Woman, Church & State
by Matilda Joslyn Gage · English · Gutenberg #45580 · 1,099,030 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Woman, Church & State
Author: Matilda Joslyn Gage
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+WOMAN,
CHURCH
& STATE+
The
Original Exposé
of Male
Collaboration
Against
the Female Sex
by Matilda Joslyn Gage
Original publication date 1893
Contents
Preface 5
_Chapter One_—+The Matriarchate+
Tendency of Christianity from the first to restrict woman’s
liberty. Woman had great freedom under the old civilizations.
The Matriarchate; its traces among many nations; it preceded
the Patriarchate. The Iroquois or Six Nations under
reminiscences of the Matriarchate. Government of the United
States borrowed from the Six Nations. To the Matriarchate or
Mother-rule, is the world indebted for its first conception
of “inherent rights,” and a government established on this
basis. Malabar under the Matriarchate when discovered by the
Portuguese. The most ancient Aryans under the Matriarchate.
Ancient Egypt a reminiscence of the Matriarchal period.
Authority of the wife among the most polished nations of
antiquity. As Vestal Virgin in Rome, woman’s authority great
both in civil and religious affairs. Monogamy the rule of the
Matriarchate. Polygamy, infanticide and prostitution the rule
of the Patriarchate. 7
_Chapter Two_—+Celibacy+
Original sin. Woman not regarded as a human being by the
church. Marriage looked upon as vile. Celibacy of the clergy;
their degrading sensuality. A double Code of Morals. Celibacy
confirmed as a dogma of the church. Many notable consequences
followed. Wives sold as slaves. Women driven to suicide.
Influence of the church unfavorable to virtue. Women of wealth
drawn into monastic life. The church in Mexico. President
Diaz. Protestant Orders. 24
_Chapter Three_—+Canon Law+
The church makes the legitimacy of marriage depend upon its
control of the ceremony. Change from ancient civilization
to renewed barbarism at an early age of the Christian era,
noted by historians, but its cause unperceived. The clergy
a distinct body from the laity; their rights not the same.
A holy sex and an unholy one. Rapid growth of Canon law in
England. Alteration in the laws through the separation of
Ecclesiastical courts from the Civil, recognized by Blackstone
as among the remarkable legal events of Great Britain.
Learning prohibited to women. The oath of seven persons
required to convict a priest. Husbands prohibited by Canon law
from leaving more than one-third of their property to wives;
might leave them less. Daughters could be disinherited; sons
could not be. The Reformation effected no change. Governments
catering to Pope Leo XIII, at time of his Jubilee; the
President of the United States sends a gift. 50
_Chapter Four_—+Marquette+
Feudalism; its degradation of woman. _Jus primae noctis._
Rights of the Lords Spiritual. Peasants decide not to marry.
Immorality of the heads of the Greek and the Protestant
churches. Breton Ballad of the Fourteenth Century. St.
Margaret of Scotland. Pall Mall Gazette’s disclosures. Foreign
traffic in young English girls. West End. Eton. Prostitution
chiefly supported by “Heads of Families.” Northwestern
Pineries. Governmental crime-makers. Rapid increase of child
criminals. The White Cross society. Baptism of nude women in
the early Christian Church. 66
_Chapter Five_—+Witchcraft+
The possession of a pet of any kind dangerous to woman. Black
cats and witches. The fact of a woman’s possessing knowledge,
brought her under suspicion of the church. The three most
distinguishing features of witchcraft. Opposition of the
church to the growth of human will. Persecution for witchcraft
a continuance of church policy for obtaining universal
dominion over mankind. The Sabbat. The Black Mass. Women
physicians and surgeons of the middle ages; they discover
anaesthetics. Their learning; their persecution by the church.
The most eminent legal minds incapable of forming correct
judgment. Three notable points in regard to witchcraft.
Persecution introduced into America by the “Pilgrim Fathers.”
First Synod in America convened to try a woman for heresy.
Whipping half nude women for their religious opinions. Famine
caused by persecution of women. 94
_Chapter Six_—+Wives+
“Usus.” Disruption of the Roman Empire unfavorable to
the personal and proprietary rights of woman. Sale of
daughters practiced in England seven hundred years after
the introduction of Christianity. The Mundium. The practice
of buying wives with cattle or money regulated by law. Evil
fame of Christendom. “The Worthier of Blood.” Murder of a
husband termed petit treason; punished by burning alive.
Mrs. Sanio decapitated in Finland, 1892, for crime of petit
treason. Husbands control wives’ religion. The “Lucy Walker
case;” Judge Dodge decides a husband has a property interest
in a wife. Davenport’s Rules for his wife. Assaulting wives
protected by law. The Ducking Stool; its use in England;
brought to America by the “Pilgrim Fathers.” Salic law.
Gavelkind. Women not permitted to read the Bible. “Masterless
women.” Women not admitted as a surety or witness. The Code
Napoleon. Morganatic marriage. Ibsen’s “Ghosts.” Strindberg’s
“Giftas.” Ancient Slavs. Russia under Greek Christianity.
The Domstroii Marriage forms. Burying wives alive. “Darkest
England.” Advertising wives. An English clergyman offers £100
reward for the capture and return of his wife. Civil marriage
is opposed by the church. Action of the Chilian Republic. 129
_Chapter Seven_—+Polygamy+
Polygamy sustained by the Christian Church and the Christian
State. The first Synod of the Reformation convened to sanction
polygamy. Favoring views of Luther and the other “principal
reformers.” Favoring action of the American Board of Foreign
Missions. Favoring action of a Missionary Conference in India.
Mormons compared to the Puritans. Mormon theocracy similar to
that of other Christian sects. 175
_Chapter Eight_—+Woman and Work+
God’s “curse” upon Adam. Opposition of the church to
amelioration of woman’s suffering as an interference with her
“curse.” Man’s escape from his own “curse.” The sufferings
of helpless infants and children because of woman’s labor.
Innutrition and the hard labor of expectant mothers the
two great factors in physical degeneration and infantile
mortality. Woman’s work in Europe and the United States. Woman
degraded under Christian civilization to labors unfit for
slaves. 191
_Chapter Nine_—+The Church of Today+
Sin killed by sin. Woman’s inferiority taught from the pulpit
today. A Pastoral letter. The See trial. Modern sermons on
women. Lenten lectures of Rev. Morgan A. Dix. The Methodist
General Conference of 1880, reject Miss Oliver’s petition
for ordination on the plea that woman already has all the
rights that are good for her. Resolves itself into a political
convention. The General Conference of 1888, rejects women
delegates. The Catholic Plenary Council of 1884. Mazzini’s
prophecy. The opposition of the church to woman’s education
has killed off the inhabitants of the world with greater
rapidity than war, famine or pestilence. The present forms of
religion and governments essentially masculine. 208
_Chapter Ten_—+Past, Present, Future+
The most important struggle in the history of the church. Not
self-sacrifice, but self-development woman’s first duty in
life. The protective spirit; its injury to woman. Christianity
of little value to civilization. Looking backward through
history; looking forward. 237
+Notes+ 249
+Index+ 289
[Illustration: Matilda Joslyn Gage, 1880]
WOMAN, CHURCH & STATE
The
Original Exposé
of Male
Collaboration
Against
the Female Sex
by Matilda Joslyn Gage
Copyright 1893
By Matilda Joslyn Gage
This Book is _Inscribed_ to the Memory of my Mother, who was at once
mother, sister, friend:
_Dedicated_ to all Christian women and men, of whatever creed or name
who, bound by Church or State, have not dared to Think for Themselves:
_Addressed_ to all Persons, who, breaking away from custom and the
usage of ages, dare seek Truth for the sake of Truth. To all such it
will be welcome; to all others aggressive and educational.
Preface
This work explains itself and is given to the world because it is
needed. Tired of the obtuseness of Church and State; indignant at
the injustice of both towards woman; at the wrongs inflicted upon
one-half of humanity by the other half in the name of religion; finding
appeal and argument alike met by the assertion that God designed the
subjection of woman, and yet that her position had been higher under
Christianity than ever before: Continually hearing these statements,
and knowing them to be false, I refuted them in a slight _resumé_
the subject at the annual convention of the National Woman Suffrage
Association, Washington, D.C., 1878.
A wish to see that speech in print, having been expressed, it was
allowed to appear in _The National Citizen_, a woman suffrage paper I
then edited, and shortly afterwards in “The History of Woman Suffrage,”
of which I was also an editor. The kindly reception given both in
the United States and Europe to that meager chapter of forty pages
confirmed my purpose of a fuller presentation of the subject in book
form, and it now appears, the result of twenty years investigation, in
a volume of over five hundred and fifty pages.
Read it; examine for yourselves; accept or reject from the proof
offered, but do not allow the Church or the State to govern your
thought or dictate your judgment.
_Chapter One_
+The Matriarchate+
Woman is told that her present position in society is entirely due to
Christianity; that it is superior to that of her sex at any prior age
of the world, Church and State both maintaining that she has ever been
inferior and dependent, man superior and ruler. These assertions are
made the basis of opposition to her demands for exact equality with
man in all the relations of life, although they are not true either
of the family, the church, or the state. Such assertions are due to
non-acquaintance with the existing phase of historical knowledge, whose
records the majority of mankind have neither time nor opportunity of
investigating.
Christianity tended somewhat from its foundation to restrict the
liberty woman enjoyed under the old civilizations. Knowing that
the position of every human being keeps pace with the religion and
civilization of his country, and that in many ancient nations woman
possessed a much greater degree of respect and power than she has at
the present age, this subject will be presented from a historical
standpoint. If in so doing it helps to show man’s unwarranted
usurpation over woman’s religious and civil rights, and the very great
difference between true religion and theology, this book will not have
been written in vain, as it will prove that the most grievous wrong
ever inflicted upon woman has been in the Christian teaching that
she was not created equal with man, and the consequent denial of her
rightful place in Church and State.
The last half century has shown great advance in historical knowledge;
libraries and manuscripts long inaccessible have been opened to
scholars, and the spirit of investigation has made known many secrets
of the past, brought many hidden things to light. Buried cities have
been explored and forced to reveal their secrets; lost modes of writing
have been deciphered, and olden myths placed upon historic foundations.
India is opening her stores of ancient literature; Egypt, so wise and
so famous, of which it was anciently said: “If it does not find a man
mad it leaves him mad,” has revealed her secrets; hieroglyph-inscribed
temples, obelisks and tombs have been interpreted; papyri buried
4,000 and more years in the folds of bandage-enveloped mummies have
given their secrets to the world. The brick libraries of Assyria have
been unearthed, and the lost civilization of Babylonia and Chaldea
imparted to mankind. The strange Zunis have found an interpreter; the
ancient Aztec language its Champollion, and the mysteries of even our
western continent are becoming unveiled. Darkest Africa has opened to
the light; the colossal images of Easter Island hint at their origin;
while the new science of philology unfolds to us the history of peoples
so completely lost that no other monument of their past remains. We
are now informed as to the condition of early peoples, their laws,
customs, habits, religion, comprising order and rank in the state, the
rules of descent, name, property, the circumstances of family life,
the position of mother, father, children, their temples and priestly
orders; all these have been investigated and a new historic basis has
been discovered. Never has research been so thorough or long-lost
knowledge so fully given to the world.
These records prove that woman had acquired great liberty under the
old civilizations. A form of society existed at an early age known
as the Matriarchate or Mother-rule. Under the Matriarchate, except
as son and inferior, man was not recognized in either of these great
institutions, family, state or church. A father and husband as such,
had no place either in the social, political or religious scheme;
woman was ruler in each. The primal priest on earth, she was also
supreme as goddess in heaven. The earliest semblance of the family
is traceable to the relationship of mother and child alone. Here the
primal idea of the family had birth.[1] The child bore its mother’s
name, tracing its descent from her; her authority over it was regarded
as in accord with nature; the father having no part in the family
remained a wanderer. Long years elapsed before man, as husband and
father, was held in esteem. The son, as child of his mother, ranked
the father, the mother taking precedence over both the father and
the son.[2] Blood relationship through a common mother preceded that
of descent through the father in the development of society.[3] This
priority of the mother touched not alone the family, but controlled
the state and indicated the form of religion. Thus we see that during
the Matriarchate, woman ruled; she was first in the family, the state,
religion, the most ancient records showing that man’s subjection to
woman preceded by long ages that of woman to man. The tribe was united
through the mother; social, political and religious life were all in
harmony with the idea of woman as the first and highest power. The
earliest phase of life being dependent upon her, she was recognized as
the primal factor in every relation,[4] man holding no place but that
of dependent.
Every part of the world today gives evidence of the system;
reminiscences of the Matriarchate everywhere abound. Livingstone found
African tribes swearing by the mother and tracing descent through her.
Marco Polo discovered similar customs in his Asiatic voyages, and
the same customs are extant among the Indians of our own continent.
Bachofen[5] and numerous investigators[6] agree in the statement that
in the earliest forms of society, the family, government, and religion,
were all under woman’s control; that in fact society started under
woman’s absolute authority and power.
The second step in family life took place when the father, dropping
his own name, took that of his child. This old and wide-spread custom
is still extant in many portions of the globe; the primitive peoples
of Java, Australia and Madagascar are among those still continuing its
practice.[7] By this step the father allied himself to both mother
and child, although still holding an inferior position to both. The
Matriarchal family was now fully established, descent still running
in the female line. Thus, as has been expressed, we find that woman’s
liberty did not begin today nor under modern religions or forms or
government, but that she was in reality the founder of civilization,
and that in the most remote times woman enjoyed superiority of rights
in all the institutions of life.[8] And yet so difficult is it to
break away from educated thought, so slight a hold have historical
facts upon the mind when contrary to preconceived ideas, that we
find people still expressing the opinion that man’s place has always
been first in government. Even under those forms of society where
woman was undisputed head of the family, its very existence due to
her, descent entirely in the female line, we still hear assertion that
his must have been the controlling political power. But at that early
period to which we trace the formation of the family, it was also the
political unit. And when peoples became aggregated into communities,
when tribal relations were ultimately recognized, woman still held
superior position, and was the controlling power in government, and
never was justice more perfect, never civilization higher than under
the Matriarchate. Historians agree as to the high civilization even
today of those nations or tribes still preserving traces of Matriarchal
customs. Even under its most degenerate form, the family, governmental
and religious rights of women are more fully recognized than under any
phase of Christian civilization. In all the oldest religions, equally
with the Semitic cults, the feminine was recognized as a component and
superior part of divinity, goddesses holding the supreme place. Even
at much later periods woman shared equally with man in the highest
priestly offices, and was deified after death. In Egypt, Neith the
Victorious, was worshiped as mother of the gods, and in the yearly
festival held in her honor, every family took part for the time holding
a priestly office. To neglect this duty was deemed an omission of great
irreverence.[9] The most ancient occultism recognized the creative
power as feminine and preceding both gods and men.
Under the Matriarchate, monogamy was the rule; neither polyandry or
promiscuity existed.[10]
For long years after the decline of the Matriarchate we still discover
that among many of the most refined nations, woman still possessed
much of the power that belonged exclusively to her during that early
period. Ancient Egypt, recognized as the wisest nation since the direct
historic period, traced descent even to the throne in the female
line. To this reminiscence of the Matriarchate are we indebted for
the story of Moses and his preservation by an Egyptian princess in
direct contravention of the Pharaoh’s orders, as told by the Bible and
Josephus. She not alone preserved the child’s life but carried him to
the king as her son given to her by the bounty of the river and heir
to his throne. As showing woman’s power in that kingdom, the story
is worthy of being farther traced. Josephus says that to please his
daughter, the king took the child in his arms, placing his crown on
the baby head, but the chief priest at that moment entering the room,
in a spirit of prophecy cried aloud, “Oh King; this is the child of
whom I foretold danger; kill him and save the nation,” at the same time
striving to take the babe from the king. But the princess caught him
away, thus setting both kingly and priestly power at defiance, taking
this step by virtue of her greater authority, protecting him until he
reached manhood and causing him to be educated in all the wisdom of
the Egyptians, in a college under her own control. Nor in the supreme
hour of the nation’s peril, when the king, too old to lead his armies
to battle, demanded Moses as heir to the throne in his place, would she
give him up until she had exacted an oath from her father, the potent
Pharaoh, that he meant the youth no harm.
The famous Iroquois Indians, or Six Nations, which at the discovery of
America held sway from the great lakes to the Tombigbee river, from the
Hudson to the Ohio, and of whom it has been said that another century
would have found them master of all tribes to the Gulf of Mexico on
the south, and the Mississippi on the west, showed alike in form of
government, and in social life, reminiscences of the Matriarchate.
The line of descent, feminine, was especially notable in all tribal
relations such as the election of Chiefs, and the Council of Matrons,
to which all disputed questions were referred for final adjudication.
No sale of lands was valid without consent of the squaws and among the
State Archives at Albany, New York, treaties are preserved signed by
the “Sachems and Principal Women of the Six Nations.”[11] The women
also possessed the veto power on questions of war. Sir William Johnston
mentions an instance of Mohawk squaws forbidding the war-path to young
braves. The family relation among the Iroquois demonstrated woman’s
superiority in power. When an Indian husband brought the products of
the chase to the wigwam, his control over it ceased. In the home, the
wife was absolute; the sale of the skins was regulated by her, the
price was paid to her. If for any cause the Iroquois husband and wife
separated, the wife took with her all the property she had brought
into the wigwam; the children also accompanied the mother, whose right
to them was recognized as supreme. So fully to this day is descent
reckoned through the mother, that blue-eyed, fair-haired children of
white fathers are numbered in the tribe and receive both from state
and nation their portion of the yearly dole paid to Indian tribes. The
veriest pagan among the Iroquois, the renowned and important Keeper
of the Wampum, and present sole interpreter of the Belts which give
the most ancient and secret history of this confederation, is Ephraim
Webster, descended from a white man, who, a hundred or more years
since, became affiliated through marriage with an Indian woman, as a
member of the principal nation of the Iroquois, the Onondagas. As of
yore, so now, the greater and lesser Council Houses of the Iroquois are
upon the “mountain” of the Onondaga reservation a few miles from the
city of Syracuse, New York. Not alone the Iroquois but most Indians of
North America trace descent in the female line; among some tribes woman
enjoys almost the whole legislative authority and in others a prominent
share.[12] Lafitte and other Jesuit missionary writers are corroborated
in this statement by Schoolcraft, Catlin, Clark, Hubert Bancroft of the
Pacific coast, and many students of Indian life and customs. But the
most notable fact connected with woman’s participation in governmental
affairs among the Iroquois is the statement of Hon. George Bancroft
that the form of government of the United States, was borrowed from
that of the Six Nations.[13] Thus to the Matriarchate or Mother-rule
is the modern world indebted for its first conception of inherent
rights, natural equality of condition, and the establishment of a
civilized government upon this basis. Although the reputation of the
Iroquois as warriors appears most prominent in history, we nevertheless
find their real principles to have been the true Matriarchal one
of peace and industry. Driven from the northern portion of America
by vindictive foes, compelled to take up arms in self-protection,
yet the more peaceful occupations of hunting and agriculture were
continually followed. Their history was preserved by means of wampum,
while under their women the science of government reached the highest
form known to the world. Among the Zunis of New Mexico, woman still
preserves supreme religious and political authority; the Paramount
Council consisting of six priests under control of a supreme priestess
who is the most important functionary of the tribe.[14] This form of
government is traceable to their earliest civilization at which period
their cities were grouped in sevens, six of them constructed upon a
uniform plan; the supreme seventh containing six temples clustered
about a supreme central seventh temple. While male priests ruled over
the six primal cities the central and superior seventh was presided
over by a priestess who not alone officiated at the central temple, but
to whom the male priests of the six cities and six inferior temples
were subservient. The ancient Lycians, the Sclavs, the Basques of
Spain,[15] the Veddas of Ceylon,[16] the inhabitants of Malabar, the
aborigines of widely separated lands, all show convincing proof of
woman’s early superiority in religion, in the state, and in the family.
