Bible -- Commentaries; Bible -- Feminist criticism; Women in the Bible
If it can be proven that during the last thousand years the Christian
clergy, with the Bible in their hands, have pointed out or attempted to
remove one single cruelty or wrong which women have suffered, now is
the opportune time to furnish such proof. Now, to-day, when woman
herself is rising in her mental majesty, and when her wrongs are being
righted, Christianity is dead in the strongest brains and the most
heroic hearts of Europe and of America; and now, when the myth and the
miracle of Bible teaching have lost their hold on the minds of people,
this is the very age when the position of woman is more exalted than it
has ever been since Chrisianity {sic} began.
If even the claim that the Bible has elevated woman to her present
status were true, when the light is turned on to the social, domestic
and religious life of the Christian world, this achievement reflects no
credit on Bible teaching. After nineteen hundred years no woman's
thought has ever been incorporated into the ecclesiastical or civil
code of any Christian land.
Monogamic marriage is the strongest institution of the Christian
system; yet all the men of the Old Testament were polygamists; and
Christ and Paul, the central figures of the New Testament, were
celibates and condemned marriage by both precept and example. In
Christian lands monogamy is strictly demanded of women; but bigamy,
trigamy, and polygamy are in reality practised by men as one of the
methods of elevating women, Largely, the majority of men have one
legal wife; but assisted by a small per cent. of youths and of
bachelors, Christendom maintains an army of several millions of
courtesans. Thousands of wretched women are yearly driven to graves in
the potter's field, while manhood is degraded by deception, by
drunkenness and by disease; and the blood of the innocents cries out
against a system which thus "elevates" woman.
The Bible says that "a tree is known by its fruit;" yet this tree is
carefully pruned, watered, and tended as the "Tree of life" whose
fruit, in the words of Archdeacon Farrar, "alone elevates woman, and
shrouds as with a halo of sacred innocence the tender years of the
child." The Bible records that God created woman by a method different
from that employed in bringing into life any other creature, then
cursed her for seeking knowledge; yet God declares in the Bible: "My
people are destroyed for lack of knowledge." "Because thou hast
rejected knowledge I will reject thee." "Add to your faith virtue, and
to virtue knowledge," and knowledge is the savior of the human race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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