Section III: Some Exceptions
Chapter X: The Elect Among Women
"The Gospel is the most tremendous engine of democracy ever forged. It is destined to break in pieces all castes, privileges, and oppressions. Perhaps the last caste to be destroyed will be that of sex."
—Helen B. Montgomery.
"The power of educated womanhood in the world is simply the power of skilled service. ... The world is full of need and every opportunity is a duty. Preparation for these duties is education, whatever form it may take and whatever service may result. The trained, which means the educated in mind and hand, win influence and power simply because they know how."
—Isabella Thoburn.
"There is nothing in the Universe that I fear, save that I shall not know all my duty or shall fail to perform it."
—Mary Lyon, 1849.
The forces which were transforming and destroying the established traditions of women's lives in the last century produced very different effects upon them, according to their individual temperaments and breeding, and the degree of social restriction to which they were subjected. While some exploded in an indignant demand for their rights, others, scarcely less discontented, but lacking initiative and courage, set conventionality aside with more discretion. By far the larger number, however, unconscious of the impulse that moved them, instinctively responded to it while still endeavoring to remain within their appointed sphere. They accepted as ordained and necessary their indirect relation to the world outside the home, and adapted as best they might their fledgling spirits to the shell in which they found themselves. They were assured that woman's power lay in her "influence." If the lives of their men-folk showed small impress of their prayers and innocent admonitions, they, nevertheless, believed themselves appointed agents of morality and trusted to an inscrutable Providence to make that influence effective.
A few—whom we have called the Elect—felt a call from God which transcended any that women had ever known. To those who believed that their social responsibility lay in domestic sacrifice and consecration, the religious awakening of the early Nineteenth Century brought a special opportunity for the exercise of womanly devotion—a way not in any wise inconsistent with the strictest canons of female duty, yet leading out into a foreign world, where profounder consecration was required. The terrifying, yet fascinating, tales of the heathen in kingdoms on the other side of the globe lent a glamor to the work of foreign missions. Their strange unchristian customs woke, in hearts filled with religious fervor, the primal instinct of the born adventurer. And not alone among men; for among women missionaries there have been some with as great a desire as a Stanley or a Peary for the unknown and the picturesque.
Men who dedicated themselves to foreign missionary work were expected, as part of their preparation, to choose for wives women of exceptional piety and bodily vigor, not only as a safeguard against evil, but to double their own efficiency by establishing among lost souls a model Christian household. Now and then these quite human apostles took with them some exemplary but feeble young girl, who shortly laid down her life in a strange country for a cause that she did not comprehend; but, for the most part, they chose prayerfully some young woman whose local reputation for piety and competence marked her out as suitable for missionary labors. Many a romantic girl, filled with religious enthusiasm, and after the slightest acquaintance with a young clergyman, married the Cause rather than the Man.
Whether congenially mated or not, there was scant time for uxorious sentiment in the exactions of the arduous life to which they went. The hardships of their physical existence, and the ever-pressing miseries of the needy creatures to whom they had dedicated their service, overtopped their merely personal griefs. Into many such families child after child was born, to fade away prematurely in an enervating climate; and such children as survived were of necessity sent to America to grow up among strangers. Both parents found their reward in the glory of the greater sacrifice; and the sons might well dedicate their easier tasks, as did the son of Adoniram Judson:
"To the children of the missionaries, the involuntary inheritors of their parents' sufferings and rewards."
On first thought it might seem that no woman would be farther from sharing the discontents which were moving her sex in America to struggle against their social bonds, than the missionary wife. There was certainly nothing novel in the consecration of wives to their husbands and children, since it had been the accepted duty of woman throughout the ages. But little as she might sympathize with woman's rights, it was the peculiar distinction of the missionary wife to dedicate herself, not like plain women to her family, but to the Cause of Christ, counting it all glory to share the perils of the pioneers who carried Christianity wherever men lay in darkness.
"Judson in his prison, Moffat with the savages in South Africa, Chalmers in the wilderness of New Guinea, Hunt and Calvert in blood-stained Fiji, Patson in the New Hebrides, all these and thousands more had some woman who stood shoulder to shoulder to them, sharing weariness, danger, loneliness, sickness, death."
It is written that of twelve missionaries sent to Sierra Leone in 1823, ten of whom were husbands and wives, six died that year, and four more in eighteen months; of the women none survived, and three were buried in the first year, with their babes beside them. However unaware of it, these women were as much fulfilling their inevitable share in the emancipation of their sex as those who suffered ostracism for demanding equal rights.
No more inspiring illustration of the unpremeditated manner in which such women took a new place in the world can be given, perhaps, than the lives of Ann Hasseltine, Sarah H. Boardman, and Emily Chubbock, each of whom successively became the wife of Adoniram Judson, the first missionary to Burmah. Of the first it has been said that her record and her sufferings have no parallel in missionary annals. A wellborn and well-educated New England girl, she was fascinated as much, it may be, by the mission as by the personality of the young theological student; and her life was looked upon by them both as even more a partnership in apostleship both as even more a partnership in apostleship than an obedience to wifely duty. During the fourteen years of her marriage, while she carried domestic cares and bore children for whom there was no hope of survival, she performed also prodigies of missionary labor. When, during the war between England and Burmah, Dr. Judson was thrown into the death prison, she was left quite unprotected. With an infant in her arms, she daily visited and comforted the prisoners, and her diplomacy and moving appeals to the government prepared the way for the ultimate release of all the English captives. Even when she went home with health undermined by fever, hardships, and grief, she spent her furlough in rousing interest in missions, finding time to write and translate extensively in the difficult Burmese language. One is not surprised to learn that when her body at last gave way from sheer exhaustion, she was "glad to go" to a world which promised rest. She had sacrificed her children as ungrudgingly as Abraham; she had laid down her life as deliberately as John Huss; for she had given herself body and soul, not to Adoniram Judson, but to the work of the Lord in whom she believed.
Sarah Boardman, the second wife, gave herself with just as clear a vision when she married Dr. Judson, for she was then the widow of a missionary who had died in the field. And again the union was a partnership in the promotion of the missions rather than for the attainment of any mere domestic comfort. After ten years she too gave her life gladly on the altar of missionary teaching. Yet this ruthless man of God had no hesitation, apparently, in inducing a delicate literary woman a few years afterward to return to the Orient with him. Though he died prematurely, and she was able to return to her native land with his children, she, too, paid the penalty in an early death, though not until she had written the biography of the first Mrs. Judson.
Estimated by the unchristian mind, the lives of these women might appear to have been sacrificed to the visionary egotism of a religious fanatic. But the utter absence of any petty feminine exactions toward their husband, and the evident admiration which each displayed, not only for his mission, but for her own predecessor, leaves no doubt that these martyrs to a cause counted it a privilege so to die for a great idea. Many a sister at home made almost as great sacrifices of her personal desires and comfort to some merely human man, who accepted it as due to himself and quite inevitable in the life of a proper domestic woman. The wives of Adoniam Judson had at least the compensation of giv ing their lives to something larger than themselves; and of breathing freely in a world from which all the pettier feminine coercions had dropped away.
Their pitiful and more profound experiences served other women, too, by affording inspiration to those who, not elected to special work, pursued the commonplace round of living. Comfortable women, in whom the horrors of jails and asylums in their own towns had not roused an active sense of social responsibility, felt their imaginations kindle at the recital of heathen barbarities and missionary sacrifice.
"Though they had little to give, the egg money, the butter money, the rag money, was theirs to squander in missions if they chose. Hundreds of female cent societies . . . mite societies, female praying societies, sewing and Dorcas societies, sprang up in support of missions."
They begged from door to door; they devised leaflets, wrote missionary stories and poems, and published news from the foreign field; and by such inconspicuous cooperation gained enlargement of their own lives. At the same time they became imbued with the thought that some women might be elected to a wider destiny, not less feminine and moral, but larger than their own.
Thus the members of churches were being prepared for the proposal that single women should be educated to go out as teachers and medical missionaries. Yet it was thirty years before this proposal was acted upon, so deep-rooted was the tradition still that an unmarried woman could properly do nothing in the world alone. Even after its practical adoption, the missionary spinster was often regarded as a sort of social roustabout to the men in the field. It is related of Bishop Thoburn that, convinced that it was impossible for men to reach the Hindu household, he sent for his sister, Isabella, to come out to India for this work. Miss Thoburn, who had had a large experience in teaching and nursing, objected to her brother's assumption that she had come out merely to be his clerk and assistant, and the Bishop was compelled to reconsider the situation. He wrote thus frankly of his conversion to a broader view:
"I accepted the fact that a Christian woman sent out to the field was a Christian missionary, and that her time was as precious, her work as important, and her rights as sacred as those of the more conventional missionaries of the other sex. The old-time notion that a woman in her best estate is only a helper, and should only be recognized as an assistant, is based on a very shallow fallacy."
Yet even so just a man as this could not wholly divest his mind of the tradition that woman was made for man, for he adds:
"She is a helper in the marriage relation, but in God's wide vineyard there are many departments of labor in which she can successfully maintain the position of an independent worker."
The increasing demand of the foreign mission work for women trained in nursing and medicine, reacted helpfully upon the struggle then in progress at home for the admission of women to the medical profession. While the Philadelphia Medical Society was excommunicating some of its members for lecturing in a woman's medical college, the experience of men in the evangelization of the heathen had forced upon them and their boards of management the conviction that "the heathen woman drowned all ideas;" and that "the citadel of heathendom was in the home, which could only be taken by the assault of women." This imperative need created a demand for trained women. As Helen Montgomery puts it, in her Western Women in Eastern Lands:
"Whether there were to be women physicians in America was a matter of interest; but in Asia it was a matter of life and death. The women of half the world were shut out from medical assistance unless they could receive it at the hands of women."
Here was a field of high professional labor which men had perforce to yield to women. While the clergy at home were still preaching that medicine was outside the sphere of woman; and the medical profession itself, with greater vehemence and less excuse, was denying them opportunities for study and practice, a few young women began to prepare themselves for this service. Clara Swain, the first fully-equipped medical woman to be sent to India in 1869, suffered to the full all the hindrances set by prejudice in the path of the unusual woman. Upon her fell the combined resistance of men physicians, of the conservatives in the churches, and of a society still permeated with the conventional views of feminine limitations.
While more than a thousand women, married and single, were suffering moral and social exile in foreign lands for the succor of lost souls, the sisters at home were also caught on the swell of a humanitarian wave that was destined to carry a great body of pious, domestic women far outside the limits of orthodox femininity. Temperance reform, already a generation old, had languished while men and women alike were absorbed in the exigencies of war. But the experience of that struggle had given women occasion for the development of their powers of organization; and when it was past they no longer desired to return to that exclusive sphere from which they had been wrenched by a national emergency.
Most of the temperance leaders were as far as possible from supposing that they were allied with the emancipation of their sex. They had little sympathy with woman's rights, and no intention of adopting its direct and startling methods. Although there was scarcely a state in which drunkenness was then recognized as cause for divorce, the temperance women were shocked by the proposition of Elizabeth Cady Stanton to adopt a resolution that no woman should remain in the relation of wife with a confirmed drunkard. They, nevertheless, justified their own unprecedented campaigns on the orthodox ground of their peculiar mission for the moral uplift of mankind. The Woman's Crusade, which spread in 1874 from Ohio over all the Northern States with a kind of pentecostal power, has been sympathetically described by Frances E. Willard:
"That women should thus dare, after they had so long endured, was a wonder. . . . Woman-like, they took their knitting, their zephyr-work, or their embroidery, and simply swarmed into the drink-shops, seated themselves, and watched the proceedings. Usually they came in a long procession from their rendezvous at some church, where they had held morning prayer-meeting, entered the saloon with kind faces, and the sweet songs of church and home upon their lips, while some Madonna-like leader. . . took her stand beside the bar, and gently asked if she might read God's word and offer prayer.
