| <The Saturday Review March 7, 1868>
| <The Priesthood of Woman>
| <pb n="302">
| If the female philosophers who plead for the emancipation 
| of their sex would stoop from the sublimer heights of 
| Woman's Rights to arguments of mere human expediency, 
| we fancy they might find some of their critics disposed to 
| listen in a more compliant mood.  We can imagine a very 
| good point being made out of the simple fact of waste, by 
| some feminine advocate who would point out in a 
| businesslike way how much more work the world might get 
| through if only woman had fair play.  Waste is always a 
| pitiful and disagreeable thing, and the waste of whatever 
| reserved power may lie at present unused in the breasts of 
| half a million of old maids, for instance, is a thought which, 
| with so much to be done around us, it is somewhat 
| uncomfortable to dwell much upon.  The argument, too, 
| might be neatly enforced, just at present, by illustrations 
| from a somewhat unexpected quarter.  The Papacy seems 
| determined to carry out its concordat with Woman.  If we 
| are to credit the latest rumours from the Vatican, Rome has 
| grown impatient of the class who now present themselves 
| at her doors as candidates for canonization, and has fallen 
| back from the obscure Italian beggars and Cochin Chinese 
| martyrs whom she has recently delighted to honour on the 
| more illustrious names of Christopher Columbus and Joan 
| of Arc.  A little courage must have been needed for this 
| retreat upon the past, for neither the great navigator nor the 
| heroine found much support or appreciation in the prelates 
| of their day; and the somewhat uncomfortable fact might be 
| urged by the devil's advocate, in the case of the latter, that 
| if Joan was sent to the martyr's stake, it was by a spiritual 
| tribunal.  On the other hand, there is the obvious 
| desirableness of showing how perfectly at one the Papacy 
| is with the spirit of the age in this double compliment to the 
| two primary forces of modern civilization ~~ the 
| democratic force of the New World, and the feminine force 
| of the Old.  The beatification of the Maid of Orleans in its 
| most simple aspect is the official recognition, by the 
| Papacy, of the claims of her sex to a far larger sphere of 
| human action than has as yet been accorded to them.  
| Woman may fairly meet the domestic admonitions of Papal 
| briefs by this newly discovered instance of extra-domestic 
| holiness, and may front the taunts of cynical objectors with 
| a saintly patron who was the first to break through the outer 
| conventionalities of womanhood.  But the figure of Joan of 
| Arc is far more than a convenient answer to objection such 
| as these; it is, as we have said, in itself a cogent argument 
| for a better use of feminine energies.  No life gives one 
| such a notion as hers of the vast forces which like hidden, 
| and as it would seem wasted, in the present mass of 
| women.  It is impossible to be content with little projects of 
| utilization such as those which throw open to her the 
| telegraph-office or the printing-press, or even with the 
| more ambitious claims for her admission to the Bench or 
| the dissecting-room, when one gets a glimpse such as this 
| of energies latent within the female breast which are strong 
| enough to change the face of the world.  It is difficult to 
| suppose that the woman of our day is less energetic than 
| the woman of the fifteenth century, or that her piano and 
| her workbag sum up the whole of her possibilities any more 
| than her spinning-wheel or her sheep-tending exhausted 
| those of the Maid of Domremy.  The ordinary occupations 
| of woman strike us in this light as mere jets of vapour, 
| useful indeed as a relief to the volcanic pressure within, but 
| insufficient to remove the peril of an eruption.  There must 
| be some truth in the spasmodic utterances of the fevered 
| sibyls who occasionally bare the female heart to us in 
| three-volume novels, and the gaiety and frivolity of the life of 
| woman is a mere mask for the wild, tossing emotions 
| within.  It is a standing danger, we own; and besides the 
| danger here is, as we have said, the waste and the pity of it.
