Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/106

102 woman, if she wished, should not preach as well as men. It would be hard, in the present condition of the pulpit, to say she had not intellect enough for that! I am glad to find, now and then, women preachers, and rejoice at their success. A year ago I introduced to you the Reverend Miss Brown, educated at an orthodox theological seminary: you smiled at the name of Reverend Miss. She has since been invited to settle by several congregations of unblemished orthodoxy, and has passed on, looking further.

It seems to me that woman, by her peculiar constitution, is better qualified to teach religion than any merely intellectual discipline. The Quakers have always recognised the natural right of woman to perform the same ecclesiastical function as man. At this day the most distinguished preacher of that denomination is a woman, who adorns her domestic calling as housekeeper, wife, and mother, with the same womanly dignity and sweetness which mark her public deportment.

If woman had been consulted, it seems to me theology would have been in a vastly better state than it is now. I do not think that any woman would ever have preached the damnation of babies new-born; and “hell, paved with the skulls of infants not a span long,” would be a region yet to be discovered in theology. A celibate monk—with God's curse writ on his face, which knew no child, no wife, no sister, and “blushed that he had a mother”—might well dream of such a thing: he had been through the preliminary studies. Consider the ghastly attributes which are commonly put upon God in the popular theology; the idea of infinite wrath, of eternal damnation, and total depravity, and all that—why, you could not get a woman who had intellect enough to open her mouth to preach these things anywhere. Women think they think that they believe them, but they do not. Celibate priests, who never knew marriage, or what paternity was, who thought woman was “a pollution,” they invented these ghastly doctrines; and when I have heard the Athanasian Creed and the Dies Iræ chanted by monks with the necks of bulls and the lips of donkeys, why I have understood where the doctrine came from, and have felt the appropriateness of their braying out the damnation hymns: