The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. I., No. 11, July, 1835Various
General
The Southern Literary Messenger, Vol. I., No. 11, July, 1835
Various
American literature -- 19th century -- Periodicals
How then does it happen that woman is more religious than man--that
she is every where found yielding a more ready and more perfect
devotion to the God of nature? We have seen that instinct, feeling and
reason concur in the support of religion. Which of these is the main
impelling cause with woman? I am disposed to say the two former. She
is not so much disposed to skepticism as man; she does not wait for
the slow deductions of reason, before she is willing to yield her
assent. She does not withhold her belief, like man, until she can
contemplate the power, majesty and unity of the deity, in the
countless millions of bright orbs, rolling in harmony and
magnificence, along those complicate and luminous paths which have
been assigned to them in the infinitudes of space. She does not wait
until she can descend from the contemplation of this grand, this
sublime prospect, to the infinitesimally minute parts of nature, and
view with the eye of philosophy, their order, harmony and design,
where she may behold the existence of deity proclaimed in those
countless millions of millions of animalculæ, which escape the
unassisted vision of man--each one displaying a form, a structure, a
complexity of organs as perfect, as beautiful, as well adapted to the
sphere in which he moves, on that little atom of creation, which is a
world to him, as the grandest and most imposing animals of nature. No!
She does not require for the generation of her faith, thus to be able
to range from the bottom to the top of creation--from the infinitely
small to the infinitely great--to behold in the vast and the minute
"The unambitious footsteps of the god
Who gives its lustre to an insect's wing,
And wheels his throne upon the rolling worlds."
She looks into her own heart, and finds there the want of a consoling
religion. She looks into the pages of holy writ, and builds her faith
on the revealed will of her Maker. "Thus saith the Lord," is the
simple but stable foundation on which her hopes are rested. With man,
religion is much more a matter of speculation, of reason and
philosophy, than with woman.
Let us now investigate, if possible, the causes of this very
interesting difference between the sexes.
_Causes.--1st. Education_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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