Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/107

Rh woman could not do it. He shut her out of the choir, out of the priest’s house, out of the pulpit; and then the priest, with unnatural vows, came in, and taught these “doctrines of devils.” Could you find a woman who would read to a congregation, as words of truth, Jonathan Edwards's Sermons on a Future State—“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” “The Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners,” “Wrath upon the Wicked to the Uttermost,” “The Future Punishment of the Wicked,” and other things of that sort? Nay, can you find a worthy woman, of any considerable culture, who will read the fourteenth chapter of Numbers, and declare that a true picture of the God she worships? Only a she-dragon could do it in our day.

The popular theology leaves us nothing feminine in the character of God. How could it be otherwise when so much of the popular theology is the work of men who thought woman was a “pollution,” and barred her out of all the high places of the Church? If women had had their place in ecclesiastical teaching, I doubt that the “Athanasian Creed” would ever have been thought a “symbol” of Christianity. The pictures and hymns which describe the last judgment are a protest against the exclusion of woman from teaching in the Church. “I suffer not a woman to teach, but to be in silence,” said a writer in the New Testament. The sentence has brought manifold evil in its train.

So much for the employments of women.

By nature woman has the same political rights that man has—to vote, to hold office, to make and administer laws. These she has as a matter of right. The strong hand and the great head of man keep her down, nothing more. In America, in Christendom, woman has no political rights, is not a citizen in full; she has no voice in making or administering the laws, none in electing the rulers or administrators thereof. She can hold no office—cannot be committee of a primary school, overseer of the poor, or guardian to a public lamp-post. But any man, with conscience enough to keep out of gaol, mind enough to escape the poor-house, and body enough to drop his ballot into the box, he is a voter. He may have no character, even no money, that is no matter—he is male. The noblest