the moment when the _revival of light shall restore it to liberty, to humanity, and to virtue_.... The priests held human learning in contempt.... Fanatic armies laid waste the provinces.

Executioners, _under the guidance of legates and priests_, put to death those whom the soldiers had spared. _A tribunal of monks was established, with power of condemning to the stake whoever should be suspected of making use of his reason_.... All sects, all governments, every species of authority, inimical as they were to each other in every point else, seemed to be of accord in granting no quarter to the exercise of reason.... Meanwhile education, being everywhere subjected [to the clergy], had corrupted everywhere the general understanding, by _clogging the reason of children with the weight of the religious prejudices of their country_... In the eighth century an ignorant pope had persecuted a deacon for contending that the earth was round, in opposition to the opinion of the rhetorical Saint Austin. In the fifteenth, the ignorance of another pope, much more inexcusable, delivered Galileo into the hands of the inquisition, _accused of having proved the diurnal and annual motion of the earth_. The greatest genius that modern Italy has given to the sciences, overwhelmed with age and infirmities, was obliged to purchase his release from punishment and from prison, by asking pardon of G.o.d for having taught men better to understand his works."--Ibid.

Appendix H.

1. Fenelon, a celebrated French clergyman and writer of the seventeenth century, discouraged the acquisition of knowledge by women.--See Hallam's "Lit. of Europe."

2. "Perhaps it is to the spirit of Puritanism that we owe the little influence of women, and the consequent inferiority of their education."--Buckle.

3. "In England (1840) a distrust and contempt for reason prevails amongst religious circles to a wide extent; many Christians think it almost a matter of duty to decry the human faculties as poor, mean, and almost worthless; and thus seek to exalt piety at the expense of intelligence."--Morell's "Hist. of Speculative Phil."

4. "That women are more deductive than men, because they think quicker than men, is a proposition which some people will not relish, and yet it may be proved in a variety of ways. Indeed nothing could prevent its being universally admitted except the fact that the remarkable rapidity with which women think is obscured by that miserable, that contemptible, that preposterous system, called their education, in which valuable things are carefully kept from them, and trifling things carefully taught to them, until their fine and nimble minds are too often irretrievably injured."--Buckle.

Appendix I.

1. "The Roman [Pagan] religion was essentially domestic, and it was a main object of the legislator to surround marriage with every circ.u.mstance of dignity and solemnity. _Monogamy was, from the earliest times, strictly enjoined_, and it was one of the great benefits that have resulted from the expansion of Roman power, _that it made this type dominant in Europe_. In the legends of early Rome we have ample evidence both of the high moral estimate of women, and of their prominence in Roman life. The tragedies of Lucretia and of Virginia display a delicacy of honor, a sense of the supreme excellence of unsullied purity, which no Christian nation could surpa.s.s."--Lecky, "European Morals," Vol. 1, p. 316.

2. "Marriage [under Christian rule] was viewed in its coa.r.s.est and most degraded form. The notion of its impurity took many forms, and exercised _for some centuries_ an extremely wide influence over the Church."--Ibid., p. 343.