Monogamy was a marked feature of the Matriarchate. Bachofen, who has
written voluminously upon the Matriarchate, recognizes it as peculiarly
characteristic of woman’s government. He also says the people who
possessed the Mother-rule together with Gynaikokraty (girls’ rule)
excelled in their love of peace and justice. Under the Matriarchal
family and tribal system even long after its partial supersedence by
the incoming Patriarchate, the marriage relation was less oppressive to
woman than it has been under most centuries of christian civilization.
Daughters were free in their choice of husbands, no form of a force or
sale existing.[17]
One of the most brilliant modern examples of the Matriarchate was
found in Malabar at the time of its discovery by the Portuguese in
the XV century. The Nairs were found to possess a fine civilization,
entirely under the control of women, at a period when woman’s position
in England and on the Continent of Europe, was that of a household and
political slave. Of Malabar it has been said, that when the Portuguese
became acquainted with the country and the people, they were not so
much surprised by the opulence of their cities, the splendor of all
their habits of living, the great perfection of their navy, the high
state of the arts, as they were to find all this under the entire
control and government of women. The difference in civilization between
christian Europe and pagan Malabar at the time of its discovery was
indeed great. While Europe with its new art of printing, was struggling
against the church for permission to use type, its institutions of
learning few, its opportunities for education meagre; its terrible
inquisition crushing free thought and sending thousands each year to
a most painful death, the uncleanliness of its cities and the country
such as to bring frequent visits of the plague; its armies and its
navies with but one exception, imperfect; its women forbidden the right
of inheritance, religious, political, or household authority;—the
feminine principle entirely eliminated from the divinity—a purely
masculine God the universal object of worship, all was directly the
opposite in Malabar. Cleanliness, peace, the arts, a just form of
government, the recognition of the feminine both in humanity and in the
divinity were found in Malabar. To the question of a Danish missionary
concerning their opinion of a Supreme Being, this beautiful answer was
given.
The Supreme Being has a Form and yet has no Form; he can be
likened to nothing; we cannot define him and say that he is
this or that; he is neither Man or Woman; neither Heaven
or Earth, and yet he is all; subject to no corruption, no
mortality and with neither sleep nor rest, he is Almighty and
Omnipotent without Beginning and without End.[18]
Under the Missionaries sent by England to introduce her own barbaric
ideas of God and man, this beautiful Matriarchal civilization of
Malabar soon retrograded and was lost.
The ancient Mound Builders of America, of whom history is silent and
science profoundly ignorant, are proven by means of symbolism to
have been under Matriarchal rule, and Motherhood religion. Anciently
motherhood was represented by a sphere or circle. The circle, like the
mundane egg, which is but an elongated circle, contains everything in
itself and is the true microcosm. It is eternity, it is feminine, the
creative force, representing spirit. Through its union with matter in
the form of the nine digits it is likewise capable of representing
all natural things.[19] The perfect circle of Giotto was an emblem of
divine motherhood in its completeness. It is a remarkable fact—its
significance not recognized,—that the roughly sketched diameter within
the circle, found wherever boys congregate, is an ancient mystic
sign[20] signifying the male and female, or the double-sexed deity. It
is the union of all numbers, the one within the zero mark comprising
ten, and as part of the ancient mysteries signifying God, the creative
power, and eternal life; it was an emblem of The All.
In many old religions, the generative principle was regarded as
the mother of both gods and men. In the Christian religion we find
tendency to a similar recognition in Catholic worship of the Virgin
Mary. The most ancient Aryans were under the Matriarchate, the
feminine recognized as the creative power. The word _ma_ from which
all descendants of those peoples derive their names for mother, was
synonymous with _Creator_. Renouf, the great antiquarian authority
upon the Aryan’s,[21] gives the songs and ceremonies of the wedding.
In these, the woman is represented as having descended to man from
association with divine beings in whose custody and care she has been,
and who give her up with reluctance. In Sanscrit mythology,[22] the
feminine is represented by Swrya, the Sun, the source of life, while
the masculine is described as Soma, a body. Soma, a beverage of the
gods especially sacred to Indra, was the price paid by him for the
assistance of Vayu, the swiftest of the gods, in his battle against the
demon Vritra. A curious line of thought is suggested. The marriage of
the man to the woman was symbolized as his union with the gods. Soma, a
drink devoted to Indra, the highest god, signified his use of a body,
or the union of spirit and body. In the same manner, woman representing
spirit, by her marriage to man became united with a body. As during
the present dark age, the body has been regarded more highly than the
spirit, we find a non-recognition of the woman, although the union of
spirit and body is symbolized in the Christian church by the sacrament
of bread and wine. During the purest period of Aryan history marriage
was entirely optional with woman and when entered into, frequently
meant no more than spiritual companionship. Woman equally with man was
entitled to the Brahminical thread; she also possessed the right to
study and preach the Vedas, which was in itself a proof of her high
position in this race. The Vedas, believed to be the oldest literature
extant, were for many ages taught orally requiring years of close
application upon part of both teacher and student.
The word _Veda_ signifies “to-know”; the latter from _Vidya_ meaning
“wise.” The English term widow is traceable to both forms of the word,
meaning a wise woman—one who knows man. Many ages passed before the
Vedas were committed to writing.[23] At that early day the ancestral
worship of women—departed mothers—was as frequent as that of departed
fathers, women conducting such services which took place three times a
day. In the old Aryan Scriptures the right of woman to hold property,
and to her children, was much more fully recognized than under the
Christian codes of today. Many of the olden rights of women are still
extant in India. The learned Keshub Chunder Sen vigorously protested
against the introduction of English law into India, upon the ground
that it would destroy the ancient rights of the women of that country.
It was primal Indian law that upon the death of the husband the wife
should heir all his property. Marriage was regarded as an eternal
union, the two, by this act, having so fully become one, that upon the
husband’s death, one half of his body was still living. The property
and the children were held as equally belonging to the husband or the
wife.
Colebrook’s _Digest of Hindoo Law_, compiled from the writings of the
Bengal Pundit Jergunnat, ’Na Tercapanchama, from those of Vasist ha,
Catayana, and other Indian authorities says:
In the Veda, in Codes of Law, in sacred ordinances, the wife
is held as one person with the husband; both are considered
one. When the wife is not dead, half the body remains; how
shall another take the property when half the body of the
owner lives? After the death of the husband the widow shall
take his wealth; this is primeval law.
Though a woman be dependent, the alienation of female
property, or of the mother’s right over her son by the gift of
a husband alone[24] is not valid in law or reason;
The female property of wives like the property of a stranger,
may not be given, for there is want of ownership.
Neither the husband, nor the son, nor the father, nor the
brother, have power to use or alien the legal property of a
woman.
We hold it proper that the wife’s co-operation shall be
required in civil contracts and in religious acts under the
text.
A gift to a wife is irrevocable.
The collection of East Indian laws made under authority of the
celebrated Warren Hastings, 1776, is of similar character. The kinds of
property a wife can hold separate from her husband at her own disposal
by will, are specified.
During long centuries while under Christian law the Christian wife
was not allowed even the control of property her own at the time of
marriage, or of that which might afterwards be given her, and her
right of the disposition of property at the time of her death was
not recognized in Christian lands, the Hindoo wife under immemorial
custom could receive property by gift alike from her parents, or from
strangers, or acquire it by her own industry, and property thus gained
was at her own disposal in case of her death. Another remarkable
feature of Indian law contrasting with that of Christian lands was
preference of woman over man in heirship. In case of a daughter’s
death, the mother heired in preference to father, son, or even husband.
That is called a woman’s property; First. Whatever she owns
during the Agamini Shadee, i. e. Days of Marriage;...
Whatever she may receive from any person as she is going to
her husband’s home or coming from thence.
Whatever her husband may at any time have given her; whatever
she has received at any time from a brother; and whatever her
father and mother may have given her.
Whatever her husband on contracting a second marriage may give
her to pacify her.
Whatever a person may have given a woman for food or clothing.
Whatever jewelry or wearing apparel she may have received from
any person; also whatever a woman may receive from any person
as an acknowledgment or payment for any work performed by her.
Whatever she may by accident have found anywhere.
Whatever she may gain by painting, spinning, needle-work or
any employment of this kind.
Except from one of the family of her father, one of the family
of her mother, or one of the family of her husband, whatever
she may receive from any other person. Also if the father or
mother of a girl give anything to their son-in-law, saying
at the same time: “This shall go to our daughter,” and even
without any words to this purpose at the time of making the
gift, if they merely have it in their intention that the thing
thus given should revert to their daughter, all and every one
of these articles are called a woman’s property.
Her right of final disposal by will is also specified. Her effects
acquired during marriage go to her daughters in preference to her sons,
and possessing no daughters, to her mother.
When a woman dies, then whatever effects she acquired during
the Agamini Shadee, even though she hath a son living, shall
go first to her unmarried daughter; if there is but one
unmarried daughter she shall obtain the whole; if there are
several unmarried daughters, they all shall have equal share.
Property under the three forms of marriage, if no unmarried
daughters and others mentioned here, goes to her mother
before to her father; and if neither, to her husband, and if
no husband to husband’s younger brother, or several younger
brothers, (if several).
The specification of gifts of intention is remarkable in securing
property to the wife that was seemingly given by the parents to the
husband alone. An equally remarkable fact is the father’s heirship in
preference to the husband’s, and the heirship of the daughters and
mother in preference to any male relative however near, and is in
striking contrast to Christian law in reference to woman’s property. If
a husband neglect to provide his wife necessary food and clothing, the
East Indian wife is allowed to procure them by any means in her power.
Maine has not failed to recognize the superior authority of the eastern
wife in relation to property over that of the Christian wife. He says:
“The settled property of a married woman incapable of
alienation by her husband, is well known to the Hindoos under
the name of Stridham.”
It is certainly a remarkable fact that the institution seems
to have developed among the Hindoos at a period relatively
much earlier than among the Romans. The _Mitakshara_, one of
the oldest and most revered authorities of the Hindoo judicial
treatises, defines Stridham, or woman’s property, as that
which is given to the wife by the father, the mother, or a
brother at the time of the wedding, before the nuptial fire.
But adds Maine:
The compiler of Mitakshara adds a proportion not found
elsewhere; also property which she may have acquired by
inheritance, purchase, partition, seizure or finding, is
denominated woman’s property.... If all this be Stridham, it
follows that the ancient Hindoo law secured to married women
an even greater degree of proprietary independence than that
given to them by the modern English Married Woman’s Property
Act.
Property is common to the husband and the wife. The ample support of
those who are entitled to maintenance is rewarded with bliss in heaven;
but hell is the portion of that man whose family is afflicted with pain
by his neglect. Therefore the Hindoo husband is taught to maintain his
family with the utmost care. Maxims from the sacred books show the
regard in which the Hindoo woman is held:
“He who despises woman despises his mother.”
“Who is cursed by woman is cursed by God.”
“The tears of a woman call down the fire of heaven on those
who make them flow.”
“Evil to him who laughs at woman’s sufferings; God shall laugh
at his prayers.”
“It was at the prayer of a woman that the Creator pardoned
man; cursed be he who forgets it.”
“Who shall forget the sufferings of his mother at his birth
shall be reborn in the body of an owl during three successive
transmigrations.”
“There is no crime more odious than to persecute woman.”
“When women are honored the divinities are content; but when
they are not honored all undertakings fail.”
“The households cursed by women to whom they have not rendered
the homage due them, find themselves weighed down with ruin
and destroyed as if they had been struck by some secret power.”
“We will not admit the people of today are incapable of
comprehending woman, who alone can regenerate them.”
The marriage ceremony is of the slightest kind and under three forms:
1. Of mutual consent by the interchange of necklaces or
strings of flowers in some secret place.
2. A woman says, “I am become your wife,” and the man says, “I
acknowledge it.”
3. When the parents of a girl on her marriage day say to the
bridegroom: “Whatever act of religion you perform, perform it
with our daughter,” and the bridegroom assents to this speech.
The comparatively modern custom of suttee originated with the priests,
whose avaricious desires created this system in order thereby to secure
the property of the widow. The Vedas do not countenance either suttee
or the widow’s relinquishment of her property, the law specifically
declaring, “If a widow should give all her property and estate to the
Brahmins for religious purposes, the gift indeed is valid, but the act
is improper and the woman blamable.” An ancient scripture declares that
“All the wisdom of the Vedas, and all that has been written in books,
is to be found concealed in the heart of a woman.” It is a Hindoo maxim
that one mother is worth a thousand fathers, because the mother carries
and nourishes the infant from her own body, therefore the mother is
most reverenced. A Hindoo proverb declares that “Who leaves his family
naked and unfed may taste honey at first, but shall afterwards find it
poison.” Another says, “A wife is a friend in the house of the good.”
Ancient Egypt worshiped two classes of gods; one purely spiritual and
eternal, the other secondary but best beloved, were believed to have
been human beings who from the services they had rendered to humanity
were upon death admitted to the assembly of the gods. Such deification
common in ancient times, is still customary in some parts of the earth.
Within the past few years a countryman of our own was thus apotheosized
by the Chinese to whom he had rendered valuable service at the time of
the Tae-ping rebellion.[25] Ancient Egyptians recognized a masculine
and feminine principle entering in all things both material and
spiritual. Isis, the best beloved and most worshiped of the secondary
gods, was believed by them to have been a woman who at an early period
of Egyptian history had rendered that people invaluable service. She
was acknowledged as their earliest law-maker, through whose teaching
the people had risen from barbarism to civilization. She taught them
the art of making bread[26] from the cereals theretofore growing wild
and unused, the inhabitants at an early day living upon roots and
herbs. Egypt soon became the grain growing portion of the globe, her
enormous crops of wheat not alone aiding herself, but rendering the
long stability of the Roman Empire possible. The science of medicine
was believed to have originated with Isis; she was also said to have
invented the art of embalming, established their literature, founded
their religion. The whole Egyptian civilization was ascribed to the
woman-goddess, Isis, whose name primarily Ish-Ish, signified Light,
Life.[27] Isis, and Nepthys—the Lady of the House—were worshiped as
the Beginning and the End. They were the Alpha and Omega of the most
ancient Egyptian religion. The statues of Isis bore this inscription:
I am all that has been, all that shall be, and none among
mortals has hitherto taken off my veil.
Isis was believed to contain germs within herself for the reproduction
of all living things. The most universal of her 10,000 names was,
“Potent Mother Goddess.”[28] This Egyptian regard for Isis is an
extremely curious and interesting reminiscence of the Matriarchal
period. Her worship was universal throughout Egypt. Her temples were
magnificent. Her priests, consecrated to purity, were required to
bathe daily, to wear linen garments unmixed with animal fibre, to
abstain from animal food, and also from those vegetables regarded as
impure.[29] Two magnificent festivals were yearly celebrated in her
honor, the whole people taking part. During one of these festivals her
priests bore a golden ship in the procession. The ship, or ark,[30]
is peculiarly significative of the feminine principle, and wherever
found is a reminiscence of the Matriarchate. The most sacred mysteries
of the Egyptian religion, whose secrets even Pythagoras could not
penetrate, to which Herodotus alluded with awe, and that were unknown
to any person except the highest order of priests, owed their
institution to Isis, and were based upon moral responsibility and a
belief in a future life. The immortality of the soul was the underlying
principle of the Egyptian religion.
Isis seems to have been one of those extraordinary individuals, such
as occasionally in the history of the world have created a literature,
founded a religion, established a nationality. She was a person of
superior mentality, with power to diffuse intelligence.
Moses, “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” borrowed much
from Isis. The forms and ceremonies used in her worship were largely
copied by him, yet lacked the great moral element—immortal life—so
conspicuously taught as a part of Egyptian religion. The Sacred Songs
of Isis were an important part of the literature of Egypt. Plato, who
burned his own poems after reading Homer, declared them worthy of the
divinity, believing them to be literally 10,000 years old.[31] All
orders of the priesthood were open to women in Egypt; sacred colleges
existed for them, within whose walls dwelt an order of priestesses
known as “God’s Hand,” “God’s Star.” Its ranks were recruited from
women of the principal families, whose only employment was the service
of the gods. “Daughter of the Deity,” signified a priestess.
Women performed the most holy offices of religion, carrying the Sacred
Sistrum and offering sacrifices of milk, both ceremonies of great
dignity and importance, being regarded as the most sacred service
of the divinity. Such sacrificial rites were confined to queens and
princesses of the royal household. Ames-Nofri-Ari, a queen who received
great honor from Egyptians, spoken of as the “goddess-wife of Amun,”
the supreme god of Thebes, for whose worship the wonderful temple of
Karnak was founded by a Pharaoh of the XII dynasty, is depicted on the
monuments as the Chief High Priest—the Sem, whose specific duty was
offering sacrifices and pouring out libations in that temple. By virtue
of her high office she preceded her husband, the powerful and renowned
Rameses II. The high offices of the church were as habitually held by
women as by men; Princess Neferhotep, of the fifth dynasty, was both
a priestess and a prophetess of the goddesses Hathor and Neith, the
representatives of celestial space, in which things were both created
and preserved.
A priestess and priest in time of the XIII Pharaoh represented on a
slab of limestone, in possession of the Ashmolean Library of Oxford,
England, is believed to be the oldest monument of its kind in the
world, dating to 3,500, B.C.
Queen Hatasu, the light of the brilliant XVIII dynasty, is depicted
upon the monuments as preceding in acts of worship the great Thotmes
III, her brother, whom she had associated with herself upon the throne,
but who did not acquire supreme power until after her death.[32] The
reign of Hatasu was pre-eminent as the great architectural period of
Egypt, the engraving upon monuments during her reign closely resembling
the finest Greek intaglio. Egypt, so famous for her gardens and her art
of forcing blossoms out of season, was indebted to this great queen for
the first acclimatizing of plants. Upon one of her voyages she brought
with her in baskets filled with earth several of those Balsam trees
from Arabia, which were numbered among the precious gifts of the Queen
of Sheba to King Solomon. The red granite obelisks erected by Hatasu
before the gates of Karnak, the most magnificent and loftiest ever
erected in Egypt, were ninety-seven feet in height and surmounted by a
pyramid of gold.
As early as the XI Pharaoh, II dynasty, the royal succession became
fixed in the female line. A princess was endowed with privileges
superior to a prince, her brother, her children reigning by royal
prerogative even when her husband was a commoner; the children of
a prince of the Pharaonic house making such marriage were declared
illegitimate.
From the highest to the most humble priestly office, women officiated
in Egypt. A class of sacred women were doorkeepers of temples, another
order known as “Sacred Scribes” were paid great deference. The Pellices
or Pellucidae of Amun were a remarkable body of priestesses whose
burial place has but recently been discovered. They were especially
devoted to the services of Amun-Ra, the Theban Jove. Egypt was indebted
to priestesses for some of its most important literature. To Penthelia,
a priestess of Phtha[33] the God of Fire, in Memphis, Bryant ascribes
the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer[34] in his travels
through that country, by aid of a suborned priest, having stolen these
poems from the archives of the temples of Phtha where they had been
deposited for safe keeping.