| A little closer examination, however, may suggest some 
| doubts whether this waste of power is not more apparent 
| than real.  In the physical world, Mr. Grove, has told us that 
| the apparent destruction of a force is only its transformation 
| into a force which is correlative to it; that motion, for 
| instance, when lost, is again detected in the new form of 
| heat, and heat in that of light.  But the theory is far from 
| being true of the physical world only, and, had we space 
| here, nothing would be easier than to trace the same 
| correlation of forces through the moral nature of man.  For 
| waste, then, in the particular instance which is before us, 
| we may perhaps substitute transformation.  Professing 
| herself the most rigid of conservatives, woman gives vent 
| to this heroic energy for which the times offer no natural 
| outlet in the radical modifications which she is continually 
| introducing into modern society.  We overlook the 
| manifold ways in which she is acting on and changing the 
| state of things around us, just because we are deceived by 
| the apparent unity with which the whole sex advances 
| towards marriage.  We forget the large margin of those who 
| fail in attaining their end, and we act as if the great mass of 
| unmarried women simply represented a waste and lost 
| force.  And yet it is just this waste force which tells on 
| society more powerfully than all.  The energies which fail 
| in finding a human object of domestic adoration become 
| the devotional energies of the world.  The force which 
| would have made the home makes the Church.  It is really 
| amazing to watch, if we look back through the ages, the 
| silent steady working of this feminine impulse, and to see 
| how bit by bit it has recovered the ground of which 
| Christianity robbed Woman.  We wonder that no woman 
| poet has ever turned, like Schiller, to the gods of old.  In 
| every heathen religion of the Western world woman 
| occupied a prominent place.  Priestess or prophetess, she 
| stood in all ministerial offices on an equality with man.  It 
| was only the irruption of religions from the East, the faiths 
| of Isis or Mithras, which swept woman from the temple.  
| Christianity shared the Oriental antipathy to the ministerial 
| service of woman; it banished her from altar and from 
| choir; in darker times it drove her to the very porch of its 
| shrines.  The Church of after ages deal with woman as the 
| Empire dealt with its Caesars:  it was
| <pb n="303">
| ready to grant her apotheosis, but only when she was safely 
| out of the world.  It gave her canonization, and it gives it to 
| her still, but not the priesthood.  No rout could seem more 
| complete, but woman is never greater than when she is 
| routed.  The newly-instituted arson of to-day, brimming 
| over with apostolic texts which forbid woman to speak in 
| church, no sooner arrives at his parish than he finds himself 
| in a spiritual world whose impulse and guidance is wholly 
| in the hands of women.  Expel woman as you will, <f> 
| </f>.  Woman is, in fact, the parish.  Within, in her lowest 
| spiritual form, as the parson's wife, she inspires and 
| sometimes writes his sermons.  Without, as the bulk of his 
| congregation, she watches over his orthodoxy, verifies his 
| texts, visits his schools, and harasses his sick.  <q> </q>! 
| said a sick woman to a wealthier sister the other day, <q> 
| </q>.  But the district-lady has others to <p> "worrit" </p> 
| in life besides the sick.  Mrs. Hannah More tells us 
| exultantly in her journal how successful were her raids 
| upon the parsons, and in what dread all unspiritual 
| ministers stood of her visitations.  And the same rigid 
| censorship prevails in many quarters still.  The preacher 
| who thunders so defiantly against spiritual foes is trembling 
| all the time beneath the critical eye that is watching him 
| from the dim recesses of an unworldly bonnet, and the 
| critical finger which follows him with so merciless an 
| accuracy in his texts.  Impelled, guided, censured by 
| woman, we can hardly wonder if in nine cases out of ten 
| the parson turns woman himself, and if the usurpation of 
| woman's rights in the services of religion has been deftly 
| avenged by the subjugation of the usurpers.  Expelled from 
| the Temple, woman has simply put her priesthood into 
| commission, and discharges her ministerial duties by 
| deputy.
| It was impossible for woman to remain permanently 
| content with a position like this; but it is only of late that a 
| favourable conjuncture of affairs has enabled her to quit it 
| for a more obtrusive one.  The great Church movement 
| which the <hi rend="italic"> Apologia </hi> has made so 
| familiar to us in its earlier progress came some ten years 
| ago to a stand.  Some of its most eminent leaders had 
| seceded to another communion, it had been weakened by 
| the Gorham decision, and by its own internal dissensions.  
| Whether on the side of dogma, or ritual, it seemed to have 
| lost for the moment its old impulse ~~ to have lost heart 
| and life.  It was in this emergency that woman came to the 
| front.  She claimed to revive the old religious position 
| which had been assigned to her by the monasticism of the 
| middle ages, but to revive it under different conditions and 
| with a different end.  The mediaeval Church had, indeed, 
| glorified, as much as words could glorify, the devotion of 
| woman; but once become a devotee, it had locked her in the 
| cloister.  As far as action on the world without was 
| concerned, the veil served simply as a species of suicide, 
| and the impulses of woman, after all the crowns and pretty 
| speeches of her religious counselors, found themselves 
| bottled up within stout stone walls and as inactive as 
| before.  From this strait woman, at the time we speak of, 
| delivered herself by the organization of charity.  In lines of 
| a certain beauty, though somewhat difficult in their 
| grammatical construction, she has been described as a 
| ministering angel when pain and anguish wring the brow; 
| and it was in her capacity of ministering angel that she now 
| placed herself at the head of the Church movement and 
| advanced upon the world.  It was impossible to lock these 
| beneficent beings up, for the whole scope of their existence 
| lay in the outer world; but every day, as it developed their 
| ecclesiastical position, made even their admirers recognise 
| the wise discretion of the middle ages.  Long before the 
| Ritualists themselves, they, with a feminine instinct, had 
| discerned the value of costume.  The district visitor, whom 
| nobody had paid the smallest attention to in the common 
| vestments of the world, became a sacred being as she 
| donned the crape and hideous bonnet of the <p> "Sister."  
