Читать книгу Consecrated Womanhood - Frederic Rowland Marvin - Страница 3

"

To those who have long lamented the prevailing tendency in Christian churches to deny to women the honors and responsibilities of sacred offices and duties, such a sermon as "Consecrated Womanhood," written by an American clergyman is like a breadth of fresh air in Neapolitan church-buildings that have never known the beauty of sunlight, and the atmospheres of which have grown heavy through the centuries with the oppressive weight of suffocating incense.

The preacher opens his discourse with the statement that "the Bible honored woman when every other book was blind to the true dignity of her character." Scholars differ, and little is certain when we go back far enough in the ancient writings of our race. But I think there can be no doubt that in all the earliest literatures of which we have knowledge, the thought of the world was more favorable to the development of womanly independence, than in later compositions, especially such as have come from patristic and monastic sources. Certainly we find the great Greek tragedians unfolding their noblest ideals in the character of an Alcestis, and expressing through the lips of an Antigone their loftiest conceptions of virtue, and their purest and bravest ethical teachings. The Jews did not stand alone, as this eloquent sermon clearly shows, in honoring woman; but the Old Testament is devoid, as its most careless reader cannot but see, of all that wretched admiration for feminine feebleness of mind and body which seems to have sprung from masculine vanity, and has been fostered by centuries of priestly instruction and popular superstition. As the most illustrious Jewess now living, Lady Battersea, wrote in her admirable book some years ago, when she was Miss Constance de Rothschild, "The ideal woman of the ancient Israelite was always strong and fearless—a Miriam, a Deborah, a Judith, an Esther. Not a word in that older Bible denies to woman the right to exercise every power of speech or action granted her by Jehovah."

Nothing assuredly can be more broadminded or more generous than Dr. Marvin's whole treatment of the claims of women, whether in politics, in the religious life, or in the domestic circle. In my humble opinion it would do infinite service in awakening thought and dispelling prejudice, could the sermon on "Consecrated Womanhood" be preached in every church and chapel in England. The good Quakers alone, so far as I know, have no need for its admonition.

Frances Power Cobbe.

Hengwrt,

Dolgelly, North Wales,

June 21, 1903.