The priestly class of prophetesses was large in Egypt, their
predictions not infrequently changing the course of that country’s
history. To his daughter, the prophet-priestess Athryte, was the great
Rameses II indebted for the prophecy which led him into his conquering
and victorious career. Known as one of the four great conquerors of
antiquity,[35] reigning sixty years, he greatly added to the wealth and
renown of Egypt.
The class of priestesses called Sibyls were early known in Egypt,
India, and other portions of the ancient world. They were regarded
as the most holy order of the priesthood and held to be in direct
communion with the gods, who through them revealed secrets to the lower
order of priests; the word Sibyl originating from Syros, i. e. God. The
learned Beale defines Sibyl as thought, therefore a woman in possession
of God’s thought. The names of ten renowned Sibyls have come down to
our day. The Sibyline Books for many years governed the destinies of
Rome. Oracles were rendered from the lips of a priestess known as the
Pythia; the famous Delphian Shrine for ages ruling the course of kings
and nations.
Upon the monuments of Egypt, those indisputable historic records,
queens alone are found wearing the triple crown, significant of
ecclesiastical, judicial and civil power, thus confirming the statement
of Diodorus that queens were shown greater respect and possessed
more power than kings: the pope alone in modern times claiming the
emblematic triple crown. A comparison between the men and women of the
common people of this country, shows no less favorably for the latter.
Women were traders, buying and selling in the markets while the men
engaged in the more laborious work of weaving at home. Woman’s medical
and hygienic knowledge is proven by the small number of infantile
deaths.[36] At the marriage ceremony the husband promised obedience to
the wife in all things, took her name, and his property passed into her
control; according to Wilkinson great harmony existed in the marriage
relation, the husband and wife sitting upon the same double chair in
life and resting at death in the same tomb.
Montesquieu says:
It must be admitted although it shocks our present customs,
that among the most polished peoples, wives have always had
authority over their husbands. The Egyptians established it by
law in honor of Isis, and the Babylonians did the same in time
of Semiramis. It has been said of the Romans that they ruled
all nations but obeyed their wives.
Crimes against women were rare in Egypt and when occurring were most
severely punished.[37] Rameses III caused this inscription to be
engraved upon his monuments:
To unprotected woman there is freedom to wander through the
whole country wheresoever she list without apprehending
danger.
A woman was one of the founders of the ancient Parsee religion, which
taught the existence of but a single god, thus introducing monotheism
into that rare old kingdom. Until the introduction of Christianity
woman largely preserved the liberty belonging to her in the old
civilizations. Of her position under Roman law before this period Maine
(Gaius) says:
The jurisconsults had evidently at this time assumed the
equality of the sexes as a principle of the law of equity.
The situation of the Roman woman whether married or single
became one of great personal and proprietary independence; but
Christianity tended somewhat from the commencement to narrow
this remarkable liberty. The prevailing state of religious
sentiment may explain why modern jurisprudence has adopted
these rules concerning the position of women which belong to
an imperfect civilization. No society which preserves any
tincture of Christian institutions is likely to restore to
married women the personal liberty conferred on them by middle
Roman law. Canon law has deeply injured civilization.
Rome not only secured remarkable personal and proprietary rights to
woman, but as Vestal Virgin, she held the highest priestly office. No
shrine equalled that of the Vestals in sanctity; none was so honored
by the state. To their care the sacred Fire was entrusted, and also
the Palladium; those unknown articles upon whose preservation not
alone the welfare but the very existence of Rome was held to depend.
The most important secrets of state were entrusted to them and their
influence in civil affairs was scarcely secondary to their religious
authority. In troubled times, in civil wars, in extreme emergencies
of the commonwealth they acted as ambassadors, or were chosen umpires
to restore peace between the parties. In state ceremonies, in the
most solemn, civil or religious meetings they performed important
duties. They were superior to the common law or the authority of the
consul. The most important secrets were entrusted to them, wills of
the emperors and documents of state confided to their care; offenses
against them were punished with death. If meeting a criminal on his way
to execution, he was pardoned as a direct intervention of heaven in
his behalf. Among their important privileges was exemption from public
taxes, the right to make a will, internment within the city walls, the
right to drive in the city where no other carriage was allowed; even
the consuls were obliged to make room for them to pass. Chosen from
noble families when between the ages of six and ten, their terms of
service was thirty years.
The order of Vestal Virgins flourished eleven hundred years, having
been founded seven hundred years before the Christian era and
continuing four hundred years afterwards. But those women all young,
all between the ages of six years and forty, so closely guarded the
secrets of the Penetralia that to this day they still remain as
unknown as when in their charge. The order was destroyed in the fourth
century, but the ruins of their temple recently discovered prove that
when obliged to flee from the sacred enclosure they first demolished
the most holy portion where the secrets of Rome were hidden.[38]
Recent important archaeological discoveries at the Atrium Vertae in
the Forum, corroborate history in regard to the high position and
extraordinary privileges of the Vestals. Several statues have been
found representing the sacred maiden with the historic fillet about her
head and the cord beneath her breast. Medallions worn upon the breast
of their horses have also been unearthed. The wealth of the order was
extremely great, both its public and private property being exempt from
that conscription which in times of war reached all but a few favored
individuals.
The names by which Imperial Rome was known were all feminine; Roma,
Flora, Valentia; nearly its first and greatest goddess was Vesta.[39]
Sacred and secret were originally synonymous terms. All learning was
sacred, consequently secret, and as only those possessed of learning
were eligible to the priestly office it is readily seen that knowledge
was a common heritage of primitive women. Letters, numbers, astrology,
geography and all branches of science were secrets known only to
initiates. The origin of the most celebrated mysteries, the Eleusinian,
and those of Isis, were attributed to woman, the most perfect temple of
ancient or modern times, the Parthenon, or Temple of the Virgins, was
dedicated to the goddess Minerva.
Chryseis was priestess of Juno in Argo. This office was of great civil
as well as religious importance regulating their dates and chronology.
To the present day in China woman assists at the altar in ancestral
worship, the prevailing form of religious adoration. The mother of a
family is treated with the greatest respect[40] and the combined male
and female principle is represented in god under the name Fou-Fou,
that is, Father-Mother.[41] When the Emperor acting as high priest
performs certain rites he is called Father-Mother of the people. Woman
is endowed with the same political powers as man.[42] The wife presides
like her husband at family councils, trials, etc. As Regent, she
governs the Empire with wisdom, dignity, power, as was shown during the
co-regency of the Empresses of the East and of the West, their power
continuing even after the promotion of a boy-heir to the throne.
A Thibetan woman empire extant between the VI and VII centuries A.D.
is spoken of by Chinese writers. An English author, Cooper, seems
to have visited this region, meeting with an amusing venture while
there.[43]
Under the law of the Twelve Tables, founded A.U.C. 300, woman
possessed the right of repudiation in marriage. The code itself was
ascribed to a woman of that primitive Athens founded and governed by
women long years previous to the date of modern Athens. The change in
woman’s condition for the worse under Christianity is very remarkable
and everywhere it is noticed. Among the Finns, before their conversion,
the mother of a family took precedence of the father in the rites of
domestic worship. Under the Angles, a wound inflicted upon a virgin was
punished with double the penalty of the same injury inflicted upon a
man, remarkable as showing the high esteem and reverence in which women
were held. Before the introduction of Christianity, the Germans bound
themselves to chastity in the marriage relation; under Catholicism the
wife is required to promise the devotion of her body to the marital
rite. German women served as priestesses of Hertha, and during the
time of Rome’s greatest power, Wala or Valleda,—this title being
significative of a supremely wise woman, a prophetess,—was virtual
ruler of the Germanic forces; Druses when about invading Germany was
repelled by her simple command to “Go Back.” But under Christianity
the German woman no longer takes part in public affairs, education is
denied, the most severe and degrading labor of field, streets and mine
falls upon her, while in the family she is serf to father, brother,
husband.
The women of ancient Scandinavia were treated with infinite respect;
breach of marriage promise was classed with perjury; its penalty was
outlawry. Marriage was regarded as sacred and in many instances the
husband was obliged to submit to the wife.[44] Those old Berserkers
reverenced their Alruna, or Holy Women, on earth and worshiped
goddesses in heaven, where, according to Scandinavian belief, gods and
goddesses sat together in a hall without distinction of sex.
The whole ancient world recognized a female priesthood, some
peoples, like the Roman, making national safety dependent upon their
ministration; others as in Egypt, according them pre-eminence in the
priestly office, reverencing goddesses as superior to gods; still
others as the Scandinavians, making no distinction in equality between
gods and goddesses; others governing the nation’s course through
oracles which fell from feminine lips, still others looking to the
Sibylline Books for like decision.[45] Those historians anxious to
give most credit to the humanizing effect of Christianity upon woman
are compelled to admit her superiority among pagan nations before the
advent of this religion.[46]
The Patriarchate under which Biblical history and Judaism commenced,
was a rule of men whose lives and religion were based upon passions
of the grossest kind, showing but few indications of softness or
refinement. Monogamous family life did not exist, but a polygamy whose
primal object was the formation of a clan possessing hereditary chiefs
ruling aristocratically. To this end the dominion of man over woman
and the birth of many children was requisite. To this end polygamy
was instituted, becoming as marked a feature of the Patriarchate as
monogamy was of the Matriarchate. Not until the Patriarchate were
wives regarded as property, the sale of daughters as a legitimate
means of family income, or their destruction at birth looked upon as
a justifiable act. Under the Patriarchate, society became morally
revolutionized, the family, the state, the form of religion entirely
changed. The theory of a male supreme God in the interests of force and
authority, wars, family discord, the sacrifice of children to appease
the wrath of an offended (male) deity are all due to the Patriarchate.
These were practices entirely out of consonance with woman’s thought
and life. Biblical Abraham binding Isaac for sacrifice to Jehovah,
carefully kept his intentions from the mother Sarah. Jephtha offering
up his daughter in accordance with his vow, allowing her a month’s life
for the bewailment of her virginity, are but typical of the low regard
of woman under the Patriarchate. During this period the destruction of
girl children became a widely extended practice, and infantile girl
murder the custom of many nations. During the Matriarchate all life
was regarded as holy; even the sacrifice of animals was unknown.[47]
The most ancient and purest religions taught sacrifice of the animal
passions as the great necessity in self-purification. But the
Patriarchate subverted this sublime teaching, materializing spiritual
truths, and substituting the sacrifice of animals, whose blood was
declared a sweet smelling savor to the Lord of Hosts.
Both infanticide and prostitution with all their attendant horrors
are traceable with polygamy,—their origin—to the Patriarchate or
Father-rule, under which Judaism and Christianity rose as forms of
religious belief. Under the Patriarchate woman has ever been regarded
as a slave to be disposed of as father, husband or brother chose.
Even in the most Christian lands, daughters have been esteemed
valuable only in proportion to the political or pecuniary advantage
they brought to the father, in the legal prostitution of an enforced
marriage. The sacrifice of woman to man’s baser passions has ever been
the distinguishing characteristic of the Patriarchate. But woman’s
degradation is not the normal condition of humanity, neither did it
arise from a settled principle of evolution, but is a retrogression,
due to the grossly material state of the world for centuries past, in
which it has lost the interior meaning or spiritual significance of its
own most holy words.
Jehovah signifies not alone the masculine and the feminine principles
but also the spirit or vivifying intelligence. It is a compound word
indicative of the three divine principles.[48] Holy Ghost, although
in Hebrew a noun of either gender, masculine, feminine, neuter,
is invariably rendered masculine by Christian translators of the
Bible.[49] In the Greek, from whence we obtain the New Testament,
spirit is of the feminine gender, although invariably translated
masculine. The double-sexed word, Jehovah, too sacred to be spoken by
the Jews, signified the masculine-feminine God.[50] The proof of the
double meaning of Jehovah, the masculine and feminine signification,
Father-Mother, is undeniable. Lanci, one of the great orientalists,
says:
Jehovah should be read from left to right, and pronounced
Ho-Hi; that is to say He-She (Hi pronounced He,) Ho in Hebrew
being the masculine pronoun and Hi the feminine. Ho-Hi
therefore denotes the male and female principles, the vis
genatrix.[51]
Kingsford says:
The arbitrary and harsh aspect under which Jehovah is chiefly
presented in the Hebrew Scriptures is due not to any lack of
the feminine element either in His name or in His nature, or
to any failure on the part of the inspired leaders of Israel
to recognize their equality, but to the rudimentary condition
of the people at large, and their consequent amenability
to the delineation of the stern side only of the Divine
Character.[52]
The Hebrew word _El Shaddai_, translated, “The Almighty” is still more
distinctively feminine than _Iah_, as it means “The Breasted God,” and
is made use of in the Old Testament whenever the especially feminine
characteristics of God are meant to be indicated.[53]
The story of the building of the tower of Babel and the subsequent
confusion of language possesses deep interior significance; the word
(Babel) meaning “God the Father” as distinct and separate from the
feminine principle. The confusion which has come upon humanity because
of this separation has been far more lamentable in its results than
a mere confounding of tongues.[54] In the earliest religions the
recognition of the feminine principle in the divinity is everywhere
found. “I am the Father and Mother of the Universe” said Krishna in the
Bhagavad Gita.
An Orphic hymn says: “Zeus is the first and the last, the head and the
extremities; from him have proceeded all things.” He is a man and an
immortal nymph i.e. the male and female element. The Sohar declares
“the ancient of the ancient has a form and has no form.”
The Holy Spirit, symbolized by a dove, is a distinctively feminine
principle—the Comforter—and yet has ever been treated by the Christian
Church as masculine, alike in dogmas propounded from the pulpit, and
in translations of the Scriptures. A few notable exceptions however
appear at an early date. Origen expressly referred to the Holy Ghost as
feminine, saying: “The soul is maiden to her mistress the Holy Ghost.”
An article upon the “Esoteric character of the Gospels” in Madam
Blavatsky’s _Lucifer_ (November 1887) says:
Spirit or the Holy Ghost was feminine with the Jews as most
ancient peoples and it was so with the early Christians;
Sophia of the Gnostics and the third Sephiroth, Binah (the
female Jehovah of the Cabalists,) are feminine principles
“Divine Spirit” or Ruach, “One is She the spirit of the Elohim
of Life,” is said in Sepher Yetzirah.[55]
An early canonical book of the New Testament known as “The Everlasting
Gospel” also as “The Gospel of the Holy Ghost” represents Jesus as
saying, “My mother the Holy Ghost, took me by the hair of my head up
into a mountain.”
The word _sacred_ simply meaning secret, having its origin as shown at
the time when knowledge was kept hidden from the bulk of mankind, only
to be acquired by initiation in the mysteries, so also the word _holy_
simply means whole, that is, undivided. In its ignorance, unwisdom,
and fear of investigation, mankind has allowed a division of the two
divine principles, male and female, to obtain firm hold in their
minds. Prejudice, which simply means prejudgment, a judgment without
proof, has long ruled mankind, owing chiefly to that bondage of the
will inflicted by a tyrannous self-seeking priesthood. But we have now
reached a period in history when investigation is again taking the
place of blind belief and the truth, capable of making man free, is
once more offered. It is through a recognition of the divine element of
motherhood as not alone inhering in the great primal source of life but
as extending throughout all creation, that it will become possible for
the world, so buried in darkness, folly and superstition, to practice
justice toward woman. Not legislation but education will bring about
the change; not external acts but internal thought. It is but a few
years since the acknowledgment of a feminine element even in plants was
regarded by the church as heretical. Yet though still perceiving but
partial truth, science now declares the feminine principle to inhere
in plants, rocks, gems, and even in the minutest atoms; thus in some
degree recognizing the occult axiom “As it is above, so it is below.”
_Chapter Two_
+Celibacy+
While the inferior and secondary position of woman early became an
integral portion of Christianity, its fullest efforts are seen in
Church teachings regarding marriage. Inasmuch as it was a cardinal
doctrine that the fall of Adam took place through his temptation
into marriage by Eve, this relation was regarded with holy horror as
a continuance of the evil which first brought sin into the world,
depriving man of his immortality.[1] It is a notable fact that the
expected millennium of a thousand years upon earth with its material
joys has ever had more attraction for Christians than the eternal
spiritual rapture of heaven. Many of the old Fathers taught that “the
world is a state of matrimony, but paradise of virginity.”[2] To such
extent was this doctrine carried it was declared that had it not have
been for the fall, God would have found some way outside of this
relation for populating the world, consequently marriage was regarded
as a condition of peculiar temptation and trial; celibacy as one of
especial holiness.
The androgynous theory of primal man found many supporters, the
separation into two beings having been brought about by sensual desire.
Jacob Boehme and earlier mystics of that class recognized the double
sexuality of God in whose image man was made. One of the most revered
ancient Scriptures, “The Gospel according to the Hebrews,” which was
in use as late as the second century of the Christian era, taught the
equality of the feminine in the Godhead; also that daughters should
inherit with sons. Thirty-three fragments of this Gospel have recently
been discovered. The fact remains undeniable that at the advent of
Christ, a recognition of the feminine element in the divinity had not
entirely died out from general belief, the earliest and lost books
of the New Testament teaching this doctrine, the whole confirmed by
the account of the birth and baptism of Jesus, the Holy Spirit,[3]
the feminine creative force, playing the most important part. It
was however but a short period before the church through Canons
and Decrees, as well as apostolic and private teaching, denied the
femininity of the Divine equally with the divinity of the feminine.
There is however abundant proof that even under but partial recognition
of the feminine principle as entering in the divinity, woman was
officially recognized in the early services of the church, being
ordained to the ministry, officiating as deacons, administering the
act of baptism, dispensing the sacrament, interpreting doctrines and
founding sects which received their names.[4]
The more mystical among priests taught that before woman was separated
from man, the Elementals[5] were accepted by man as his children
and endowed by him with immortality, but at the separation of the
androgynous body into the two beings Adam and Eve, the woman through
accident was also endowed with immortality which theretofore had
solely inhered in the masculine portion of the double-sexed being.
These mystics also taught that this endowment of woman with immortality
together with her capability of bringing new beings into existence also
endowed with immortal life, was the cause of intense enmity toward
her on the part of the Elementals, especially shown by their bringing
suffering and danger upon her at this period.
Still another class recognizing marriage as a necessity for the
continuance of the species, looked upon it with more favor, attributing
the fall to another cause, yet throwing odium upon the relation by
maintaining that the marriage of Adam and Eve did not take place until
after they had been driven from Paradise. This doctrine was taught by
the Father Hieronymus.[6] Thus with strange inconsistency the church
supported two entirely opposing views of marriage. Yet even those who
upheld its necessity still taught woman’s complete subordination to man
in that relation; also that this condition was one of great tribulation
to man, it was even declared that God caused sleep to fall upon Adam
at the creation of Eve in order to prevent his opposition.[7] Lecky
speaking of the noxious influences of ascetics upon marriage, says it
would be difficult to conceive anything more coarse and repulsive than
the manner in which the church regarded it; it was invariably treated
as a consequence of the fall of Adam and regarded from its lowest
aspect.[8] But having determined that evil was necessary in order to
future good, the church decided to compel a belief that its control of
this contract lessened the evil, to this end declaring marriage illegal
without priestly sanction; thus creating a conviction of and belief
in its sacramental nature in the minds of the people. Despite the
favoring views of a class regarding marriage, celibacy was taught as
the highest condition for both man and woman, and as early as the third
century many of the latter entered upon a celibate life, Jerome using
his influence in its favor. Augustine, while admitting the possibility
of salvation to the married, yet speaking of a mother and daughter in
heaven, compared the former to a star of the second magnitude, but the
latter as shining with great brilliancy. The superior respect paid to
the celibates even among women is attributed to direct instruction of
the apostles. The “Apostolic Constitutions” held even by the Episcopal
church as regulations established by the apostles themselves, and
believed to be among the earliest christian records, give elaborate
directions for the places of all who attend church, the unmarried being
the most honored. The virgins and widows and elder women stood or sat
first of all.
