Page:Woman's Position According to the Bible.pdf/3

 the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man" (1 Cor. xi., 8, 9). "Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman, being deceived, was in the transgression" (1 Tim. ii., 11-14). The argument is a poor one, for if priority of creation gave priority of right, then the beasts and fishes were superior to Adam; but a poor argument satisfies the true Christian, when it comes from inspired lips.

The contempt felt by Paul for women is strongly shown in his scoffing "If they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home" (1 Cor. xiv., 35). He clearly could not conceive why they should want to know anything, but if they are so perverse that they will learn, then let them "ask their husbands". And if they have no husbands, O sapient Paul? Or if, still worse, their husbands do not know? Many a man, I fear, tells his wife not to trouble her head about "things a woman can't understand," when, if he spoke the truth, he would have to answer: "My dear, I do not know".

There is no better way of finding the real position held by women in any community, than by studying their position in the sexual relation. In the lowest conditions of savagery no kind of ordered relation can be said to exist; the earliest form in which marriage is seen is marriage by capture, in which the woman is carried away by force by the man who covets her, and becomes as much his property as any other spoil he may take. Marriage by purchase gradually replaces marriage by capture, and the partly civilised savage buys instead of stealing his wife; he pays so much for a woman, and naturally owns her thereafter, as he owns anything else he may have bought. In both of these stages we find polygamy with its hopeless female degradation, the strong capturing, the rich buying, many wives. Gradually, with advancing civilisation, polygamy is replaced by monogamy with servitude, and this is gradually, but very slowly, yielding to monogamy with equality.

In seeking for signs of this succession in the Bible, we shall not find general among the Hebrews the custom of marriage by capture. It was resorted to on one occasion