Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/481

Rh has appreciated the real significance of the work of Jesus, "In Christ there is neither male nor female."

Two objections may be raised to this position: (1) On the one hand it may be urged that he sometimes spoke brusquely to women—even to his mother. But this objection is trivial and would doubtless never have been raised except for the unusually awkward and harsh expression in our English version. (2) On the other hand, it may be urged with far more force that Jesus never expressly attacked those social customs that force woman into infamy, or those conventionalities that have for centuries made her politically and legally the inferior of man; in short, that he never poses as the champion of the rights of women. But neither does he expressly attack many other social sins and injustices. Nor—and time has proved this—was it needful that he should. The genus includes the species, and if once men get to incorporating the social principles he has enunciated, special forms of evil will of necessity disappear. To demand that the friend of Mary Magdalene and the eulogist of the heathen mother and the self-sacrificing widow should preach woman suffrage; or to complain because he whose life was a continuous argument for equality and fraternity among men and women did not revise the Old Testament until it accorded with the Christian conceptions of today, is to ask that which is as absurd as it is impossible and needless.

And what is true of his honoring of woman, is strikingly apparent in his regard for childhood. Jesus himself was a man without home, without wife, without child; but he has left words which have for all ages sanctified childhood. In his own life, despite the scantiness of the records found in Luke and Matthew, there is presented an ideal of childhood. He rendered filial obedience to his parents and as a "child grew and waxed strong, filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him." In