The chief respect shown by the early fathers towards marriage was that
it gave virgins to the church, while the possibility of salvation to
the married, at first recognized, was denied at later date even to
persons otherwise living holy lives. The Emperor Jovinian banished
a man who asserted the possibility of salvation to married persons
provided they obeyed all the ordinances of the church and lived good
lives.[9] As part of this doctrine, the church taught that woman
was under an especial curse and man a divinely appointed agent for
the enforcement of that curse. It inculcated the belief that all
restrictions placed upon her were but parts of her just punishment for
having caused the fall of man. Under such teaching a belief in the
supreme virtue of celibacy—first declared by the apostle Paul,—was
firmly established. To Augustine is the world indebted for full
development of the theory of original sin, promulgated by Paul as a
doctrine of the Christian Church in the declaration that Adam, first
created, was not first in sin. Paul, brought up in the strictest
external principles of Judaism, did not lose his educational bias or
primal belief when changing from Judaism to Christianity.[10] Neither
was his character as persecutor changed when he united his fortunes
with the new religion. He gave to the Christian world a lever long
enough to reach down through eighteen centuries, all that time moving
it in opposition to a belief in woman’s created and religious equality
with man, to her right of private judgment and to her personal freedom.
His teaching that Adam, first created, was not first in sin, divided
the unity of the human race in the assumption that woman was not part
of the original creative idea but a secondary thought, an inferior
being brought into existence as an appendage to man.
Although based upon a false conception of the creative power, this
theory found ready acceptance in the minds of the men of the new
church. Not illiterate, having received instruction at the feet
of Gamaliel, Paul was yet intolerant and credulous, nay more,
unscrupulous. He was the first Jesuit in the Christian church,
“Becoming all things to all men.” The Reformed church with strange
unanimity has chosen Paul as its leader and the accepted exponent
of its views. He may justly be termed the Protestant Pope, and
although even among Catholics rivalling Peter in possession of the
heavenly keys, yet the Church of Rome has accepted his authority as
in many respects to be more fully obeyed than even the teachings of
St. Peter.[11] Having been accepted by the Church as the apostolic
exponent of its views upon marriage, it was but to be expected that
his teachings should be received as divine. That Paul was unmarried
has been assumed because of his bitterness against this relation, yet
abundant proof of his having a wife exists. For the membership of the
Great Sanhedrim, marriage was a requisite. St. Clement of Alexandria
positively declared that St. Paul had a wife. Until the time of
Cromwell, when it was burned, a MS. letter of St. Ignatius in Greek was
preserved in the old Oxford Library; this letter spoke of “St. Peter
and Paul and the apostles who were married.” Another letter of St.
Ignatius is still extant in the Vatican Library. Tussian and others
who have seen it declare that it also speaks of St. Paul as a married
man.[12] But tenderness toward woman does not appear in his teachings;
man is represented as the master, “the head” of woman. In consonance
with his teaching, responsibility has been denied her through the ages;
although the Church has practically held her amenable for the ruin of
the world, prescribing penance and hurling anathemas against her whom
it has characterized as the “door of hell.”
At a synod in Winchester in the eighth century, St. Dunstan, famed for
his hatred of women, made strenuous effort to enforce celibate life. It
was asserted to be so highly immoral for a priest to marry, that even
a wooden cross had audibly declared against the horrid practice.[13]
Although in the third century marriage was permitted to all orders
of the clergy,[14] yet the very ancient “Gospel of the Egyptians,”
endorsed as canonical by Clement of Alexandria, taught celibacy. These
old christian theologians found the nature of woman a prolific subject
of discussion, a large party classing her among brutes without soul
or reason. As early as the sixth century a council at Macon (585),
fifty-nine bishops taking part, devoted its time to a discussion of
this question, “Does woman possess a soul?” Upon one side it was argued
that woman should not be called “homo”; upon the opposite side that she
should, because, first, the Scriptures declared that God created man,
male and female; second, that Jesus Christ, son of a woman, is called
the son of man. Christian women were therefore allowed to remain human
beings in the eyes of the clergy, even though considered very weak and
bad ones. But nearly a thousand years after this decision in favor of
the humanity of the women of Christian Europe, it was still contended
that the women of newly discovered America belonged to the brute
creation, possessing neither souls nor reason.[15] As late as the end
of the sixteenth century an anonymous work appeared, arguing that women
were no part of mankind, but a species of intermediate animal between
the human and the brute creation. (Mulieres non est homines, etc.)
Mediaeval christian writings show many discussions upon this point, the
influence of these old assertions still manifesting themselves.
Until the time of Peter the Great, women were not recognized as human
beings in that great division of Christendom known as the Greek church,
the census of that empire counting only males, or so many “souls”—no
woman named. Traces of this old belief have not been found wanting
in our own country within the century. As late as the Woman’s Rights
Convention in Philadelphia, 1854, an objector in the audience cried
out: “Let women first prove they have souls; both the Church and the
State deny it.”
Everything connected with woman was held to be unclean. It is stated
that Agathro desired the Sophist Herodes to get ready for him the next
morning a vessel full of pure milk, that is to say which had not been
milked by the hand of a woman. But he perceived as soon as it was
offered to him that it was not such as he desired, protesting that the
scent of her hands who had milked it offended his nostrils. In the
oldest European churches great distinction was made between the purity
of man and woman. At an early date woman was forbidden to receive the
Eucharist into her naked hand on account of her impurity,[16] or to
sing in church on account of her inherent wickedness. To such an extent
was this opposition carried, that the church of the middle ages did not
hesitate to provide itself with eunuchs in order to supply cathedral
choirs with the soprano tones inhering by nature in woman alone. One
of the principal charges against the Huguenots was that they permitted
women to sing in church, using their voices in praise of God contrary
to the express command of St. Paul, Catherine de Medicis reproaching
them for this great sin.[17] The massacre at St. Bartholomew, when
30,000 men, women and children lost their lives, and the entire
destruction of many families of purest character took place, with an
additional great loss to France from the self-imposed banishment of
hundreds more, may be traced to the teaching of St. Paul that woman
should keep silence in the church. This doctrine also crossed the
ocean with the Puritan Fathers, and has appeared in America under many
forms.[18]
The Christianity of the ages teaching the existence of a superior and
inferior sex, possessing different rights under the law and in the
church, it has been easy to bring man and woman under accountability to
a different code of morals. For this double code the church is largely
indebted to the subtle and acute Paul, who saw in the new religion but
an enlarged Judaism that should give prominence to Abraham and his seed
from whom Christ claimed descent. His conversion did not remove his
old Jewish contempt for woman, as shown in his temple service, the law
forbidding her entrance beyond the outer court. Nor could he divest
himself of the spirit of the old morning prayer which daily led each
Jew to thank God that he was not born a heathen, a slave or a woman.
He brought into the new dispensation the influence of the old
ceremonial law, which regarded woman as unclean. The Jewish exclusion
of forty days from even the outer court of the sanctuary to the woman
who had given birth to a son, and of twice that period, or eighty
days, if a daughter had been born, was terminated in both religions
by a sin-offering in expiation of the mother’s crime for having, at
the peril of her own, brought another human being into life.[19] This
Old Testament teaching degraded the life-giving principle exemplified
in motherhood, and in a two-fold way lessened the nation’s regard for
womanhood. First, through the sin-offering and purification demanded
of the mother; second, by its doubling the period of exclusion from
the temple in case a girl was given to the world.[20] The birth of
girls even under Christianity has everywhere been looked upon as an
infliction, and thousands have been immured in convents, there to die
of despair or to linger through years,[21] the victim alike of father
and of priest.
The influence of Judaism extended through Christendom. The custom of
purification after maternity inherited by the church from Judaism
brought with it into Christianity the same double restriction and
chastening of the mother in case her infant proved a girl, a gift as
propitiation or expiation being required. Uncleanliness was attributed
to woman in every function of her being; the purification of the Virgin
Mary, who was not exempt, when after the birth of a God, being used as
an incontrovertible argument in proof. A festival of the purification
of the Virgin Mary, adopted from paganism, was introduced into Rome
at an early date, thus perpetuating a belief in the uncleanliness
of motherhood. The Church in the Roman Empire soon united with
the State[22] in imposing new restrictions upon women. Since the
Reformation the mother’s duty of expiation has been confirmed by the
Anglican Church, and is known in England as “churching.” Directions
as to the woman’s dress at this time was early made the subject of a
canon.[23] She was to be decently appareled. This term “decently,”
variously interpreted, was at times the occasion of serious trouble. In
1661, during the reign of James I, the Chancellor of Norwich ordered
that every woman who came to be churched should be covered with a white
veil. A woman who refused to conform to this order was excommunicated
for contempt. She prayed a prohibition, alleging that such order was
not warranted by any custom or Canon of the Church of England. The
judges of the civil court, finding themselves incompetent to decide
upon such a momentous question, requested the opinion of the archbishop
of Canterbury. Not willing to trust his own judgment, that dignitary
convened several bishops for consultation. Their decision was against
the woman, this Protestant Council upon woman’s dress declaring that it
was the ancient usage of the Church of England for women who were to be
churched to come veiled, and a prohibition was denied.
The doctrine that woman must remain covered when in the sacred church
building shows itself in the United States.[24] In many instances under
Christianity, woman has been entirely excluded from religious houses
and church buildings. When Pope Boniface[25] founded the abbey of Fulda
he prohibited the entrance of women into any of the buildings, even
including the church. This rule remained unbroken during the tenth and
eleventh centuries, and even when in 1131 the Emperor Lothair went to
Fulda to celebrate Pentecost, his empress was not permitted to witness
the ceremonies. When Frederick Barbarossa, 1135, proposed to spend
his Easter there, he was not even allowed to enter the house because
of having his wife with him. In 1138 Boniface IX, at the request of
the abbot, John Merlow, relaxed the rule and permitted women to
attend the services of the church. Shortly afterwards the building was
destroyed by lightning, which was looked upon as evidence of the divine
displeasure at the desecration. The monastery of Athos under the Greek
church, situated upon an island, does not permit the entrance of a
female animal upon its confines. Even in America woman has met similar
experience.[26]
At certain periods during the middle ages, conversation with women was
forbidden. During the Black Death, the Flaggellants, or Brotherhood of
the Cross, were under such interdict.[27] In this last decade of the
XIX century, the Catholic church still imposes similar restrictions
upon certain religious houses. Early in 1892 the queen-regent of
Spain visited the monastery of Mirzaflores; its rules not allowing
a monk to speak to a woman, the queen was received in silence. Her
majesty immediately telegraphed to the pope asking indulgence, which
was granted, and during four hours the monks were permitted the sin
of speaking to a woman. It is curious to note that the first sentence
uttered by one of the monks was a compliment upon the simplicity of her
majesty’s attire. But the most impressive evidence of the contempt of
the church towards all things feminine was shown in a remark by Tetzel
the great middle-age dealer in indulgences. Offering one for sale he
declared it would insure eternal salvation even if the purchaser had
committed rape upon the mother of God.[28]
A knowledge of facts like these is necessary in order to a just
understanding of our present civilization, especially as to the origin
of restrictive legislation concerning woman. The civilization of today
is built upon the religious theories of the middle ages supplemented by
advancing freedom of thought. Lea, declares thus:
The Latin church is the great fact which dominates the history
of modern civilization. All other agencies which molded the
destinies of Europe were comparatively isolated or sporadic in
their manifestations.
The influence of church teaching is most strikingly manifested in the
thought of today. Without predetermined intention of wrong doing, man
has been so molded by the Church doctrine of ages and the coordinate
laws of State as to have become blind to the justice of woman’s demand
for freedom such as he possesses. Nor is woman herself scarcely less
bound, although now torn by the spirit of rebellion which burned in the
hearts of her fore-mothers, so cruelly persecuted, so falsely judged,
during past ages, when the most devout Christian woman possessed no
rights in the church, the government or the family. The learning which
had been hers in former periods, was then interdicted as an especial
element of evil. Her property rights recognized in former periods then
denied; as a being subordinate to man she was not allowed a separate
estate or control over the earnings of her own hands. Her children were
not her own but those of a master for whose interest or pleasure she
had given them birth. Without freedom of thought or action, trained
to consider herself secondary to a man, a being who came into the
world not as part of the great original plan of creation but as an
afterthought of her Creator, and this doctrine taught as one of the
most sacred mysteries of religion which to doubt was to insure her
eternal damnation, it is not strange that the great body of women are
not now more outspoken in demanding equal religious and governmental
rights with man. But another phase of heredity shows itself in the
eagerness with which women enter all phases of public life which does
not place them in open antagonism with Church or State. Education,
industries, club life and even those great modern and religious
organizations which bring them before the public, throwing active work
and responsibility upon them, would be entirely unexplainable were it
not for the tendency of inherited thought to ultimately manifest itself.
The long continued and powerfully repressing influence of church
teaching in regard to the created inferiority of women, imposed upon
millions of men and women a bondage of thought and action which even
the growing civilization of the nineteenth century has not yet been
able to cast off. To this doctrine we can trace all the irregularities
which for many centuries filled the church with shame; practices
more obscene than those of Babylon or Corinth dragged Christendom to
a darkness blacker than the night of heathendom in the most pagan
countries—a darkness so intense that the most searching efforts of the
historian but now and then cast a ray of light upon it;—a darkness so
profound that in Europe from the seventh to the eleventh centuries no
individual thought can be traced, no opinion was formed, no heresy
arose. All Christendom was sunk in superstition. Lange[29] says “The
disappearance of ancient civilization in the early centuries of the
Christian era is an event the serious problems of which are in great
part still unexplained.” Had Lange not been influenced by the subtle
current of heredity which unwittingly influenced nations and systems
equally with individuals, he could easily have discovered the cause
of this disappearance of olden civilization, to be in the degradation
of the feminine element under Christianity. While this darkness of
Christian Europe was so great that history knows less of it a thousand
years since than it does of Egypt 5,000 years ago, one corner of that
continent was kept luminous by the brilliance of Mohammedan learning.
The Arabs alone had books from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries
of the Christian era. The Moors of Spain kept that portion of Europe
bright, while all else was sunk in darkness. Universities existed,
learning was fostered and women authors were numerous. For many
hundred years Rome possessed no books but missals and a few Bibles in
the hands of priests. Men were bound by church dogmas looking only
for aggrandisement through her. The arts ceased to flourish, science
decayed, learning was looked upon as a disgrace to a warrior,[30] the
only occupation deemed worthy of the noble.
The priesthood who alone possessed a knowledge of letters, prostituted
their learning to the basest uses; the nobility when not engaged
against a common foe, spent their time battling against each other;
the peasantry were by turns the sport and victim of priest and noble,
while woman was the prey of all. Her person and her rights possessed
no consideration except as she could be made to advance the interest
or serve the pleasure of priest, noble, father, husband; some man-god
to whose lightest desire all her wishes were made to bend. The most
pronounced doctrine of the church at this period was that through
woman sin had entered the world; that woman’s whole tendency was
towards evil, and had it not been for the unfortunate oversight of her
creation, man would then be dwelling in the paradisal innocence and
happiness of Eden, with death entirely unknown. When the feminine was
thus wholly proscribed, the night of moral and spiritual degradation
reached its greatest depth, and that condition ensued which has alike
been the wonder and the despair of the modern historians, whose
greatest fault, as Buckle shows, has been the reading of history from
a few isolated facts rather than building up its philosophy from an
aggregation of events upon many different planes.
Under all restrictions woman did not fail to show her innate power
even within the fold of the church. She founded devout orders,[31]
established and endowed religious institutions, and issued her
commands to the pope himself, in more than one instance seating that
holy personage in the papal chair.[32] From St. Paulina, whose life
was written by St. Jerome, to the promulgation of the dogma of the
Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary by the Ecumenical Council
under Pius IX, and the later canonization of Joan of Arc, woman has
not failed to impress even the Christian world with a sense of her
intellectual and spiritual power. Yet despite the very great influence
exerted by so many women in the affairs of the church—notwithstanding
the canonization of so many women, she has only been able to show her
capacity at an immense expenditure of vital force against constant
priestly opposition and the powerful decrees of councils. Subtle and
complex as are the influences that mould thought and character, we
cannot comprehend the great injustice of the church towards woman in
its teaching of her mental and spiritual inferiority without a slight
examination of the great religious institutions that have been under
her charge. Of these none possess more remarkable history than the
Abbey of Fontervault,[33] founded in 1099, for both monks and nuns.
It belonged in the general rank of Benedictines, and was known as the
Order of Fontervault. It was ruled by an abbess under title of General
of the Order, who was responsible to no authority but that of the
pope himself. Forming a long succession of able women in thirty-two
abbesses from the most eminent families of France, woman’s capacity
for the management of both ecclesiastical and civil affairs was there
shown for six hundred years. It was the abbess who alone decided the
religious fitness of either monk or nun seeking admission to the
order. It was the abbess who decreed all ecclesiastical and civil
penalties; who selected the confessors for the different houses of the
order throughout France and Spain; who managed and controlled the vast
wealth belonging to this institution; it was the abbess who drew up
the rules for the government of the order, and who also successfully
defended these privileges when attacked. For neither the protection of
the pope, the wealth of the order, or the family influence connected
with it, prevented priestly attack,[34] and no argument in favor of
woman’s governing ability is stronger than the fact that its abbesses
ever successfully resisted these priestly assaults upon the privileges
of their order. The abbey of Fontervault, with its grounds of forty or
fifty acres, was surrounded by high walls; its soil was tilled by the
monks of the abbey, who received even their food as alms from the nuns,
returning all fragments for distribution to the poor.[35]
The authority of women was supreme in all monasteries of the order.
The ecclesiastical power maintained by these abbesses is the more
remarkable, as it was in direct contravention of the dictates of the
early councils, that of Aix-la-Chapelle, 816, forbidding abbesses to
give the veil or take upon themselves any priestly function; the later
council of Paris A.D. 824, bitterly complained that women served at the
altar, and even gave to people the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
Among the convents controlled by women, which have largely influenced
religious thought, was that of the Paraclete in the 12th century under
Heloise. Its teachings that belief was dependent upon knowledge,
attacked the primal church tenet, that belief depends upon faith alone.
The convent of Port Royal des Champs during the 17th century exerted
much influence. Its abbess, the celebrated Mother Angelique Arnault,
was inducted into this office in her eleventh year upon death of her
abbess-aunt whose co-adjutrix she had been. This convent, both in
person of the nuns as well as the monks connected with it, became a
protest against the jesuitical doctrine of the seventeenth century, and
like the Paraclete is intimately connected with reform questions in the
Catholic Church. Notwithstanding such evidences of woman’s organizing
mind and governing qualities under the most favorable conditions, as
well as of piety so unquestioned as to have produced a long calendar of
female saints, the real policy of the church remained unchanged; nor
could it be otherwise from its basis of woman’s created inferiority and
original sin. The denial to women of the right of private judgment and
the control of her own actions, the constant teaching of her greater
sinfulness and natural impurity, had a very depressing effect upon the
majority of women whose lowly station in life was such as to deprive
them of that independence of thought and action possible to women of
rank and wealth. Then, as now, the church catered to the possessors
of money and power; then, as now, seeking to unite their great forces
with its own purpose of aggrandizement, and thus the church has
ever obstructed the progress of humanity, delaying civilization and
condemning the world to a moral barbarism from which there is no escape
except through repudiation of its teaching. To the theory of “God the
Father,” shorn of the divine attribute of motherhood, is the world
beholden for its most degrading beliefs, its most infamous practices.
