Part 13 (2/2)

It is only a question of time and bravery when he will swear off.*****

* See Appendix G, 1-4.

** See Appendix U.

*** See Clifford's ”Scientific Basis of Morals,” p. 25

**** See Morley's ”Diderot,” p. 190.

***** See Ibid, p. 126.

In the Church schools and ”universities” to-day it is quite pathetic to hear the professors wrestle with geology and Genesis, and cut their astronomy to fit Joshua. If in one of these inst.i.tutions for the petrifaction of the human mind there is a teacher who is either not nimble enough to escape the conclusions of a bright pupil or too honest to try, he is at once found to be ”incompetent as an instructor,” and is dropped from the faculty. I know one case where it took twenty years to discover that a professor was not able to teach geology--and it took a heresy-hunter with a Bible to do it then.

But it is the claim of the Church in regard to the education of women with which I have to do here.

Women in Greece and Rome under Pagan rule had become learned and influential to an unparalleled degree.*

The early Fathers of the Church found women thirsty for knowledge and eager for opportunities to learn. They thereupon set about making it disreputable for a woman to know anything,** and in order to clinch their prohibition the Church a.s.serted that woman was unable to learn, had not the mental capacity,*** was created without mental power and for purely physical purposes.

* See Lecky, Milman, Diderot, Morley, Christian, and others.

** ”In the fourth century we find that holy men in council gravely argued the question, and that too with abundant confidence in their ability and power to decide the whole matter: 'Ought women to be called human beings?' A wise and pious father in the Church, after deliberating solemnly and long on the vexed question of women, finally concluded: 'The female s.e.x is not a fault in itself, but a fact in nature for which women themselves are not to blame;' but he graciously cherished the opinion that women will be permitted to rise as men, at the resurrection. A few centuries later the masculine mind underwent great agitation over the question: 'Would it be consistent with the duties and uses of women for them to learn the alphabet?' And in America, after Bridget Gaffort had donated the first plot of ground for a public school, girls were still denied the advantages of such schools. The questions--'Shall women be allowed to enter colleges?' and 'Shall they be admitted into the professions?' have been as hotly contested as has been the question of their humanity.”

--Gamble.

*** ”There existed at the same time in this celebrated city a cla.s.s of women, the glory of whose intellectual brilliancy still survives; and when Alcibiades drew around him the first philosophers and statesmen of Greece, 'it was a virtue to applaud Aspasia;' of whom it has been said that she lectured publicly on rhetoric and philosophy with such ability that Socrates and Alcibiades gathered wisdom from her lips, and so marked was her genius for statesmans.h.i.+p that Pericles afterward married her and allowed her to govern Athens, then at the height of its glory and power.

Numerous examples might be cited in which Athenian women rendered material aid to the state.”

--Gamble.

It was maintained that her ”sphere” was clearly defined, and that it was purely and solely an animal one; and worst of all it was stoutly a.s.serted that her greatest crime had always been a desire for wisdom, and that it was this desire which brought the penalty of labor and death into this world.*

With such a belief it is hardly strange that the education of girls was looked upon as a crime; and with such a record it is almost incredible effrontery that enables the Church to-day to claim credit for the education of women,** If she were to educate every woman living, free of charge, in every branch of known knowledge, she could not repay woman for what she has deprived her of in the past, or efface the indignity she has already offered.***

* See Morley's ”Diderot,” p. 76; Lea's ”Sacerdotal Celibacy;” Lecky's ”European Morals.”

** See Appendix H, 1 to 4.

*** Lecky, ”European Morals,” p. 310.

A prominent clergyman of the Church of England, who was recently much honored in this country, lately said, in a sermon to women: ”There are those who think a woman can be taught logic. This is a mistake. Men are logical, women are not.” He was too modest to give his proofs. It seemed to me strange that he did not mention the doctrines of the trinity and vicarious atonement, or a few of the miracles, as the result of logic in the masculine mind. And I could not help thinking at the time that a man whose mental furniture was chiefly composed of the thirty-nine articles and the Westminster Catechism would naturally be a profound authority on logic. An orthodox preacher talking about logic is a sight to arouse the compa.s.sion of a demon. Next to the natural sciences, logic can give the Church the colic quicker than any other kind of a green apple. And so it is not strange that the clergy should be afraid that it would disagree with the more delicate const.i.tution of a woman. They always did maintain that any diet that was a trifle too heavy for them couldn't be digested by anybody else; and they would be perfectly right in their supposition if intellectual dyspepsia or softening of the brain were contagious.

The ”sphere” of no other creature is wholly determined and bounded by _one physical_ characteristic or capacity. To every other creature is conceded without question the right to use more than one talent.

But the Fathers decided in holy and solemn council that it would be ”unbecoming” for a woman to learn the alphabet, and that she could have no possible use for such information. They said that she would be a better mother without distracting her dear little brain with the a, b, c's, and that therefore she should not learn them. They also decided that she who was so far lost to modesty as to become acquainted with the multiplication table ”was an unfit a.s.sociate for our wives and mothers.” There was something wrong with such a woman. She was either a ”witch” or else she was ”married to the devil.”

That is the way the Church encouraged education for women. This was done, the holy Fathers said, to ”protect women from the awful temptations of life to which the Lord in his infinite wisdom had subjected man.” They had too much respect for their wives and mothers to permit them to come in contact with the wickedness of long division or cube root, and they hoped while life lasted that no man would be so negligent of duty as to allow his sister to soil her pure mind with conic sections.

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