"Women gave of their best during the two months of that wonderful uprising. All other engagements were laid aside; elegant women of society walked beside quiet women of the home, school, and shop in the strange processions that soon lined the chief streets, not only of nearly every town and village in the state that was its birthplace, but of leading cities there and elsewhere; and voices trained in Paris and Berlin sang 'Rock of Ages, cleft for me,' in the malodorous air of liquor-rooms and beer-halls.
"Thousands of men signed the pledge . . . others slunk out of sight, and a few cursed the women openly; . . . soon the saloonkeepers surrendered in large numbers . . . the liquor traffic was temporarily driven out of two hundred and fifty towns to which the Crusade extended. . . . In Cincinnati the women . . . were arrested and locked up in jail, in Cleveland dogs were set upon the Crusaders, while in several places they were smoked out or had the hose turned upon them. Men say there was a spirit in the air such as they never knew before; a sense of God and human brotherhood."
This extraordinary outburst on the part of the mothers of the country, a class that had hitherto been untouched by the political and social reforms proposed by the woman's rights group, culminated in the organization of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which spread throughout every state in the Union, and ultimately to foreign countries. In 1890 it was publishing 130,000 pages of temperance literature, and a journal of its own; it had established a temperance hospital, and a lecture bureau, built a woman's temple, and was extending its work to schools, restaurants, lodging-houses for the friendless, and many other forms of philanthropy. With the extent and variety of its work we are not here particularly concerned; the significance of this movement for our present purpose lies in its unconscious expression of precisely the same expanding spirit as that displayed by such widely separated groups as the suffragists, the missionaries, and the literary amateurs.
Men had concentrated their temperance agitation chiefly upon legislative reforms, and promoted it by exhortation. But women, in their characteristic manner of inexperience, attacked it from forty different sides, all of which grew naturally out of their feminine conception of the disasters wrought upon the family life by the use of intoxicants. Their methods were perfectly direct and simple. Total abstinence and prohibition were the uncompromising words around which they rallied. They pledged and converted the drunkard, and they made the saloon odious and often ridiculous. They harassed politicians and legislators with petitions, until public men dared not refuse directly the measures they demanded for fear of having their devious records on the drink question, and on the social evil, ex posed. Like the enfant terrible in the family, these devoted women said everything right out—innocently setting an example to their imitators, the modern muck-rakers.
Nor did they limit themselves to direct attack upon institutions and legislation. Since they were "to carry the home into the world," they must needs devise means for the protection of their children from the three curses: "the curse of narcotic poisons, alcohol, and nicotine; the curse of gambling; the curse of the social sin, deadlier than all." The preventive measures which they undertook, and especially the so-called scientific temperance instruction which they succeeded in introducing into the public curriculum, afford a striking illustration of both the strength and the weakness of the organization. Peculiarly ignorant as women have generally been on physiological matters, they adopted statements as to the effects of alcohol on the human system which suited their personal bias; and by their pertinacity managed to get them officially accepted by school authorities.
They had previously commanded the approval, if not the cooperation, of the general public, and even of the drinking class, in their campaign against drunkenness, the treating habit, and the saloon. But when they filled schoolbooks with dogmatic statements, unjustifiably exaggerated, if not untrue, concerning a scientific question about. which the scientists themselves disagreed, they exposed their cause to easy attack. The mistake then made—not because they were women, but because they were ignorant—checked the sympathy and undermined the confidence of many intelligent men and women whose support they could ill afford to lose.
Aside from important concrete results in social reform with which the Woman's Christian Temperance Union should be credited, their contribution to the feminist movement was also considerable. Thousands of housemothers had learned to work in small groups together, and even aggressively, for the public welfare outside the church and the home. Having no experience in parliamentary tactics, they developed remarkably flexible methods of their own. By ignoring theological disputations, as women generally do, they were able to avoid sectarianism and sectionalism. The organization is, in fact, one of the few instances in which women have not been in the least imitative, for they neither asked nor took the advice of men. By the very spontaneity and originality of their measures, these women of a purely domestic type emancipated themselves into a world of larger ideas. Beginning with a disavowal of connection with the militant section of femininity, they ended with a motto as unequivocal as that of the suffragists:
"Woman will bless and brighten every place she enters, and she will enter every place."