Dependent upon the identified with lost motherhood is the “Lost Name”
of ancient writers and occultists. When the femininity of the divine
is once again acknowledged, the “Lost Name” will be discovered and the
holiness (wholeness) of divinity be manifested.[36]
As the theory of woman’s wickedness gathered force, her representative
place in the church lessened. From century to century restrictive
canons multiplied, and the clergy constantly grew more corrupt,
although bearing bad reputation at an early date.[37] Tertullian, whose
heavy diatribes are to be found in large libraries, was bitter in
his opposition to marriage.[38] While it took many hundreds of years
for the total exclusion of woman from the christian priesthood, the
celibacy of the clergy during this period was the constant effort of
the Church. Even during the ages that priestly marriage was permitted,
celibates obtained a higher reputation for sanctity and virtue than
married priests, who infinitely more than celibates were believed
subject to infestation by demons.[39]
The restriction upon clerical marriages proceeded gradually. First
the superior holiness of the unmarried was taught together with their
greater freedom from infestation by demons. A single marriage only
was next allowed, and that with a woman who had never before entered
the relation.[40] The Council of A.D. 347, consisting of twenty-one
bishops, forbade the ordination of those priests who had been twice
married or whose wife had been a widow.[41] A council of A.D. 395 ruled
that a bishop who had children after ordination should be excluded from
the major orders. The Council of A.D. 444, deposed Chelidonius, bishop
of Besancon, for having married a widow. The Council of Orleans, A.D.
511, consisting of thirty-two bishops, decided that monks who married
should be expelled from the ecclesiastical order. The Church was termed
the spouse of the priest. It was declared that Peter possessed a wife
before his conversion, but that he forsook her and all worldly things
after he became Christ’s, who established chastity; priests were
termed holy in proportion as they opposed marriage.[42] The unmarried
among the laity who had never entered that relation, and the married
who forsook it, were regarded as saintly. So great was the opposition
to marriage that a layman who married a second time was refused
benediction and penance imposed.[43] A wife was termed “An Unhallowed
Thing.”
So far from celibacy producing chastity or purity of life, church
restrictions upon marriage led to the most debasing crimes, the most
revolting vices, the grossest immorality. As early as the fourth
century (370) the state attempted purification through a statute
enacted by the emperors Valentinian, Valerius and Gratian, prohibiting
ecclesiastics and monks from entering the houses of widows, single
women living alone, or girls who had lost their parents.[44] The
nearest ties of relationship proved ineffectual in protecting woman
from priestly assault, and incest became so common it was found
necessary to prohibit the residence of a priest’s mother or sister
in his house.[45] This restriction was renewed at various times
through the ages. The condemnation of the Council of Rome, Easter,
1051, under the pontificate of Pope Leo IX, was not directed against
married priests, but against those who held incestuous relations. Yet
although the Church thus externally set her seal of disapprobation
upon this vice, her general teaching sustained it. Gregory, bishop of
Venelli, convicted of this crime by the Council of Rome, was punished
by excommunication, but in a short time was restored to his former
important position. The highest legates were equally guilty with the
inferior priests. Cardinal John of Cremona, the pope’s legate to the
Council of Westminister 1125, sent by Pope Honorius for the express
purpose of enforcing celibacy, became publicly notorious and disgraced,
and was obliged to hastily leave England in consequence of his teaching
and his practice being diametrically opposed.[46]
Through this clerical contempt of marriage, the conditions of celibacy
and virginity were regarded as of the highest virtue. Jerome respected
marriage as chiefly valuable in that it gave virgins to the church,
while Augustine in acknowledging that marriage perpetuated the species,
also contended that it also perpetuated original sin.
These diverse views in regard to marriage created the most opposite
teaching from the church. By one class the demand to increase and
multiply was constantly brought up, and women were taught that the
rearing of children was their highest duty. The strangest sermons were
sometimes preached toward the enforcement of this command. Others
taught an entirely different duty for both men and women, and a large
celibate class was created under especial authority of the church.
Women, especially those of wealth, were constantly urged to take upon
themselves the vow of virginity, their property passing into possession
of the church, thus helping to build up priestly power. Another class
held the touch of a woman to be a contamination, and to avoid it holy
men secluded themselves in caves and forests.[47] Through numerous
decretals confirmation was given to the theory that woman was defiled
through the physical peculiarities of her being. Even her beauty was
counted as an especial snare and temptation of the devil for which in
shame she ought to do continual penance.[48] St. Chrysostom, whose
prayer is repeated at every Sunday morning service of the Episcopal
church, described women as a “necessary evil, a natural temptation,
a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a
painted ill.” But to escape her influence was impossible and celibacy
led to the most direful results. Monks and hermits acknowledged
themselves tormented in their solitary lives by visions of beautiful
women. Monasteries were visited by an illness to which celibacy
imparted a name,[49] and impurity of body and soul spread throughout
Christendom. The general tone of the church in regard to marriage; its
creation of a double code of morality; its teaching of woman’s greater
sinfulness, together with that of her absolute subordination to man,
subverted the moral character of the Christian world within whose
borders the vilest systems of immorality arose which the world has ever
known; its extent being a subject of historical record.[50]
According to the teaching of men who for many hundreds of years were
molders of human thought, priests, philosophers and physicians alike,
nature never designed to procreate woman, her intention being always
to produce men. These authorities asserted that nature never formed
the feminine except when she lost her true function and so produced
the female sex by chance or accident. Aristotle[51] whose philosophy
was accepted by the church and all teaching of a contrary character
declared heretical, maintained that nature did not form woman except
when by reason of imperfection of matter she could not obtain the
sex which is perfect.[52] Cajetan enunciated the same doctrine many
hundred years later.[53] Aristotle also denied creative power to the
mother.[54] While throughout its history the course of the Christian
Church against marriage is constantly seen, no less noticeable are the
grossly immoral practices resulting from celibacy. Scarcely a crime
or a vice to which it did not give birth. Celibacy was fostered in
the interests of power, and in order to its more strict enforcement
barons were permitted to enslave the wives and children of married
priests.[55] Those of Rome were bestowed upon the Cathedral church of
the Lateran, and bishops throughout Christendom were ordered to enforce
this law in their own dioceses and to seize the wives of priests for
the benefit of their churches. At no point of history do we more
clearly note the influence of the Church upon the State than in the
union of the temporal power with the ecclesiastical for purposes of
constraining priestly celibacy.
Under reign of Philip I of France, a council was held at Troyes which
condemned the marriage of priests.[56] In 1108, the following year,
King Henry I of England[57] summoned a council to assemble in London
for purpose of upholding priestly celibacy, urging its enforcement
upon the bishops, and pledging his kingly honor in aid. A new series
of canons was promulgated, strengthened by severe penalties and
the co-operation of the king. Finding it impossible either through
spiritual or temporal power to compel absolute celibacy[58] the king
for the benefit of his exchequer established a license for concubinage
upon the payment of a tax known as cullagium.[59]
Notwithstanding all the powerful enginery of the church, priestly
celibacy, so contrary to nature, was not rendered absolutely imperative
until the thirteenth century. The Fourth Lateran Council (Twelfth
Ecumenical), 1215, under pope Innocent III, is especially famous
because of its final settlement of the policy of the church in regard
to priestly marriage. This was a large council, 1300 prelates taking
part in the adjudication of this question. While with St. Augustine
acknowledging that marriage was requisite for the preservation of the
race, it strictly confined this relation to the laity.
The subject of celibacy as we see had agitated the church from its
foundation. A more renowned council even than the Twelfth Ecumenical,
namely, the First Nicene or Second Ecumenical, having seriously
discussed it, although after prolonged debate pronouncing against
celibacy and in favor of priestly marriage. St. Paphinutius, the martyr
bishop of Thebes, although himself a celibate advocated marriage which
he declared to be true chastity, the council adopting his opinion.
Although the tendency of the church for so many hundred years had been
towards celibacy yet when adopted as a dogma, a belief in its propriety
or its scriptural authority was by no means universal even among the
most eminent members, but in no instance has the control of the church
over the consciences and will of its adherents been more forcibly
illustrated. Many illustrious and learned theologians as Gratian the
Canonist, St. Thomas Aquinas and Giraldus Cambrensis, Arch-Deacon of
St. Davids, while thereafter sustaining celibacy _as a law of the
church_ declared it had neither scriptural nor apostolic warrant;
St. Thomas affirming it to be merely a law of human ecclesiastical
origin.[60]
Absolute celibacy of the priesthood proved very difficult of
enforcement. At the great council of London, 1237, twenty-three years
afterwards, Cardinal Otto deplored the fact that married men still
received holy orders and held office in the church, and in 1268 only
fifty-three years after the great council confirming celibacy as a
doctrine of the church, another great council was convened in London,
when Cardinal Legate Ottoborn, the direct representative of the Pope,
demanded the establishment of concubinage for priests. The institutions
of Otto and Ottoborn long remained the law of the English church. Yet
to their honor be it remembered that despite council and cardinal, pope
and church, there were priests who still persistently refused either
to part from their wives or to relinquish their priestly functions,
and who when excommunicated for contumacy, laughed at the sentence and
continued their priestly offices.[61] Others sufficiently conformed
to the edicts to lock up their churches and suspend their priestly
administrations, yet refusing to part with their wives. The relatives
of wives also exerted their influence against the action of the church.
The struggle was bitter and long. New canons were promulgated and
celibacy enforced under severe penalties, or rather marriage was
prohibited under severe penalties. The holy robbery which made slaves
of the wives and children of priests confiscating their property to the
church, had more effect in compelling celibacy than all anathemas upon
the iniquity of marriage. Priests who retained their wives preferring
the chastity of this relation to the license allowed celibates, were
prohibited from their offices and their wives denounced as harlots.
If this did not suffice, such priests were finally excommunicated.
But a way of return was left open. In case this measure coerced them
into abandoning wives and children, a short penance soon restored the
priestly rank with all its attendant dignities. Nor was the reinstated
priest compelled to live purely. So little was it expected that the tax
upon concubinage soon became a component part of the celibate system.
So gross and broadspread became the immorality of all classes that even
the Head of the Church pandered to it in the erection by Pope Sixtus V
of a magnificent building devoted to illicit pleasure.[62]
The example of Christ himself was pointed to in favor of celibacy, even
upon the cross saying to his mother, “Woman, what have I to do with
thee?” The saints of the Old Testament as well as the New, were quoted
as having opposed marriage. Abel, Melchisedeck, Joshua, Elias, Jonah,
Daniel, St. John the Baptist, St. John the Evangelist, St. Paul with
his disciples, and all saintly personages were declared to have been
celibates.
A concubinage tax was exacted from all the clergy without exception,
and rendered compulsory even upon those priests who still kept their
wives, or who lived chastely outside of the marital relation. Protests
were of no avail. Those whom disinclination, age or ill-health kept
chaste, were told the privilege of unchastity was open to them; the
bishop must have the money and after payment they were at liberty to
keep concubines or not.[63] Under concubinage the priest was free from
all family responsibility; his mistress possessed neither present nor
future claim upon him; children, who according to church teaching
followed the condition of the mother, were born to him, but for
their education and maintenance neither ecclesiastical nor civil law
compelled him to provide.[64]
For many centuries this immoral tax brought enormous sums into the
treasuries of both Church and State. Although the laws against the
marriage of priests were enacted on pretense of the greater inherent
wickedness of woman, history proves their chief object to have been
the keeping of all priestly possessions under church control. It was
openly asserted that the temporal possessions of the church were
imperilled by sacerdotal marriage, and it has been declared with every
proof of truthfulness that edicts against the marriage of priests were
promulgated to prevent the alienation of property from the church.[65]
The saying of Paul was quoted; “He that is married careth for his
wife, but he that is unmarried for the Lord.” Married bishops were
occasionally confirmed in their sees upon condition that their wives
and children should not inherit their property, which upon their death
should fall to the church.[66]
The struggle against the absolute celibacy of the priesthood was
bitter. A few priests still kept their benefices while retaining their
wives and acknowledging their children as legitimate. The sons of such
contumacious priests were declared forever incapable of taking holy
orders, unless by a special dispensation. The church showed almost
equal determination in the establishment of concubinage as in the
enforcement of priestly celibacy, each of these systems tending to its
enrichment.
Opposition proved of no permanent avail. Holding control over the
conscience of men, asserting the power to unlock the doors of heaven
and hell, a strongly organized body working to one end, it is not a
subject of astonishment that the church, its chief object the crushing
of body and soul, should in the end prove conqueror, and the foulest
crimes against woman receive approval of the entire christian world.
Many notable consequences followed the final establishment of celibacy
as a dogma of the church.
First: The doctrine of woman’s inherent wickedness and close fellowship
with Satan took on new strength.
Second: Canon Law gained full control of civil law.
Third: An organized system of debauchery arose under mask of priestly
infallibility.
Fourth: Auricular confession was confirmed as a dogma of the church.
Fifth: Prohibition of the Scriptures to the laity was enforced.
Sixth: Crime was more openly protected, the system of indulgences
gained new strength, becoming the means of great revenue to the church.
Seventh: Heresy was more broadly defined and more severely punished.
Eighth: The Inquisition was established.
When Innocent III completed the final destruction of sacerdotal
marriage, it was not upon disobedient priests the most severe
punishment fell, but innocent women and children.[67] Effort was made
to force wives to desert their husbands. Those who proved contumacious
were denied christian burial in an age when such denial was looked
upon as equivalent to eternal damnation; property left such wives was
confiscated to the church; they were forbidden the eucharist; churching
after childbirth was denied them; they were termed harlots and their
children bastards, while to their sons all office in the church was
forbidden. If still contumacious they were handed over to the secular
power for condign punishment, or sold as slaves for the benefit of
the church. They were regarded as under the direct control of Satan
himself, as beings who iniquitously stood between their husbands and
heaven.
At numerous times in the history of the church women have been brought
to despair by its teachings, and large numbers driven to suicide.
A similar period was inaugurated by the confirmation of priestly
celibacy. The wives of such men, suddenly rendered homeless and with
their children classed among the vilest of earth, powerless and
despairing, hundreds shortened their agonies by death at their own
hands. For all these crimes the church alone is responsible.
Under celibacy, auricular confession, and extended belief in
witchcraft, a new era of wrong toward woman was inaugurated. From
thenceforth her condition was more degraded than even during the early
centuries of Christianity. Accusations of heresy, which included
witchcraft as well as other sins against the church were constantly
made against that being who was believed to have brought sin into the
world. Whosoever dared question the infallibility of the church by use
of their own judgment, even upon the most trivial subjects, immediately
fell into condemnation.
Canon Law gaining full control over civil law, the absolute sinfulness
of divorce, which maintained by the church has yet been allowed by
civil law, was fully established. Woman was entirely at the mercy of
man, the Canon Law maintaining that the confession of a guilty woman
could not be received in evidence against her accomplice, although it
held good against herself[68] and the punishment due to both was made
to fall on the woman alone.[69] The best authorities prove that while
the clergy were acquainted with the civil codes that had governed the
Roman Empire, they made but little use of them.[70] Upon coming to the
throne, Justinian[71] had repealed the law of the Patriarchate which
gave the father sole right and title to, and interest in the children
of legal marriage, but this was soon again subverted by ecclesiasticism
and under Canon Law a mother was prohibited all authority over her
child, its relationship to her even being denied. While under Common
Law children followed the condition of their fathers, who if free
transmitted freedom to their children, yet in the interests of priestly
celibacy, under church legislation, an entire reversal took place and
children were held to follow the condition of their mothers. Thus
serf-mothers bore serf-children to free-born fathers; slave mothers
bore slave children to their masters; while unmarried mothers bore
bastard children to both priestly and lay fathers, thus throwing the
taint of illegitimacy upon the innocent child, and the sole burden
of its maintenance upon the mother. This portion of Canon Law also
became the law of the State in all Christian countries,[72] and is
in existence at the present time, both civil codes and statue laws
enforcing this great wrong of the Church.[73] The relations of men
and women to each other, the sinfulness of marriage and the license
of illicit relations for the priesthood, employed the thought of the
church. The duty of woman to obey, not alone her male relatives, but
all men by virtue of their sex, was sedulously inculcated. She was
trained to hold her own desires and even thoughts in abeyance to those
of man, as to one who was rightfully her master. Every holy principle
of her nature was subverted by this degrading assumption.
When auricular confession became confirmed as a dogma of the church, it
threw immense power over the family into the hands of the priesthood,
a power capable of being converted to many ends, but was specially
notable in its influence upon morals.[74] Although auricular confession
was not established as a dogma until the Council of 1215, it had
been occasionally practiced at early date, carrying with it the same
immorality in lesser form as that which afterwards became so great a
reproach to the church.[75] Through its means the priesthood gained
possession of all family, social and political secrets, thus acquiring
information whose power for evil was unlimited. The spirit of evil
never found a more subtle method of undermining and destroying human
will, its most debasing influences falling upon woman, who through
fear of eternal damnation made known her most secret thoughts to the
confessor, an unmarried and frequently a youthful man. It soon became a
source of very great corruption to both priest and woman.
Another effect of this council was the formal prohibition of the
scriptures to the laity, and thenceforth the Bible was confined to the
priest who explained its teachings in the interests of his own order,
adding to, or taking from, to suit his own interests; the recent new
version showing many such interpolations.[76] Nothing was held sacred
by these men, who sacrificed everything to their own advancement and
that of their order.
The insolence of the priesthood was that of all periods; claiming
direct inspiration from God, they taught their own infallibility and
in name of Him, whom they professed to serve, the grossest crimes were
perpetrated, and this profession became a protecting sanctuary to
men whose villainous lives would otherwise have brought them to the
gallows.[77]
With conviction of woman’s supreme wickedness, increased through the
formal recognition of celibacy as a dogma of the church, with the
establishment of auricular confession, and the denial of the Bible
to the laity, the persecution of woman for witchcraft took on new
phase. The belief that it was the ordinary method through which the
devil won souls, together with the persuasion that woman through her
greater wickedness fell more readily than men into such practices,
acquired a firmer seat in theology. Heresy, of which witchcraft was one
phase, became a greater sin; the inquisition arose, and the general
characteristics of the christian world rapidly grew more inimical to
humanity, and especially to woman’s freedom, happiness and security.
The influence of the church daily grew more unfavorable to all virtue;
vice was sustained, immorality dignified. The concubines of priests
called “wives,” in bitter mockery of that relation in which the legal
wife was termed concubine, were known as “The Hallowed Ones,” “The
Honored Ones.” No stigma attached to such a life; these women formed
quite a class in mediaeval society, themselves and their children
out-ranking the wives of ordinary laymen;[78] the touch of a priest had
sanctified them. In the estimation of the church an immoral life led
with a priest was more honorable than marriage with a layman, and all
the obligations such a relation implied. Priests assumed immunity from
wrong doing. So far from celibacy causing purity of life, through
it the priesthood grew to look upon themselves as especially set
apart for indulgence in vice. Did not history so faithfully portray
this condition, it would seem impossible that it had existed among
people asserting the highest morality, and is proof of the danger
of irresponsible power to possessor and victim alike, and the ease
with which the true meaning of right and wrong is lost under such
circumstances.
