Consecrated Womanhood: A Sermon Preached in the First Congregational Church, Portland, OregonMarvin, Frederic Rowland
Religion
Consecrated Womanhood: A Sermon Preached in the First Congregational Church, Portland, Oregon
Marvin, Frederic Rowland
Sermons, American; Women -- Biblical teaching; Women in the Bible
Miss Blake elsewhere answers, it seems to me with reason and justice,
the oft-repeated objection to co-education, founded upon the imaginary
danger of a too early romance and a hasty attachment, followed by an
unwise and to-be-repented-of marriage:
"There is something in the association of every-day life which appeals
to the judgment rather than to the fancy, and weeks and months of
steady labor over the same problems, or at the same sciences, will not
be more likely to create romances than casual meetings at fêtes and
balls."
But I turn from the secular and civil aspect of the subject to inquire
what service woman may render the church, and here I am confronted
by another question it would be difficult to answer: What service
has she not rendered? Our churches, most of them, will not ordain
her to the ministry, and yet do they not derive their spiritual life
from her influence? Could they exist without her effort and faithful
service? Who preached the first Christian sermon, and proclaimed to
an unbelieving world, "He is risen from the dead!" if not the women
who ran with great joy from the empty sepulcher, bearing with them a
license to preach from the Christ himself, given through the Angel of
the Resurrection, who said, "Go quickly and tell his disciples that he
is risen from the dead, and behold he goeth before you into Galilee;
there shall ye see him?" That was a very short sermon and had no text,
but no pulpit rhetoric and no Sunday oratory will ever eclipse its
sublime eloquence. If priests received their commission to preach from
the Apostles, the Apostles received theirs from the women who mourned
at the sepulcher and found it empty. Women can better afford to remain
out of the pulpit than the pulpit can afford to exclude them. When the
Christ shall return and His kingdom be established forever, the nations
shall hear once more the old Easter sermon first preached by a woman,
"He is risen from the dead!" The most tender and faithful friendship
our Saviour ever found in his weary and painful pilgrimage upon earth
burned in the heart and shone in the life of a noble and consecrated
woman.
"Not she with trait'rous kiss her Master stung,
Not she denied him with unfaithful tongue;
She, when Apostles fled, could danger brave—
Last at his cross, and earliest at his grave."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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