The woman's temperance movement—"of women, by women, for humanity"
—exhibits in a peculiar degree the unpremeditated and instinctive character of the impulses which drove even mothers, a specialized and isolated class, to break the conventions of their time and to express themselves in larger ways than domesticity.
A third class of homekeeping women—the Ladies Bountiful—illustrates the tendency of their conservative kind to adjust the traditional feminine limitations with some form of religio-humanitarian service outside the home. In so far as they were merely using their advantages of wealth and birth in the service of the poor, they were following the traditions of religion from the time of the early Christian church. Among this class of domestic philanthropists, Mrs. Sarah Platt Doremus, though inconspicuous in her own day, was, perhaps, the most typical. Born of a family noted for its piety, wealth, and charitable-ness, she was early married to a man of similar social station, and became the mother of nine children. Her private benefactions were countless; and, in addition, she founded several charitable institutions, extended perpetual hospitality to impecunious missionaries of every sect, and was constantly serving on boards and committees. We are assured that, in spite of these incessant and varied activities, "nothing was ever allowed to interfere with her home life." Although she attained a place among famous women by her benevolence, her biographer is at great pains to describe in detail her feminine charm and housewifely accomplishments:
"All her labors for suffering humanity were so unostentatiously performed that much was not known until after her death. No outside duty was undertaken until the claims of her household were minutely discharged. From her youth she was a notable housewife, and her delicacies for the sick were among the crowning achievements of her education. She was skilled in all the accomplishments of the day, and her paintings and embroideries were preserved as evidences of her versatile talents. To the last day of her life she was to be seen making dainty fabrics with the dexterity and rapidity of the young.
"Her beauty was retained to old age, and her clear, cameo-cut features, her delicate complexion, with its soft color, and deep blue eyes, gave her a passport to all hearts.
"Her power to organize undertakings, broad and far-reaching, was only equaled by her execution of the minutest details . . . especially with a delicacy of health which might have precluded all service. The secret of her success in every department of work was her entire consecration to the Lord's service."
It is certainly not surprising that, in her case, as in that of almost every married woman in the first half of the Nineteenth Century, all this was accomplished with the accompaniment, if not the result, of ill-health. It is, in truth, incredible that any woman should have borne nine children, performed every conventional feminine duty, practised the most exacting accomplishments, exercised unlimited hospitality, and still have had time left in which to be chairman of committees and founder of half a dozen societies, and as many more institutions. Beside such a record, the activities of the modern clubwoman and charity worker seem inconsiderable.
Mrs. Doremus was, indeed, one of a type soon to pass away, for she represented the very limit to which the domestic woman of exceptional ability could go without breaking through the appointed sphere. When women began to reform charitable institutions, besieging legislators on behalf of the neglected insane and town poor, and invading prisons to expose their horrors, they were regarded as going quite beyond the conventions of almsgiving. To understand the repugnance which their aggressive ideas aroused, we must see them with men's eyes, in perspective with the social conditions of the period. Men might themselves attempt to reform a society in which they had always been leaders and dictators, and they could accept without injury to their pride the proposals of other men; but when women presumed to criticise and, moreover, to overturn by public agitation, that which had been established and called good, the proceeding was held to be almost as outrageous as the demand for equal rights.
When Dorothea Dix, a school-teacher of exceptional culture, visited, in 1843, every almshouse and jail in Massachusetts, and appealed to the Legislature for the reform of their horrible conditions, she was doing as unfeminine a thing as Susan B. Anthony, when she attempted to vote in the face of threatened arrest.
"She then went from state to state, in a time when traveling was difficult and tedious, ignoring fatigue and a system actually saturated with malaria, until she saw twenty asylums in twenty states under proper management. In less than four years she traveled ten thousand miles, visited eighteen penitentiaries, three hundred county jails and houses of correction, and more than five hundred almshouses, besides hospitals and houses of refuge. No place was too horrible, no spectacle too sickening, to damp her enthusiasm or to hold back this delicate and refined woman from her self-appointed task."