The theory of the church that as the fall and sin really existed,
priestly immorality became a necessity in order to perpetuate the
world even through a continuance of the original sin, was a species of
fine casuistry for which the church in all ages has been remarkable.
The general tenor of the church against marriage, together with its
teaching of woman’s greater sinfulness, were the chief causes which
undermined the morality of the christian world for fifteen hundred
years. With these doctrines were also taught the duty of woman to
sacrifice herself in every way for man, a theory of which the present
century is not unfamiliar. The loss of chastity in woman was held as
light sin in comparison to the degradation that marriage would bring
to a priest, and young girls ruined by some candidate or priest,
considered themselves doing God service in refusing a marriage that
would cause the expulsion of the priestly lover from the ecclesiastical
order. With woman’s so-called “divine,” but rather demoniac
self-sacrifice, Heloise chose to be deemed the mistress of Abelard
rather than by acknowledging their marriage destroy his prospects of
advancement in the church.[79]
The State sustained the Church in its opposition to marriage, and we
find the anomaly of marriage for political reasons where the parties
forever separated at the altar. St. Jerome, and at a later date St.
Dunstan, sustained the policy of such marriages. The history of Britain
gives instances of early queens thus separating from their newly made
husbands at the close of the ceremony, dedicating their lives to
celibacy and their fortunes to the church.
Nor did this institution neglect that large class of women to whom
marriage was made impossible because of the numbers of men to whom
it was forbidden. After the Lateran Council had permanently settled
the action of the church in favor of priestly celibacy, great effort
was made to draw women of wealth into a monastic life. Religion was
the chief method of acquiring power, and as an abbess of a religious
institution it opened opportunity for power to women scarcely possible
outside the church. The two highest womanly virtues inculcated by the
church were a celibate life and liberality to religious houses. It was
taught if anything could possibly mitigate women’s sin through Eve’s
transgression, it was the observance of these two conditions.
To the student this is the most remarkable period in the history of
the church, not merely as a culmination of the effort of centuries in
finally deciding the questions of celibacy, so long agitated with such
varying results, but in the immediate change and permanent settlement
it brought about in regard to other church dogmas, as well as its
pronounced influence in causing the Lutheran Reformation.
It was asserted that the spiritual office of the priest sanctified
sin; it became a maxim that whatever a priest might do was holy; by
their taking part in lasciviousness it became consecration. To disobey
a priest was to endanger salvation; it was libellous and treasonable
to question the purity of a priest’s motives, hence religion became a
screen for all vice and a source of moral degradation to all woman. To
such extent was belief carried in the superior purity of a celibate
life that but little more than 300 years since a man was burned at the
stake in England for asserting the lawfulness of priestly marriage.[80]
The action of the council of 1215, so powerfully sustaining the olden
claims of the superior holiness of celibacy soon created a belief in
the inability of a priest to commit sin. During the middle ages his
infallibility was constantly maintained, his superior sanctity in
consequence of his celibacy universally asserted. It was impossible
not to connect the idea of great wickedness with those incapable of
entering this holy office, and as woman by virtue of sex was prohibited
priestly functions, and as her marriage had been declared a necessity
for the world, these conditions were used as arguments against her. The
conscience and morality of tens of thousands were destroyed by these
teachings, enforced as they were by all the dread authority of the
church. The christian world was under entire control of a class whose
aim was chiefly that of personal aggrandizement, and that hesitated at
no means for securing wealth and power.
The Inquisition was firmly established; under its reign six hundred
methods of torture were known, and it was conducted with such secrecy
that not until dragged before it were many of its victims aware they
were under suspicion. Even when imprisoned in its torture chambers,
the charges against them were kept secret in hopes thereby to compel
self-accusation upon other points. The inferiority of woman, her
proneness to evil and readiness to listen to all suggestions of Satan,
was taught with renewed vigor and power for evil.
The priest regarded himself as the direct representative of divinity;
the theory of infallibility was not confined to the pope, but all
dignitaries of the church made the same claim. Asserting themselves
incapable of wrong doing, maintaining an especial sanctification by
reason of their celibacy, priests nevertheless made their holy office
a cover for the most degrading sensuality. Methods were taken to
debauch the souls as well as the bodies of women. Having first taught
their special impurity, it was not maintained that immorality with a
priest was not sin, but on the contrary hallowed the woman, giving
her particular claim upon heaven. It was taught that sin could only
be killed through sin.[81] The very incarnation was used as a means
of weakening woman’s virtue. That Christ did not enter the world
through the marriage relation, stamped with christian honor a system
of concubinage in the church, for whose warrant woman was pointed to
the Virgin Mary. As an enforcement of her duty of absolute surrender
of soul and body to the will of the priest the course of the Virgin
was adduced, “who obeyed the angel Gabriel and conceived without fear
of evil, for impurity could not come of a spirit.”[82] The chastity of
concubinage and the unchasteness of marriage was constantly asserted
by the church, and thus the mysteries upon which its foundations were
laid were used by it for the degradation of woman, who was at all times
depicted as a being of no self-individuality, but one who had been
created solely for man’s pleasure. As late as the seventeenth century,
it was taught that a priest could commit no sin. This old doctrine took
new strength from the Illumes, who claimed an inner divine light.[83]
We find reference to priestly immorality and claim of infallibility
among old writers, Boccaccio in many of his stories putting arguments
of this kind in the mouth of his priestly characters.[84]
It was asserted too that sin was of the body alone, the soul knowing
nothing, partaking nothing of it. As an argument in favor of woman’s
throwing herself entirely in the hands of priests for immoral purposes,
it was declared that, “The devout having offered up and annihilated
their own selves exist no longer but in God; thenceforth they can do
no wrong. The better part of them is so divine that it no longer knows
what the other is doing.”
In confirmation of this doctrine it was said that Jesus threw off his
clothing and was scourged naked before the people. The result of this
teaching was the almost universal immorality of christendom. Under
such religious doctrine it could but be expected that the laity would
closely imitate the priesthood. Europe became a continent of moral
corruption, of which proof is overwhelming. Could we but relegate
christian immorality to the dark ages we might somewhat palliate it
under plea of ignorance. But unfortunately for such claim ample proof
is found to show that the enlightenment of modern civilization has not
yet been able to overthrow the basic idea upon which this immorality
rests. Amid the material and intellectual advancement of the last
hundred years we find spiritual darkness still profound in the church
and the true foundation of immorality almost unrecognized.
As long as the church maintains the doctrine that woman was created
inferior to man, and brought sin into the world rendering the sacrilige
of the Son of God a necessity, just so long will the foundation of vice
and crime of every character remain. Not until the exact and permanent
equality of woman with man is recognized by the church, aye, even more,
the greater power and capacity of woman in the creative function,
together with the accountability of man to woman in everything relating
to the birth of a new being, is fully accepted as a law of nature, will
vice and crime disappear from the world. Until that time has fully
come, prostitution in its varied forms will continue to exist, together
with alms-houses, reformatories, jails, prisons, hospitals and asylums
for the punishment, reformation or care of the wretched beings who have
come into existence with an inheritance of disease and crime because of
church theory and church teaching.
The system of celibacy produced its same effects wherever preached. So
constant was the system of debauchery practiced in England during the
reign of Henry VII that the gentlemen and farmers of Carnarvonshire
laid complaint against the clergy of systematically seducing their
wives and daughters.[85] Women were everywhere looked upon as slaves
and toys, to obey, to furnish pleasure and amusement, and to be cast
aside at will. Under the religious teaching of christendom it could not
but be expected that the laity would closely imitate the priesthood,
and to victimize women became the custom of all men.[86] When a priest
failed to take a concubine his parishoners compelled him to do so
in order to preserve the chastity of their own wives and daughters.
Draper[87] tells us that in England alone 100,000 women became victims
of the priests. Houses of vile character were maintained for especial
use of the priesthood. The marriage of a priest was called a deception
of the devil who thus led him into an adulterous relation[88] for sake
of alienating property from the church.
This mediaeval doctrine that sin can only be killed through sin, finds
expression today not alone in religion[89] but in society novels;[90]
its origin, like many other religious wrongs, being directly traceable
to the teaching of St. Paul.[91]
The incontinence of these celibate priests ultimately became so great
a source of scandal to the church that it was obliged to take action.
Edicts and bulls were fulminated from the papal chair, although the
facts of history prove Rome itself, its popes and its cardinals, to
have been sunk in the grossest immorality. Spain, the seat of the
Inquisition, and at that period the very heart of Christendom, was
the first country toward which investigation was turned, Pope Paul IV
issuing a bull against those confessors who solicited women, provoking
them to dissolute action. When this bull of investigation first
appeared in Spain, it was accompanied by an edict commanding all those
who knew of monks or priests that had thus abused the confessional to
make it known within thirty days under grievous penalty. The terrible
power of the church intimidated those who otherwise for very shame
would surely have buried the guilt of their priests in oblivion,
and so great was the number of women who thronged the palace of the
Inquisition in the city of Seville alone, that twenty secretaries
with as many Inquisitors were not sufficient to take the deposition
of the witnesses. A second, a third and a fourth thirty days were
appointed for investigation, so great were the number of women making
complaint.[92] So large a number of priests were implicated that after
a four months’ examination, the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition put
a stop to the proceedings, commanding that all those immoralities
and crimes against womanhood only rendered possible in the name of
religion, and which has been proven by legal evidence, should be buried
in eternal oblivion. The deposition of thousands of women seduced by
their confessors, was not deemed sufficient evidence for removal of the
guilty priests from their holy offices. Occasionally a single priest
was suspended for a short time but in a few months restored again to
his priestly position.[93]
It was not uncommon for women to be openly carried off by priests,
their husbands and fathers threatened with vengeance in cases of their
attempted recovery.[94] During the height of the Inquisitorial power
it was not rare for a family to be aroused in the night by an ominous
knock and the cry “The Holy Fathers, open the door!”
To this dread mandate there could be but one reply, as both temporal
and spiritual power lay in their hands. A husband, father or son might
thus be seized by veiled figures; or as frequently a loved wife or
young daughter was dragged from her bed, her fate ever to remain a
mystery. When young and beautiful these women were taken to replenish
the Inquisitional harem; the “dry pan,” “boiling in oil,” and similar
methods of torture, threatened, in order to produce compliance upon
part of wretched victims. No Turkish seraglio with bow-string and sack
ever exhibited as great an amount of diabolical wickedness as the
prison-harems of the Inquisition. As late as the seventeenth century
Pope Gregory XV commanded strict enforcement of the bull against
priestly lechery not alone in Spain, but in all other parts of the
Christian world. In England after the reformation, the same condition
was found to exist.[95] But edicts against lasciviousness were vainly
issued by a church whose foundation is a belief in the supremacy of one
sex over the other, and that woman brought sin into the world through
having seduced man into the marriage relation. Despite the advance of
knowledge and civilization the effects of such teachings are the same
now as during the middle ages, as fully proven at time of separation
between the temporal and spiritual power in Italy;[96] and these
proofs are taken from Catholic sources. In 1849 when the Roman people
opened the palace of the Inquisition there was found in the library
a department entitled “Summary of Solicitations,” being a record of
cases in which women had been solicited to acts of criminality by
their confessors in the pontifical state.[97] The testimony of Luther
as to the moral degradation of the church at time of the Reformation
has never been invalidated,[98] and is entirely in accord with its
character throughout history.
That the same iniquities are connected with the confessional today, we
learn from the testimony of those priests who have withdrawn from the
communion of the Catholic Church; Father Hyacinthe publicly declaring
that ninety-nine out of one hundred priests live in sin with the women
they have destroyed. Another priest following the example of Father
Hyacinthe in marrying, asserted that he took this step in order to get
out of the ultramontane slough and remain an honest man.[99] That the
Catholic Church of the present day bears the same general character
it did during the middle ages is proven from much testimony. Among
the latest and most important witnesses, for minuteness and fullness
of detail, is Rev. Charles Chiniquy in his works “The Priest, The
Woman and the Confessional,” “Fifty Years of Rome,” etc. Now over
eighty years of age, Rev. Mr. Chiniquy was for more than fifty years
a Catholic priest of influence and high reputation, known in Canada,
where thousands of drunkards reformed under his teaching, as the
“Apostle of Temperance.” Becoming convinced of the immorality of the
Romish Church, he left it in 1856, taking with him five thousand French
Canadians with whom he settled at St. Anne, Kankakee County, Illinois.
Having united with a branch of the Protestant church, he was invited
to Scotland to take part in the Tercentenary of the Reformation, and
later to England, where he lectured on invitation of ministers of every
evangelical denomination.[100] His “Fifty Years of Rome” indissolubly
links his name with that of Abraham Lincoln, through the information
there made known regarding the Catholic plot for President Lincoln’s
assassination.
It is as fully a law of moral as of material nature that from the same
causes the same effects follow. In his work upon the confessional[101]
Rev. Mr. Chiniquy relates incidents coming under his own personal
knowledge while he was still a catholic priest regarding its present
abuses. The character of the questions made a duty of the priest
to ask during confession, are debasing in the extreme, their whole
tendency towards the undermining of morality. Too broadly indelicate
for translation these priestly instructions are hidden in Latin, but
are no less made the duty of a priest to understand and use. In 1877, a
number of prominent women of Montreal, Canada, addressed a declaration
and protest to the bishop of that diocese against the abuses of the
confessional of which their own experience had made them cognizant.
DECLARATION
To His Lordship Bourget, Bishop of Montreal
_Sir_:—Since God in his infinite mercy has been pleased to
show us the errors of Rome, and has given us strength to
abandon them to follow Christ, we deem it our duty to say
a word on the abominations of the confessional. You well
know that these abominations are of such a nature that it
is impossible for a woman to speak of them without a blush.
How is it that among civilized christian men one has so far
forgotten the rule of common decency as to force women to
reveal to unmarried men, under the pains of eternal damnation,
their most secret thoughts, their most sinful desires and
their most private actions?
How unless there be a brazen mask on your priest’s face dare
they go out into the world having heard the tales of misery
which cannot but defile the hearing, and which the women
cannot relate without having laid aside modesty and all sense
of shame. The harm would not be so great should the Church
allow no one but the woman to accuse herself. But what shall
we say of the abominable questions that are put to them and
which they must answer?
Here, the laws of common decency strictly forbid us to enter
into details. Suffice it to say, were husbands cognizant of
one-tenth of what is going on between the confessor and their
wives, they would rather see them dead than degraded to such a
degree.
As for us, daughters and wives from Montreal who have known
by experience the filth of the confessional, we cannot
sufficiently bless God for having shown us the error of our
ways in teaching us that it was not at the feet of a man as
weak and as sinful as ourselves, but at the feet of Christ
alone that we must seek salvation.
Julia Herbert,
Marie Rogers,
J. Rocham,
Louise Picard,
Francoise Dirringer,
Eugenie Martin, and
forty-three others.[102]
In reply to a letter of inquiry addressed by myself to Rev. Mr.
Chiniquy, the following answer was received.
St. Anne, Kankakee County, Illinois
January 4, 1887
Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage,
Madam
In answer to your honored letter of the 29th Dec. I hasten to
say: _First._ The women of Montreal signed the declaration
you see in ‘The Priest, the Woman and the Confessional,’ in
the fall of 1877. I do not remember the day. _Second._ As it
is ten years since I left Montreal to come to my Missionary
field of Illinois, I could not say if these women are still in
Montreal or not. Great, supreme efforts were secretly made by
the Bishop of Montreal to show that these names were forged
in order to answer and confound me, but the poor Bishop found
that the document was too correct, authentic and public to be
answered and attacked, and he remained mute and confounded,
for many of these women were well known in the city.
_Third._ You will find the answer to your other questions,
in the volume ‘Fifty Years in the Church of Rome,’ which I
addressed you by today’s mail.
Respectfully yours in Christ,
C. Chiniquy
The same assertion of priestly infallibility is made today as it
was centuries ago, the same declaration of change of nature through
priestly celibacy. Upon this question Mr. Chiniquy says:
If any one wants to hear an eloquent oration let him go
where the Roman Catholic priest is preaching on the divine
institution of auricular confession. They make the people
believe that the vow of perpetual chastity changes their
nature, turns them into angels and puts them above the common
faults of the fallen children of Adam. With a brazen face when
they are interrogated on that subject, they say that they have
special graces to remain pure and undefiled in the midst of
the greatest dangers; that the Virgin Mary to whom they are
consecrated is their powerful advocate to obtain from her son
that superhuman virtue of Chastity; that what would be a cause
of sin and perdition to common men is without peril and danger
for a true son of Mary.[103]
A work entitled “Mysteries of the Neapolitan Convents,” its author
Henrietta Carracciola, a woman of the purest blood of the princes of
Italy, daughter of the Marshal Carracciola, Governor of the Province of
Pasi in Italy, is quoted from, by Rev. Mr. Chiniquy, in confirmation of
his statements as to the continued impurity of the confessional.
Finally another priest, the most annoying of all for his
obstinate assiduity, sought to secure my affections at all
cost. There was not an image profane poetry could afford
him, nor a sophism he could borrow from rhetoric, no wily
interpretation he could give to the word of God, which he did
not employ to convert me to his wishes. Here is an example of
his logic:—
“Dear daughter,” said he to me one day, “knowest thou who thy
God truly is?”
“He is the Creator of the Universe,” I answered dryly.
“No-no-no-no! that is not enough,” he replied laughing at
my ignorance; “God is Love, but love in the abstract which
receives its incarnation in the mutual affection of two
hearts which idolize each other. You must then not only love
God in the abstract existence, but must also love him in his
incarnation, that is, in the exclusive love of a man who
adores you. _Quod Deus est amor nec colitus nisi amando._”
“Then,” I replied, “a woman who adores her own lover would
adore Divinity itself?” “Assuredly,” reiterated the priest
over and over again, taking courage from my remark and
chuckling with what seemed to him the effect of his catechism.
“In that case,” said I hastily, “I should select for my lover
rather a man of the world than a priest.”
“God preserve you, my daughter! God preserve you from that
sin. To love a man of the world, a sinner, a wretch, an
unbeliever, an infidel! Why, you would go immediately to hell.
The love of a priest is a sacred love, while that of a profane
man is infamy. The priest purifies his affections daily in
communion with the Holy Spirit.... If you cannot love me
because I am your confessor, I will find means to assist you
to get rid of your scruples. We will place the name of Jesus
Christ before all our affectionate demonstrations and thus our
love will be a grateful offering to the Lord and will ascend
fragrant with perfume to Heaven like the smoke of the incense
of the Sanctuary. Say to me for example ‘I love you in Jesus
Christ, last night I dreamed of you in Jesus Christ,’ and you
will have tranquil conscience, because in doing this God will
sanctify every transport of your love.”