| </p> Within the new establishment there was all the 
| excitement of a perfectly novel existence of time broken up 
| as women like it to be broken up in perpetual services and 
| minute obligation of rules, the dramatic change of name, 
| and the romantic self-abnegation of obedience.  The <p> 
| "Mother Superior" </p> took the place of the tyrant of 
| another sex who had hitherto claimed the submission of 
| woman, but she was something more to her <p> "children" 
| </p> than the husband or father whom they had left in the 
| world without.  In all matters, ecclesiastical as well as civil, 
| she claimed within her dominions to be supreme.  The 
| quasi-sacerdotal dignity, the pure religious ministration 
| which ages had stolen from her, was quietly reassumed.  
| She received confessions, she imposed penances, she drew 
| up offices of devotion.  Wherever the community settled, it 
| settled as a new spiritual power.  If the clergyman of the 
| parish ventured on advice or suggestion he was told that the 
| Sisterhood must preserve its own independence of action, 
| and was snubbed home again for his pains.  The Mother 
| Superior, in fact, soon towered into a greatness far beyond 
| the reach of ordinary parsons.  She kept her own tame 
| chaplain, and she kept him in very edifying subjection.  
| From a realm completely her own, the influence of woman 
| began now to tell upon the world without.  Little colonies 
| of sisters planted here and there annexed parish after parish.  
| Sometimes the parson was worried into submission by 
| incessant calls of the most justifiable nature on his time and 
| patience.  Sometimes he was bribed into submission by the 
| removal from his shoulders of the burden of alms.  It was 
| only when he was thoroughly tamed that he was rewarded 
| by pretty stoles and gorgeous vestments.  Astonished 
| congregations saw their church blossom in purple and red, 
| and frontal and hanging told of the silent energy of the 
| group of Sisters.   The parson found himself 
| <reg orig="no where"> nowhere </reg> in 
| his own parish; every detail managed for him, every care 
| removed, and all independence gone.  If it suited the 
| ministering angels to make a legal splash, he found himself 
| landed in the Law Courts.  If they took it into their heads to 
| seek another fold, <reg orig="every one"> everyone </reg> 
| assumed, as a matter of 
| course, that their pastor would go too.  At such a rate of 
| progress the great object of woman's ambition must soon 
| come in view, and the silent control over the priest will 
| merge in the open claim to the priesthood.
| It may be in silent preparation for such a claim that the 
| ecclesiastical hierarchy are taking, year by year, a more 
| feminine position.  The Houses of Convocation, for 
| instance, present us with a lively image of what the bitterest 
| censor of woman would be delighted to predict as the result 
| of her admission to senatorial honours.  There is the same 
| interminable flow of mellifluous talk, the same utter 
| inability to devise or to understand an argument, the same 
| bitterness and hard words, the same skill in little tricks and 
| diplomacies, the same practical incompetence, which have 
| been denounced as characteristics of woman.  The caution, 
| the finesse, the sly decorum, the inability to take a large 
| view of any question, the patience, the masterly inaction, 
| the vicious outbreaks of temper which now and then break 
| the inaction of a Bishop, may sometimes lead us to ask 
| whether the Episcopal office is not one admirably suited for 
| the genius of woman.  But she must stoop to conquer 
| heights like these, and it is probably with a view to a slow 
| ascent towards them through the ages to come that she is 
| now moulding the mind of the curate at her will.  He, we 
| have been told, is commonly the first lady of the parish; 
| and what he now is in theory, a century hence may find him 
| in fact.  It would be difficult even now to detect any 
| difference of sex in the triviality of purpose, the love of 
| gossip, the petty interests, the feeble talk, the ignorance, the 
| vanity, the love of personal display, the white hand dangled 
| over the pulpit, the becoming vestment and the 
| embroidered stole, which we are learning gradually to look 
| upon as attributes of the British curate.  So perfect, indeed, 
| is the imitation that the excellence of her work may perhaps 
| defeat its own purpose; and the lacquered imitation of 
| woman, <q> </q>; as Tennyson saw and sang of him, may 
| satisfy the world and for long ages prevent any anxious 
| inquiry after the real feminine Brummagem.