From America she went to foreign countries to revolutionize there the methods of charitable institutions; and rounded out her long life of social service with work in the hospitals during the Civil War. Because we now venerate such women as Miss Dix it is the more difficult to realize the criticism which their rare and unprecedented behavior created. She definitely smashed the theory that a single woman had no duty outside the home, accomplishing, in spite of opposition and limited physical strength, tasks of which men might be proud.
Long before the War, there had been other women liberated here and there to social service through their characteristic feminine sympathies. While some were laying down their lives to help heathen women and children, others found their election at home in teaching negroes. Before the suffragists were mobbed and hooted in the streets of Eastern towns, Prudence Crandall was arrested, imprisoned, convicted, boycotted, and inhumanly persecuted in a town in Connecticut, for carrying on a school for colored girls. While Clara Barton was giving herself to the work of the Sanitary Commission, and conceiving the great idea which was to make the Red Cross a symbol of worldwide humanity, Josephine Griffing was devoting herself and her property to the relief of the thousands of homeless negroes that were pouring into the City of Washington. When the War was over, it was her plan for the Freedmen's Bureau that was adopted by the Government. From Margaret Gaffney, the uneducated daughter of an Irish immigrant, who, childless and widowed, founded orphan asylums in New Orleans with the profits of her dairy and bakery, to Josephine Shaw Lowell, the well-born and well-educated young girl bereft of her husband by the Civil contest, who gave her whole life to the charities of New York State, and left an indelible mark on the philanthropies of her generation—women of every class felt the breath of a spirit which compelled them to do strange, new things in spite of their domestic traditions.
In all that dignifies human nature, they surpassed their sex. Some carried themselves against criticism with the courage of the wellborn among canaille; some with the inspired fanaticism of religion; breaking through the prejudices of a complacent society in the service of unpopular causes, defying ostracism, ignoring weakness of body and physical hardships, sacrificing the thing dearest to woman—her reputation for womanliness—in devotion to the larger human need. By their deeds and their social martyrdom they justified their commission as "moral agents." As the numbers of such philanthropic women increased toward the end of the century, it might almost seem that here was their destined field of work outside the home. Certainly they contributed to humanitarian enterprises a quality of devotion and sacrifice not often seen before; blindly imposing upon them the standards of the pious, domestic circle with a singlemindedness born of ignorance and consecration.
While thousands of Christian women were dedicating themselves to foreign missions, carrying on temperance crusades and entering innumerable fields of philanthropy—thus more or less unconsciously enlarging their sphere—one woman alone was destined to leave an ineffaceable mark on the Christian religion. The life of Mary Baker Eddy covered more than three-quarters of the Nineteenth Century; and at her death, in 1910, she was acknowledged, even by those who were not followers of her faith, to be the most remarkable woman of her time. Only the briefest résumé of her career is required to show that that opinion was well founded.
Mary Baker was born in 1821, of plain New England parents, and brought up in the stern religious beliefs of that period. She was always a delicate child, but she seems to have been somewhat better educated than most girls of her time. She married, and bore one child, and was not unlike other women, except, perhaps, in being less strong and less happily situated. At forty years of age she seemed a confirmed invalid. At forty-six—an age when most women have finished all the constructive work of their lives—she passed through mental experiences which led to the foundation of the system now known as Christian Science. Yet another decade of life was passed in "finding herself," and in teaching and writing. Her best-known book, Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures, was not published till 1875, but has now gone through some hundreds of editions of one thousand copies each. The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was not organized till 1879; yet, at the time of her death, there were nearly one thousand churches of this sect, which claims a million adherents throughout the world. "No other faith . . . as far as human annals go, has risen and extended so rapidly, so quietly, so persistently."
It has been truthfully said that Mrs. Eddy built up a career "out of nothing that is physical, no great fortune, no industrial invention, no inherited opportunity." Her achievements were based, rather, upon a recognition of "God as Divine Principle, and the consequent allness of good and unreality of evil." Although neither of these ideas-the non-reality of matter and the influence of mind over matter-was new, she gave them new vitality by interpreting both the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures in their light. The doctrines of Christian Science, like those of older sects, were dependent upon a literal acceptance of the Bible; but Mrs. Eddy transferred the emphasis from the passages of wrath and painful prohibition to those of faith and cheerful assurance.
