Changes

732. Penance has no purpose excepting to expiate guilt. When women are taught that they must take a specially lowly position; that they must meet their husbands’ sensual demands with unquestioning obedience (see Lesson 14); that they must be silent in Church; that they must go veiled; must not teach or preach; that they must have no part in Church government,¾and all because Eve sinned, they are taught to do penance, and they are taught thereby that in some sense guilt adheres to them. The teaching of all these things (whether acknowledged or not), is precisely what Tertullian dared to say, namely,¾“God’s verdict on the sex still holds good, and the sex’s guilt must still hold also.”

734. There was a time when in civil government and every department of life men governed, but that day is passing everywhere, excepting where its existence is most incongruous,¾in the Church; for long ago it was written, “If ye have respect of persons, ye commit sin, and are convinced [i.e. convicted] of the law as transgressors” (James 2:9). When the rule of the male was universal, woman could accept membership in a Church without a change of status. She cannot, today. An invitation to identify herself with any religious society which carries with it the inference that she will turn backward into servitude will be declined with increasing frequency, in days to come. And this attitude on the part of Christian women may not be justly ascribed to pride and want of sanctity. No mature human being has a right to yield unquestioning obedience to other than God Himself. The competent have no right to accept the leadership of the relatively incompetent,¾and women have fully demonstrated the fact that they cannot all be reckoned as less competent than men. Nor must the more righteous accept control by the less righteous.

“But Eve was deceived when she dealt with the Serpent, in Eden, and can women ever be safe religious teachers?” Review the past: The Sanhedrin that compassed the death of Christ, over the protest of the “daughters of Jerusalem” and Pilate’s wife; the sects of Nicolaitanes, Ebionites, Gnostics, Ophites, Manichaeans, Predestinarians, extreme Antinomians, Irvingites, Agapoemonians, Mormons, and scores more, led by men; the ignorant and stupid ecclesiastics who resorted to imprisonments, torture, massacres, inquisitions, and burnings at the stake, to compel men and women to renounce the truth and accept spiritual darkness instead,¾then tell us on what historical authority it can be assumed that men are safe religious leaders. And why the mere fact that Eve was “deceived” and women have led in Christian Science, Theosophy, and modern (not ancient) Spiritism, proves that all women are unsafe as religious leaders? This claim lacks candor, in view of the fact that few women have ever been allowed to try if they could lead; it is born of ignorance and prejudice. On the other hand, think of the millions of women who have trusted the “authority” of male leadership in religious matters, to be hurried forward into the ditch of spiritual darkness or unrestrained license, to their eternal loss.

740. I recall an incident which my mother used to relate, of early days in New York City,¾quite close to Colonial times. She was, as usual on the Sabbath, sitting in the old Dutch Church, in a pew with her parents. The cry “Fire, Fire!” broke into the calm discourse of the minister, and a large number of men quietly withdrew, knowing that help was needed, otherwise sacred services would not have been interrupted. Later, a second cry of “Fire!” was sounded, and more men withdrew. A third cry came, and all the men withdrew. At last an urgent cry came, “Fire, Fire!¾and if there are no more men the women must come!” Then the meeting broke up, and all rushed forth to save the whole city, for it seemed doomed.

741. A very fire of hell is raging all about us, even though largely unrecognized, in modern rationalism. Its crudest features have, perhaps, found expression in Russia; its most pervasive sulphurous fumes are stifling the youths of our schools; its most consummately treacherous havoc prevails in the pulpit. We women have no alternative but to help extinguish the fire or be scorched by it, and see our children perish in its flames. Shall we women, at such a time as this, sit still, and remember our sex? Never! We will brush aside the opposition of those who can think only in terms of sex, and go up “to the help of the Lord against the mighty.”

And what must women preach? Review the history of the past few years, and the answer must be plain to every Christian. Women must preach that “religion of blood” which the fastidious have affected to find so offensive to their aesthetic taste,¾the “blood of the Cross” of the Only One, whose blood would have sufficed to spare that of millions of their sons who have been offered up as human sacrifices to Mars, had its flow of “sorrow and love” been accepted on earth as an atonement and remedy for sin before sin begot its bloodthirsty brood. There is no alternative. It must be the “blood of the Cross” and self-immolation, or else bloody wars for self-deification. Antichrist is at hand. Which shall it be?

==See Also==