Rev. Mr. Chiniquy who in his fifty years of Romish priesthood possessed
every opportunity for knowing the truth, does not hesitate to affirm
that the popes are today of the same general immoral character they
were in the earlier centuries of the Church. He says:
Let not my readers be deceived by the idea that the popes of
Rome in our days are much better than those of the ninth,
tenth, eleventh and twelfth centuries. They are absolutely the
same—the only difference is that today they take a little more
care to conceal their secret orgies. Go to Italy and there the
Roman Catholics themselves will show you the two beautiful
daughters whom the late Pope Pius IX had from two of his
mistresses. Inquire from those who have personally known Pope
Gregory XVI the predecessor of Pius IX; after they will have
given you the history of his mistresses, one of whom was the
wife of his barber, they will tell you that he was one of the
greatest drunkards in Italy.[104]
The views of the Catholic Church in regard to marriage of the
priesthood was recently demonstrated in the United States, 1885, by
the persecution of a priest of the Uniate Greek Church sent as a
missionary from Austria to Pennsylvania. The Greek Church, it must be
remembered, permits a single marriage to a priest. The Uniate while in
this respect following the discipline of the Greek Church, yet admits
the supremacy of the Pope which the regular Greek Church does not. The
Uniate Greek Church accepts, as binding, all the decisions of Rome
subsequent to the division between the eastern and the western parts of
christendom. Endowed with authority from both branches, Father Wolonski
came to this country accompanied by his wife, in full expectation of
fellowship with his catholic brethren. His first contrary experience
occurred in Philadelphia when Archbishop Ryan of the Cathedral refused
all intercourse with him because of his marriage. Reaching Shenandoah
where commissioned by his own Austrian Bishop, he discovered himself
still under ban; the resident priest of the catholic church having
warned his congregation under pain of excommunication to shun both
himself and his church, upon the ground that the Roman Church under no
circumstances tolerated a married priest. Eventually the subject grew
to such proportions that Father Wolonski was recalled, and an unmarried
priest sent in his stead.[105]
From the experience of Father Wolonski less than a decade since, with
the bitter hostility shown by the church towards Father Hyacinthe,
we find that a belief in the special holiness of celibacy is as
dominant in the Catholic church today as at any period of its history;
concurrent testimony teaching us that its greatest evils remain the
same as of old. It is less than twenty years since the whole christian
world was interested in a suit brought against the heirs of the
deceased Cardinal Antonelli in order to secure recognition of his
daughter’s claim to inheritance. This girl was everywhere spoken of by
the Catholic Church as “a sacrilegious child,” that is, a being who had
violated sacred things by coming into existence. The destruction of her
mother’s life, her own illegitimacy, the wrong done to her mother’s
family and to society were held as of no moment beside the fact that
her claims, if allowed, would take property from the church. The love
of the Great Cardinal for this girl’s mother was fully proven, but
the church having established celibacy in order that it might control
the property of its priests, was not inclined to permit any portion
to be diverted from that source. Honesty, justice, and the ties of
natural affection, now as of yore are not part of the Church system. In
consequence, this suit of the illegitimate child of the Great Cardinal
Secretary, filled not alone Italy, but the whole Catholic world with
disgrace.
Among the countries now striving to free themselves from Church
dominion is Mexico. A letter to the New York Herald, winter of 1892,
regarding the revolution there in progress, said of Diaz:
Instead of his being assisted by the Church it has been his
bitterest and most relentless enemy and opponent. The Church
in Mexico is opposed to all enlightenment of the people. The
clergy, if they can be honored with that name, fight all
improvements. They want no railways or telegraphs and when
he adopted a system of compulsory education the war began in
earnest. Diaz was determined, however, and he retaliated by
closing up the convents and prohibiting the establishment of
monasteries. Being further opposed in his efforts at reform
and defied by the priests he put hundreds of them in Pueblo
in jail and prohibited the ringing of Church bells in certain
localities. He forcibly impressed on them the fact that he was
running Mexico, not they. He gave them to understand that his
idea of Christianity was, that priests should preach Christ
crucified and not revolution and infraction of the laws.
In Mexico, priests can keep mistresses with impunity. From
a church to a gambling-table is but a step, and the priests
gamble with the rest. The rentals of houses of ill-fame, of
gambling-houses, of bull-pens all go to a church which is
supposed to teach religion. Because Diaz, a catholic himself,
will not tolerate such crimes under the guise of religion
he is fought by the church and is the recipient of their
anathemas.
Take the leading church in Monterey outside of the cathedral.
You step from the church-door to a plaza owned by the church
and in which stand fifty tents in which are conducted monte,
roulette and other games of chance. Behind this stand the
bull-pen, and the profits and rentals go to the Church.
With all these lights the most plausible inference or theory
is that the clerical party, as they see all these privileges
being swept away, will cheerfully contribute the sinews of war
with which to carry on a revolution against Diaz. They have
agents in Europe and the money can come through that source
without detection.
The agent of the Clerical Party in Europe is the Church itself. As a
body, it has ever opposed advancement and reform. It anathematized the
printing press as an invention of the devil and has steadily opposed
education of the people. Its work is best done in the darkness of
ignorance and superstition. For this cause it has opposed all new
discoveries in science, all reforms of whatever character.[106] Not
by the Catholic Church alone, but under the “Reformation,” as we have
seen, the same prohibition of the Bible to common people, has existed
the same resistance to education of the masses, the same opposition
to anti-slavery, to temperance, to woman’s demand for equality of
opportunity with man. The general nature of the church does not change
with change of name. Looking backward through history we even find the
same characteristics under the patriarchate; love of power, greed for
money, and intense selfishness combined in a general disregard for the
rights of others.
M. Renan’s drama, “L’Abbesse de Jouarre,” was written because he
wished to prove the worthlessness of those vows imposed on catholic
priests and nuns, as well as show the bondage under which they held the
feminine conscience, while the masculine conscience throws them aside.
It is not alone the nuns whose conscience is bound, but all feminine
members of the catholic church are more closely held in a spiritual
bondage, than the male members of that church. In 1885, a letter from
Chili to the _New York Sun_ graphically pictured certain Chilian
women penitents who are known by a peculiar dress they are required to
wear.[107] Others whose sins are so great that they cannot be purged by
a penitential dress, retire for a season to the “Convent of Penitents,”
where by mortification of the body they hope to gain absolution for
the soul. Still more severe than this retreat are other convents known
as “Houses of Detention,” where wayward daughters are sent, and young
mothers without husbands are cared for. But the whole country of Chili
fails to show a similar dress, or house of penitence, or correction for
men. Shame and penance, equally with sin, have been relegated by the
church to women alone.
The confessional is not frequented by men, and mass is but seldom
attended by them. For this laxity a double reason exists: First,
immorality in men is not looked upon as contrary to its discipline.
Second, through woman having been trained to a more sensitive
conscience than man, the confessional wrests secrets from her lips,
which gives the church knowledge of all it wishes to learn in regard
to the family. No more certain system could have been devised for the
destruction of woman’s self-respect than the one requiring penance from
her for sins the church passes lightly over in man. Nor would penance
of this character be demanded from women were the offices of the church
open to her the same as to man. No greater crime against humanity has
ever been known than the division of morality into two codes, the
strict for woman, the lax for man. Nor has woman been the sole sufferer
from this creation of Two Moral Codes within the Christian Church.
Through it man has lost fine discrimination between good and evil, and
the Church itself as the originator of this distinction in sin upon
the trend of sex, has become the creator and sustainer of injustice,
falsehood and the crimes into which its priests have most deeply sunk.
Nor is this condition of the past. As late as the fall of 1892 a number
of articles appeared in Canadian papers openly accusing the catholic
priesthood of that province of the grossest immorality.[108] That
priestly celibacy yet continues in the Romish Church is not a subject
of surprise, when we realize the immense power and wealth it has been
enabled to secure through its means; but it is one of astonishment,
carrying with it a premonition of danger, that we now see a similar
tendency in the ritualistic portion of the Episcopal Church, both in
England and the United States. The evils of monasticism, although less
potent than during the middle ages, are still great, and in finding
entrance into Protestant denominations are a fresh warning of their
dangerous tendency. The experience of the past should not appeal to
us in vain. We have noticed the perils to society arising from those
classes of persons who, under plea of religion, evade the duties of
family and social life. No crime against the world can be greater than
the deliberate divestment of responsibility by one’s self, because
tired of the warfare of life, that struggle which comes to every human
being; the becoming “fascinated with the conceptions of an existence”
outside of ordinary cares; and the entrance into an order in which
one’s own personal responsibility is largely surrendered to others
is not alone a crime against the state, but a sin against one’s own
self and against humanity. An order which thereafter assumes the task
of directing the thoughts and lives of its members into a channel
of “repose and contentment” as certain protestant orders do, is one
of the dangerous religious elements of the present day. No crime
against one’s self or against society can be greater than this. In the
Ritualistic Episcopal Church are to be found monks and sisterhoods
upon the celibate plan, confessors and penance, all of them primal
elements in moral and spiritual degradation. If religion has a lesson
to teach mankind, it is that of personal responsibility; it is that
of the worth and duty of the individual; it is that each human being
is alone accountable for his or her course in life; it is the lesson
of the absolute equality of each human being with every other human
being in relation to these cardinal points. The lesson should have been
learned ere this, that ecclesiastical pretense of divinely appointed
power has ever made the priesthood arrogant, coarse and tyrannical;
the male laity dependent and dissimulating; woman, self-distrustful
and timorous, believing in the duty of humiliation and self-sacrifice;
that her life is not to be lived primarily for herself alone, but that
her very right to existence is dependent upon the benefit thereby to
accrue to some other person. Today, as of old, the underlying idea of
monasticism, of “brotherhoods,” “sisterhoods,” and their ilk even in
Protestant denominations, is the divine authority of some priestly
superior, and that the power of remitting sins inheres in some system
under control of some priest. The Ritualistic party of the Episcopal
Church, equally with the Roman Catholic Church, makes frequent
reference to these words of Christ—St. John XX, XXIII—“Whatever sins
you remit they are remitted unto them, and whatsoever sins you retain
are retained,” thus premising the divine power of the priesthood.
_Chapter Three_
+Canon Law+
The earliest Saxon laws were almost entirely ecclesiastical,[1] their
basis seeming to have been payment of tithes to the Church and support
of the pope through what was known as the “hearth penny” to St. Peter.
Marriage was by no means allowed to escape general ecclesiastical
control, its legitimacy being made to depend upon the sanction and
services of a priest.[2] This we learn from Reeves, whose authority is
indisputable,[3] therefore we discover that even long before marriage
was constituted one of the sacraments, celibacy or the confessional
established, the Church had perceived the great increase in its
authority to be brought about by gaining control of the marriage
ceremony and making its legitimacy depend upon the services of a
priest. This was a material step towards the subjugation of mankind;
one whose dire consequences have not yet received due consideration.
When Rome became a Christian State, and the phallic cross triumphed
over the gods and goddesses of old, the condition of woman under the
civil law became more degraded. The change from ancient civilization
to that renewed barbarism at an early age of the Christian era, which
so many writers note without perceiving its cause, is to be found in
the low conception of womanhood inculcated by the Church. Ignorance,
superstition, falsehood and forgery united in creating new codes of
law, new customs of society, new habits of thought, which, having for
centuries been imposed upon mankind by the united force of the Church
and the State, still continue their impress upon modern life and law.
Among general canons we find that “No woman may approach the altar.”
“A woman may not baptize without extreme necessity.” “Woman may not
receive the Eucharist under a black veil.” “Woman may not receive the
Eucharist in _morbo suo menstrule_.”
At the Synod or Council of Elvira,[4] 305 or 306, several restrictive
canons were formulated against woman. Under Canon 81, she was forbidden
to write in her own name to lay christians, but only in the name of her
husband. Women were not to receive letters of friendship from any one
addressed only to themselves.
From the commencement of the fifth century, the Christian clergy
acquired a powerful influence in Rome. Bishops and priests were the
municipal magistrates of the Roman Empire, of which little now remained
except its municipal government; thus the Church in reality became
Rome, and Rome the Church. It has been declared difficult to fix with
precision the period at which ecclesiastics first began to claim
exemption from civil jurisdiction. The Synod of Paris, 615, seems to
have secured to the clergy the privilege of being brought before mixed
tribunals in all cases which had theretofore belonged to the civil
judge alone. Bishops acquired greater power from having an oversight
over the whole administration of justice committed to them, while
their spiritual judgments were rendered more effective by the addition
of excommunication to civil punishments. The State, at first holding
repression over the Church, added to its powers by relieving the clergy
from all civil duties,[5] thus tending to make of them a body exterior
to the civil government. This division was farther increased through
the emperors giving confirmation to the decisions pronounced by bishops
in ecclesiastical affairs, and also when they were chosen umpires in
civil suits; the tendency of this action was towards the creation of
an ecclesiastical law with separate powers from the civil law. Another
step towards the separation of civil from ecclesiastical law and the
supremacy of the latter, was made when in cases of discipline the
clergy were allowed to come under the authority and supervision of the
Spiritual Courts.[6]
As soon as Christianity became the religion of the State, this power
was still farther increased by the permission accorded ecclesiastics to
accept gifts, inherit and hold property; the purity of clerical motives
being thereby greatly lessened, as covetous and unscrupulous persons
were forthwith attracted to this profession. The law of tithes was
introduced by Charlemagne, and his edicts largely increased clerical
power. The compilation of a Code of Canon Law was begun as early as
the ninth century,[7] by which period the olden acknowledged rights of
the clergy, those of superintending morals and interference on behalf
of the unfortunate, had largely been lost sight of, or diverted from
their proper course by a system of ecclesiastical tyranny which created
an order of morals, whose sole design was that of building up priestly
power.
The complete inferiority and subordination of the female sex was
maintained both by civil and common law. It was a principle of common
law that sons should be admitted to an inheritance before daughters.[8]
This distinction created by the Church in the interests of the class
which was alone admitted to the priesthood, thus placing the possession
of wealth in the hands of man, did much towards keeping woman in a
subordinate condition. In accordance with natural law, the person not
owning property is less interested in the welfare of the State than
the one possessing it, a denial of the rights of ownership acting
prejudicially upon the individual.
Ecclesiastical or Canon Law[9] made its greatest encroachments at the
period when Chivalry[10] was at its height; the outward show of respect
and honor to woman under chivalry keeping pace in its false pretence
with the destruction of her legal rights. The general conception in
regard to woman was so degraded at this period that a “Community of
Women” was proposed, to whom all men should act in the relation of
husbands.[11] This plan was advocated by Jean de Meung, the “Poet of
Chivalry,” in his famous _Roman de la Rose_. Christine of Pisa, a woman
of learning and remarkable force of character, the first strictly
literary woman of western Europe, wrote a work in defense of her sex
against the general libidinous character of the age.[12] Her opposition
to the debasing theories of the “Romance” marks the later period of
woman’s entrance into literature, and is an era from which dates the
modern intellectual development of Europe.[13] Efforts to utterly
crush the moral rectitude of women through the adoption of those base
ideas of phallic origin, having been the systematic course of the
Church, the State and society through many hundred years, it is a most
notable proof of her innate disbelief in this teaching, that woman’s
first literary work of modern times was written in opposition to such
a powerfully sustained theory as to her innate depravity. Christine
asserted the common humanity of woman, entirely repudiating the sensual
ideas of the times.
To the credit of mankind it must be recorded that the laity did not
unresistingly yield to priestly power, but made many attempts to
take their temporal concerns from under priestly control. But under
the general paucity of education, and the abnegation of the will so
sedulously inculcated by the Church as the supreme duty of the laity,
its dread power brought to bear in the enforcement of its teaching by
terrifying threats of excommunication and future eternal torment, the
rights of even the male portion of the people were gradually lost. The
control of the priesthood over all things of a temporal as well as
of a spiritual nature, tended to make them a distinct body from the
laity. In pursuance of its aims for universal dominion, the Church saw
the necessity of assuming control of temporal affairs. Rights were
divided into those pertaining to persons and things; the rights of
persons belonged to the priesthood alone, but inasmuch as every man,
whatever his condition, could become a priest, and no woman however
learned or pious or high in station could be admitted to its ranks,
the whole tendency of ecclesiastical law was to divide mankind into
a holy or divine sex, and an unholy or impious one.[14] Thus Canon
Law still farther separated those whose interests were the same,
creating an antagonism in the minds of all men against all women, which
bearing upon all business of ordinary life between men and women, fell
with its greatest weight upon women. It corrupted the Common Law of
England, and perverted the civil codes of other nations. Under Canon
Law wives were deprived of the control of both person and property,
while sisters were not allowed to inherit with brothers; property,
according to old ecclesiastical language, going “to the worthiest of
blood.” Blackstone acknowledges that this distinction between brothers
and sisters reflects shame upon England, and was no part of the old
Roman law, under which the children of a family inherited equally
without distinction of sex.[15] It was as late as 1879 before the Canon
Law in regard to the sole inheritance of sons was repealed in one of
the Swiss Cantons. The influence of this law in creating selfishness
was manifested by the opposition it met, brothers piteously asserting
ruin to themselves by this act of justice to their sisters. Whenever
the Canon Law is analyzed it is found destructive to the higher moral
sentiments of humanity. A woman was prohibited the priesthood, and as
the property of men entering orders became forfeited to the Church, the
real intent of this law—that of obtaining control of property—which
otherwise might have escaped the grasping hand of the church, is easily
discernible. From its first theory of woman’s inferiority to its last
struggle for power at the present day, the influence and action of the
Patriarchate is clearly seen. The touch of the Church upon family life,
inheritance and education, increased the power of the Patriarchate.
As celibacy proved a lucrative method of bringing wealth into its
coffers, so marriage was early made a source of revenue to the Church,
Canon Law creating it a sacrament to be performed at the church door.
Owing, however, to the innate sinfulness of marriage, this sacrament
was not for many years allowed to take place within the sacred building
dedicated to God, and deemed too holy to permit the entrance of a woman
within its sacred walls at certain periods of her life. In order to
secure full control of this relation marriage unblessed by a priest
was declared to be concubinage, and carried with it deprivation of
church privileges, which the ignorance of the people held to be of
vital importance. In entering this relation the wife was compelled to
relinquish her name, her property, the control of her person, her own
sacred individuality, and to promise obedience to her husband in all
things. Certain hours of the day to suit the convenience of priests
were set aside as canonical, after which time no marriage could be
celebrated.
Nor has this priestly control of marriage been confined to the
Catholics alone. Similar laws were extant after the Reformation. In
England 1603, Canon 62 instituted that under penalty of suspension
people could not marry except between the hours of eight and twelve
in the forenoon, nor was marriage then allowed in any private place
but must be performed at the church door.[16] The rapid growth of the
Canon Law in England must be ascribed to avarice; the denial to wives
of any right of property in the marital union being an example. At
this period Canon Law began to take cognizance of crimes, establishing
an equivalent in money for every species of wrong doing. The Church
not only remitted penalty for crimes already committed, but sold
indulgences for the commission of new ones. Its touch soon extended
to all relations of life. Marriages within the seventh degree were
forbidden by the Church as incestuous,[17] but to those able to pay
for such indulgences a dispensation for such “incestuous” marriage
was readily granted. No crime so great it could not be condoned for
money. Thus through Canon Law was seen the anomaly of legal marriage
between the laity pronounced concubinage, while the concubines of
priests were termed “wives.” As soon as the legality of marriage was
made dependent upon priestly sanction the door of gross immorality was
widely opened.[18] All restrictions connected with this relation were
made to fall with heaviest weight upon woman. Husbands were secured the
right of separation for causes not freeing wives; even the adultery
of the husband was not deemed sufficient cause unless he brought his
mistress into the same house with his wife.[19] Church and State
sustained each other. Conviction of the husband for a capital crime
gave the wife no release from the marriage bond, yet in case of the
husband’s treason, his innocent wife and children were robbed of all
share in the estate of the criminal husband and father and were reduced
to beggary, his estate escheating to the State. As under civil law
so under ecclesiastical, the Church recognized but slight difference
in the guilt of a contumacious husband and that of his pious wife
and children.[20] It was a principle of the Church that the innocent
must suffer for the guilty, especially when the innocent were women
and children powerless to aid themselves. At its every step Canon Law
injured woman. The clergy assuming to be an order of spiritual beings,
claimed immunity from civil law and allowed for themselves an “arrest
of judgment” ultimately enlarged so as to include all male persons who
could read and write. This arrest known as “benefit of clergy” was
denied to all women, who were liable to sentence of death for the first
crime of simple larceny, bigamy, etc.[21] Men who by virtue of sex
could become priests if able to read, were for the same crimes punished
by simple branding in the hand, or a few months imprisonment, while a
woman was drawn and burned alive. Did not history furnish much proof
of this character it would be impossible to believe that such barbaric
injustice was part of English law down to the end of the eighteenth
century. Woman first rendered ineligible to the priesthood, was then
punished for this ineligibility.