Christian Science was one, and perhaps the most conspicuous, of the reactions against Puritanism on the one hand; and, on the other, against materialism and the negations of physical science. In both aspects it met the spiritual needs of men as well as of women, and therefore reacted upon other Christian denominations to humanize and revivify the Gospel message. Aside from this effect, it was also destined to alter the attitude of Christian thinking toward women. Repeatedly in the preceding chapters of this book, it has been pointed out how an excessively masculine interpretation of the Scriptures and the conservatism of the clergy together reinforced primitive social habits to keep women in subordination. But Mrs. Eddy interpreted the Scriptures wholly without reference to sex. Nor does Science and Health contain any peculiar earmarks of feminine authorship—not even in the chapter on Marriage—unless it be in the emphasis upon the reciprocal and equal duties of husband and wife.
Mrs. Eddy's chief contribution to humane religion lay probably in the negation of fear. For many generations the teachers of Christianity had been dwelling upon the wrath of God, the terrors of Satanic evil, and the punishments of hell; to the neglect of those large and tender mercies which Jesus himself had chiefly preached. Suffering was believed to be necessary, inevitable, sent by God for the chastening of the wicked human soul; poverty and sickness were irremediable and "Providential." To all this the doctrine of Christian Science was flatly opposed. One of its basic propositions was declared to be true, whether read forward or backward: "Life, God, omnipotent good, deny death, evil, sin, disease—Disease, sin, evil, death, deny good omnipotent, God, Life."
Such a doctrine of cheerfulness came as a revelation of divine goodness to overburdened, neurasthenic, fearful, hyper-sensitive people; and whatever may be thought of the system of therapeutics taught by Mrs. Eddy, the insistence upon a humaner interpretation of the Scriptures has been an incalculable benefit to mankind.
In her own personality, Mary Baker Eddy illustrated in a high degree the very qualities in which the average woman of the past century was lacking: her indomitable will, her serene assurance and belief in her own message; her genius for large organization, and her power to hold the allegiance of men and women alike, were absolutely "unfeminine," judged by the standards of her time. Her career was, indeed, a signal example of the sexlessness of great gifts. In no respect was she more exceptional than in the courage with which she endured ridicule and opposition:
"For more than half a century, the most powerful oppositions and antagonisms beat around her. For years ... she was the target for ridicule, abuse, slander, and calumny. Conventional religion and organized medicine vied with each other in attacking her theory, ridiculing her position, and impugning her motives. Foes arose within her own household. ... This persistent, tireless, and many-sided opposition would have crushed any one not sustained by invincible living faith."
It is not the province of a non-adherent, nor the purpose of this sketch, to estimate the ultimate religious significance of Mrs. Eddy's teachings; but, from a purely worldly standpoint, she rises unchallenged—an exception to all criteria of feminine capacity. Even if the cult of Christian Science should ultimately decline, as many others have done, the sheer indomitable dignity and power of the woman herself will remain to suggest what may be possible to any woman. While all the other sects were clinging to masculine interpretations, a woman of limited training, under the handicap of physical weakness, and quite without appeal to any personal charm, founded a new, prosperous, and humane denomination; and this not among the ignorant, but among a highly intelligent class of people. While tradition was still reiterating the necessary inferiority of the female sex, women like Mrs. Eddy and Dorothea Dix, and many another whose name is scarcely remembered now, were attacking men's problems with a grasp of intellect, a fertility of resource, and an indomitable force of will such as go to make a great statesman or a great commander. But if they had done no more than prepare the world to follow the social leadership of Jane Addams; or even if they had been no more than moving illustrations of the need under which all women labored for lack of opportunity and training, they would have served their kind and time. By so much as they rose above their weakness and their limitations, finding courage for rare deeds, they helped to liberate all other women from paralyzing conventions.