Blackstone recognizes as among the remarkable legal events of the
kingdom, the great alteration in the laws through the separation
of ecclesiastical courts from the civil. Matrimonial causes, or
injuries respecting the rights of marriage are recognized by him as
quite an undisturbed branch of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, from the
Church having so early converted this contract into a sacramental
ordinance.[22] During many centuries education was denied to woman in
Christian countries for reasons connected with her ineligibility to the
priesthood. The art of reading is by scholars believed to have been one
of the ancient mysteries taught at Eleusis and other olden temples;
learning, then, as at later periods, was in the hands of priests;
therefore the fact of being able to read was synonymous with the right
of entering the priesthood. This right appertained to women in many
ancient nations even under the Patriarchate. Higgins shows that the
word _Liber_ from which our words liberty, freedom, are derived, is
one and the same as _liber_, a book, and had close connection with the
intellectual, literary, and priestly class. As under Christian doctrine
the priesthood was denied to woman, so under the same rule learning was
prohibited to her.[23] To permit woman’s education under Christianity
would have been a virtual concession of her right to the priesthood. In
not allowing her “benefit of clergy” the priests were but consistent
with themselves and their pretensions as to the superior holiness of
the male sex. That a woman should be burned alive for a crime whose
only punishment for a man was a few months imprisonment, was in unison
with the whole teaching of the Christian Church regarding woman. Under
Canon Law many of the shields theretofore thrown about women were
removed. Punishment for crimes against them lessened, while crimes
committed by them were more severely punished. Rape, which in early
English history was termed felony, its penalty, death, was regarded in
a less heinous light under clerical rule.
Under the political constitutions of the Saxons, bishops had seats in
the national council and all laws were prefaced by a formal declaration
of their consent. By their influence it became a general law that a
woman could never take of an inheritance with a man, unless perhaps
by the particular and ancient customs of some cities or towns; while
daughters at a father’s death could be left totally unprovided for. A
law was enacted in the reign of Edward VI that no son should be passed
over in his father’s will unless disinherited in plain terms and a
just cause given. In case of daughters, sex was deemed “a just cause”
for leaving them in poverty. The earlier laws of the Danish Knut, or
Canute, show that the estate was then divided among all the children.
Under Canon Law, the testimony of a woman was not received in a court
of justice. She was depicted by the Church as the source of all evil,
the mother of every ill.[24] Legislation had the apparent aim of
freeing the clergy from all responsibility to the civil or moral law,
and placing the weight of every sin or crime upon woman.
A council at Tivoli in the Soisonnais, A.D. 909, presided over
by twelve bishops, promulgated a Canon requiring the oath of seven
persons to convict a priest with having lived with a woman; if their
oath failed of clearing him he was allowed to justify himself upon
his sole oath. Under Canon Law a woman could not bring an accusation
unless prosecuted for an injury done to herself. It is less than
thirty years since this law was extant in Scotland; and as late as
1878, that through the influence of Signor Morelli, the Italian
Parliament repealed the old restriction existant in that country
regarding woman’s testimony. Under Canon Law a woman could not be
witness in ecclesiastical or criminal suits, nor attest a will.[25]
To cast doubts upon a person’s word is indicative of the most supreme
contempt, importing discredit to the whole character. That a woman was
not allowed to attest a will, nor become a witness in ecclesiastical
suits, implied great degradation and is a very strong proof of the
low esteem in which woman was held both by State and Church. That a
priest could clear himself upon his own unsubstantiated oath is equally
significative of the respect in which this office was held, as well as
showing the degree in which all law was made to shield man and degrade
woman. When we find the oath of seven women required to nullify that
of one layman, we need no stronger testimony as to woman’s inequality
before the law. Canonists laid down the law for all matters of a
temporal nature whether civil or criminal. The buying and selling of
lands; leasing, mortgaging, contracts; the descent of inheritance; the
prosecution and punishment of murder; theft; detection of thieves;
frauds; those and many other objects of temporal jurisdiction were
provided for by Canon Law. It was intended that the clergy should come
entirely under its action, governed as a distinct people from the
laity. The principal efforts of the Canon Law towards which all its
enactments tended, was the subordination of woman[26] and the elevation
of the hierarchy. To secure these two ends the church did not hesitate
at forgery. For many hundred years a collection of Decretals, or what
were claimed as decrees of the early popes, carried great authority,
although later investigation has proven them forgeries.[27] Civil
as well as ecclesiastical laws were forged in the interest of the
priesthood; a noted instance, was the once famous law of Constantine
which endowed bishops with unlimited power, giving them jurisdiction in
all kinds of causes. This law declared that whatever is determined by
the judgment of bishops shall always be held as sacred and venerable,
and that in all kinds of causes whether they are tried according to the
pastoral or civil law that it is law to be forever observed by all.
The famous Seldon known as the “Light of England,” declares it to
have been “a prodigious and monstrous jurisdiction” assumed by the
priestly order, by means of falsehood and forgery.[28] The two classes
of temporal affairs that Spiritual Courts especially endeavored to
appropriate, were marriages, and wills, with everything bearing upon
them. In these the greatest oppression fell upon women.[29] Canon Law
gradually acquired enormous power through the control it gained over
wills, the guardianship of orphans, marriage, and divorce.[30] As soon
as ecclesiastical courts were divided from the temporal in England,[31]
a new set of principles and maxims began to prevail. This was one of
the first effects of the Conquest, but in 1272, Robert Kilmandy, Dean
of Canterbury, gave directions for the restoration and observation of
the ancient and neglected laws of Ecclesiastical Courts; of these the
Court of Arches was one of the most ancient. It is almost impossible to
fix the date of ecclesiastical rule, unless indeed we go back to the
very foundation of the church. As noted, the early Saxons were largely
governed by their priests. In 615, at the Paris synod, the clergy were
given authority in matters theretofore under civil power, while in
England we find priestly power to have been great during the fourth and
fifth centuries. Bracton sets the one hundred and fifty years between
the middle of the twelfth and end of the thirteenth centuries as the
period when this power took its greatest strides. At this time it
touched upon wills, inheritance, bequests, the legitimacy of children,
the marriage relation, and all family concerns, having broken over many
securities of the common law. This period covers the establishment of
celibacy with the trains of evils noted in the preceding chapter, when
the marriage of priests was declared invalid, their wives branded as
immoral persons, and stain of illegitimacy thrown upon their children.
Despite the guarantees of the Runnymede Charter, and the religious
rebellion of the Eighth Henry, despite the vigor of Elizabeth who bent
both priest and prelate to her fiery will, the influence of this period
moved down in line with the Reformation, and to the injury of woman,
successfully incorporated its worst features into the common law; the
new church, social and family life all partaking of this injustice.
A great number of canons were enacted after the reformation. These,
together with the foreign canons which had been adopted, were held
as part of the law of England.[32] The Episcopal church appropriated
numerous canons extant at the time of the reformation, several of these
having been created for the purpose of sustaining the church at a
period when the temporal power threatened encroachment. The archdeacon
of Surrey prepared a voluminous work upon this subject known as the
Jurus,[33] proving that these canons, decrees, etc., when falling into
disuse had been established by act of Parliament, as part of the law
of England. The preface of his work declared that it had been prepared
purely for the service of the clergy, and in support of the rights and
privileges of the Church. Thus we have direct proof of the adoption of
papal decrees as part of the government of the Protestant Episcopal
church,—the Anglican—and also as part of English law.
An act of Parliament at this age was regarded as synonymous with a law
of God. The Bible and the English government were upon the same plane,
each to be implicitly obeyed.[34] Canon Law thus firmly established
by act of Parliament, the union of Church and State complete, England
lost much of that civil freedom whose origin can be traced to the wise
legislation and love of freedom inhering in two British queens, Martia
and Boadicea. Suffering from cruel wrong, the latter rose in revolt
against the Romans. Riding among the squadrons of her army she thus
addressed them:
It will not be the first time, Britons, that you have been
victorious under the conduct of your queen. I come not here
as one of royal blood, to fight for empire or riches, but as
one of the common people to avenge the loss of their liberty,
the wrongs of myself and my children. If you Britons will but
consider the motives of our war, you will resolve to conquer
or die. Is it not much better to fall in the defense of
liberty than to be exposed to the outrages of the Romans? Such
at least is my resolution, you may if you please live and be
slaves.
But many historians date the entire subordination of the common law
to ecclesiasticism, to the reign of Stephen, who ascended to the
throne 1135, the fourth of the Anglo-Norman kings. In order to keep
the ranks of the church full, the bearing of children was enforced
upon women as a religious duty. No condition of health or distaste
for motherhood was admitted as exemption. Alike from the altar, the
confessional, and at the marital ceremony,[35] was this duty taught,
nor has such instruction even under the light of physiology and new
regard for personal rights, yet ceased.[36] No less is the unresisting
subjection of women in this relation indirectly or directly enforced by
the Protestant and the Greek churches as the law of the Bible and God.
“Increase and multiply”[37] has been the first commandment for woman,
held as far more binding upon her than the “Ten Words” of Mount Sinai.
Proof exists in abundance of a character impossible to present in this
work.
Under the general absence of learning and the equally general reverence
for whatever emanated from the church, minor ecclesiastics found
it in their power to promulgate doctrines to suit every new set of
circumstances; thus many laws aside from regularly promulgated canons,
came from time to time into force. When once applied they assumed all
the power of custom and soon bore all the force of common law. The
evils of ecclesiastical law were soon increased through the unsparing
use of forgery and falsehood. Lea says:
In the remodeling of European Institutions, so necessary to
the interests of Christianity and civilization, one of the
most efficient agencies was the collection of Canons known as
the False Decretals. Forgery was by no means a novel expedient
to the church. From the earliest times orthodox and heretics
had rivalled each other in the manufacture of whatever
documents were necessary to substantiate their respective
positions whether in faith or discipline. An examination
of these Decretals tends to the conclusion that they were
not the result of one effort or the work of one man. Their
constant repetitions and their frequent contradiction would
seem to prove this, and to show that they were manufactured
from time to time to meet the exigencies of the moment or to
gratify the feelings of the writers. Interpolated into codes
of law, adopted and amplified in the canons of councils and
the decretals of popes, they speedily became part of the
civil and ecclesiastical policy of Europe, leaving traces
on the constitutions which they afflicted for centuries....
The pretenses and privileges which they conferred on the
hierarchy became the most dearly prized and frequently quoted
portions of the Canon Law. In each struggle with the temporal
authority, it was the arsenal from which were drawn the most
effective weapons, and after each struggle the sacerdotal
combatants had higher vantage ground for the ensuing conflict
... theories of ecclesiastical superiority which left so
profound an impress on the middle ages and which have in no
slight degree molded our modern civilization.
Even Magna Charta strengthened Canon Law, confirming many liberties of
the Church, and injuring women by prohibiting appeal to them unless
for the death of their husbands. While the general tenor of the church
was against marriage, an unmarried woman unless dedicating her life
to the church was regarded with more contempt than the married. To be
under control of a husband was looked upon as the normal condition of
women not living celibate lives. Consequently women were driven into
marriage or monastic houses,[38] and no reproach so great as the term
“old maid.” The influence of custom is nowhere more discernible than
in Blackstone himself. The great commentator while fully admitting
the blending of Canon with Common law, also acknowledging its most
prejudicial effects to have fallen upon woman, yet attempts to prove
that the liberties of the English people were not infringed through
ecclesiasticism. He is so entirely permeated with the church doctrine
of woman’s created inferiority as not to be willing to acknowledge
the infringement of her natural liberty through it, although at the
same time he declares that “whosoever would fully understand the Canon
Law must study Common Law in respect to woman.” Such benumbing of the
moral faculties through her doctrines is among the greatest wrongs
perpetrated by the church upon mankind. Nor is it alone in regard to
woman. During the Franco-Prussian war a writer declared the great and
absolute need of the French people to be education; that of moral
character there was absolutely none, either in the higher or lower
classes. Even the sons of aristocratic families educated in Jesuit
schools, being at most taught that wrong can only be measured by a
formal religious standard, and that every wrong can be wiped out by
confession to the priest. French education, this writer declared to
be that of two centuries ago, when might was looked upon as identical
with justice. Nor can morality be taught while its basis in the church
remains the same.
The priestly profession held the most brilliant promises of gratified
ambition to every man that entered it. Not alone did he possess the
keys of heaven and hell, but also those of temporal power. The laity
were his obedient servants upon which he could impose penance and
from whose coffers wealth could be made to flow into his own. Through
long continued false teaching the people believed their fate in both
worlds more fully depended upon the priesthood than upon their own
course in life, God having deputed a share of his power to every
priest and monk, no matter how debased; and that when he spoke it was
not himself, but God, through his lips, as asserted by the priesthood
themselves. This impious assertion so capable as shown of being used
for the most tyrannous purposes, came also into the Reformation, and
is even heard from the lips of Protestant clergymen today.[39] Denied
recognition of a right to decide for themselves whether the priest
spoke from God, or from his own ambitious and iniquitous purposes,
deprived of education as well as of free thought—the latter a crime
to be punished with death after the most diabolical torture—it is not
a subject of surprise that the majority of the christian world was a
prey to the vilest superstition. The claim of infallibility, which may
be unsuccessfully combated when urged by a single individual, became
all-potent when advanced by a large powerfully organized and widely
distributed class under guise of religion, into which the element
of fear largely entered. No salvation outside of the church was a
fundamental doctrine of that body. Hell was declared not to be peopled
alone by the heathen, but by christian heretics, and the excommunicated
who had died without obtaining forgiveness from the Church. These were
depicted as in eternal torments of a more terrible character than
even those whom birth had left ignorant of the plan of salvation. The
strength of the church lay in its control of the conscience and the
will. Upon the State it fastened double bonds; first, by its control
of each individual member; second, in its capacity of secular ruler.
Long before the days of Torquemada and Ximenes, the Inquisition had
practically been brought to every man’s door. The imagination, that
faculty that in its perfection constitutes the happiness of mankind,
was made the implement of excessive mental torture.
Common Law as it exists today is the outgrowth of Ecclesiastical or
Canon Law touching upon all the relations of life but falling with
heaviest weight upon woman, as Blackstone so frankly admits.[40] From
the X to the XVI centuries is the period when the features of the
Canon Law most derogatory to woman became thoroughly incorporated into
English common law, since which period the complete inferiority and
subordination of woman has been as fully maintained by the State as by
the Church.
Common Law is not alone English law, it is the basic law of the
United States. Chancellor Kent said of it, “Common Law is part of the
fundamental law of the United States.” It has been recognized and
adopted as one entire system by the constitutions of Massachusetts,
New York, New Jersey and Maryland. It has been assumed by courts of
justice, or declared by statute, as the law of the land in every State,
although its influence upon the criminal codes of England and the
United States has but recently attracted the attention of legal minds.
Wharton whose _Criminal Law_ has been for years a standard work, did
not examine this relation until its seventh edition. In the preface to
this edition he gave a copious array of authors in English, German,
Latin, in proof that the criminal codes of those two countries are
permanently based upon Ecclesiastical Law.
An early council of Carthage thus ordained: “Let not a woman however
learned or holy presume to teach a man in a public assembly.” To this
Canon may be ascribed the obstacles thrown in the way of women even
during the present century, who have come before the world as public
teachers in the pulpit, at the bar, in medicine, or the more customary
branches of instruction. Advancing civilization of the present century
is still hampered by the laws of an imperfect church, enacted many
hundred years since. The trial of Mistress Anne Hutchinson in New
England, during the XVII century, was chiefly for the sin of having
taught men.
All modern legislation can be referred to the church for its origin
although most especially noticeable in reference to women legislated
for as a class, distinct and separate from men. Under Church laws,
the humble, the ignorant, the helpless have been the most oppressed,
because of their powerlessness, but upon no part of humanity has this
oppression so heavily fallen as upon her whom the church has declared
to be the author of all the misery of human life.[41] The laws of
bastardy and illegitimacy still extant in Christian countries which
decree that a child born outside of marriage shall be known by its
mother’s name and she alone responsible for its support, and which
do not allow it to inherit its putative father’s property even when
he acknowledges the child as his own, are of ecclesiastical origin.
Enacted by the Church in its most powerful days, as protection to a
celibate priesthood against all claim by mother or child, they are
still a reminder of the Matriarchate when the sole right of the mother
to the child was unquestioned. But under Church ruling this law that
the child should follow the condition of the mother, herself but a
slave, was the source of great injustice both to women and to thousands
of innocent children. Under feudalism and during slavery the child of
the feudal lord or powerful master by a serf woman, became at birth
subject to all the restrictions of the mother while the father was
freed from accountability of any nature. The Antonelli case referred
to in the second chapter, in which the Countess Lambertini claimed
heirship of Cardinal Antonelli’s property as his daughter, was decided
against her not upon denial of her paternity which was most fully
proven, but because under church law this daughter had no claim upon
her priestly father. Under Canon Law she was no more to be regarded as
his child than as the child of any other man. She was “fatherless.” She
was “a sacrilegious child” having violated sacred things by coming into
existence. Her “holy” father under Canon Law was entirely irresponsible
for her birth.[42]
The reformation proved itself in many ways as restrictive towards
woman as Catholicism. The commencement of modern law dates to the
reign of Elizabeth, who established the reformation upon a firm basis.
The oppression of her reign exceeded all that had been experienced
under Catholicism. No cottager in England was permitted to shelter
his homeless mother or sister under penalty[43] because she was
“masterless.” The greatest amount of legislation both religious and
secular under the Patriarchate has had woman for its object, and this
is especially noticeable in all countries where Christianity has been
the dominant power, because she has not been regarded by the church
as a component part of humanity, but as an offshoot whose rights and
responsibility were entirely different from those of man. Although
among the Anglo-Saxons the priesthood possessed great influence yet
after the Norman Conquest ecclesiasticism gained much greater control
in England, and Canon Law began to influence legislation, as has been
shown, exercising its chief restrictive force upon woman. While under
old Common Law,[44] a husband was compelled to leave his wife one-third
of his property and could leave her as much more as he pleased, by
Canon Law he was prohibited from leaving her more than one-third and
could leave her as much less as he pleased. Thus ecclesiasticism
presumed to control a husband’s affections and placing its slimy
fingers upon common law, allowed the husband to leave his wife in
absolute poverty, notwithstanding that her property upon marriage, and
her services under marriage, belonged exclusively to him. As early as
the twelfth century, Glanville laid it down as a law of the British
Kingdom that no one was compelled to leave another person any portion
of his property, and that the part usually devised to wives was left
them at the dictate of affection and not of law. Thus early did the
Church in England override Common Law to the detriment of woman. While
thus legislating in opposit
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