COVERED HEADS

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 147, 19 December 1933, Page 15

COVERED HEADS

WOMEN IN CHURCH

"A SEEMLY CUSTOM"

It is very common for great men to be misunderstood both by their followers and their opponents, and there is no man in Christian history who has been more misunderstood than St. Paul, writes the Eev. C. A. Allington, Dean of Durham, in the London "Daily Telegraph.'' ■ The Pauliiiists who provoked St. James to fury by their .exaggerations of their master's doctrine of the sufficiency of faith would havo been very sternly dealt with by St. Paul himself. : In later, days the misunderstanding is of a different kind. St. Paul has been regarded as a legalist whoso favourite word was the legal' term "justification," and who delighted in working out a cut-and-dried scheme of the divine plan of salvation. As a matter of fact, St. Paul, as the briefest reading of his Epistles shows, was a very emotionalman: it is significant that he records that he "spake with tongues" more than all his disciples, arid whatever is precisely meant by that expression, there can be no doubt that it implies a highly developed emotionalism. ,' It is perfectly true that he often uses, legal language: this was an inevitable result of his training as a learned Jew, but he iises it with an inconsistency which would bo impossible for a really legal mind. , '; . When we once realise the fact of St. Paul's temperament we can understand the- frame of mind in which lie legislates, when legislation is'called for. He was the last man in the world, after his experience at the hands of Jewish legalists, to wish to lay down unnecessary regulations, but he lived in days when some laws had to be made for the infant Church, unless it was to fall into a condition of anarchy. He legislated, we may well believe, impartially^- and from a sense of sheer necessity. If men and women could only bo brought to understand that their duty was to'live "in Christ," no legislation would have- been necessary, but, like Moses, "for the hardness of theiL-ihearts," he found it necessary to give- them commandments. CHURCH COKXNTH. No great man likes to bo called upon to give orders about trifles. We may recall how the great Duke of Wellington lost ids temper with the peer who complained that the place assigned to him in the Coronation procession was not such as his dignity deserved. "The Queen," he-said, at last, when his patience was exhausted—"the Queen can make you ride in the third coach or rido in tho fourth coach, or run behind all the coaches like a damned tinker's dog." I have often thought that it was in a, similar spirit that St. Paul answered the man who "replied against God." To. suppose- that such a man as St. ■Paul attached undue importance to ceremonial regulations is ■ entirely to misread his character. He. was forced by the necessity of the case to make regulations of a. trivial kind for the bettor conduct of tho Church' in Corinth, and he. made them as the circumstances of that particular case demanded. : In Corinth, a notoriously immoral city, there were obvious reasons why modesty of dress and behaviour should be enforced on Christian women converts. St. Paul made what ho thought the obvious and necessary mle, and proceeded, after his fashion, to support his rule by a very doubtful argument. It is not necessary to hold; that he seriously thought that immodest dress would be a temptation to "the angels," or "the Sons of God," who are recorded in the Old Testament as having yielded to a similar temptation iv ancient days. . The passage came into his head,' is such passages do to any man with a strong verbal memory, and he put it down in his letter:-there is no reason to believo that he- attached any importance to it then, and there- is less than no reason why we should attach importance to it.now. OPINION OF WOMEN. As for the idea that St. Paul, had a low opinion of tho female sex, therd is even less justification for it than for the similar charge levelled against St. Cuthbert. No one denies that St. Paul was a Jew and was imbued with Jewish ideas as to the-relations of the sexes: no one maintains that he was great enough to be as liberal-as his Master, but he has a right to be judged-by what ho actually said. ~ When he said that "in Christ Josus there was neither male nor female," ho meant it as surely as he meant that there was neither Jew nor Gentile: he devoted most of hiß life to fighting for the equality in the sight of God of every race of mankind, and it is not hard to believe that had the circumstances been different he would have fought with equal zeal and courage far the equality of women. If St. Paul wore alive today he would be the first, to welcome all that womenhave done, and are doing for tho cause of Christ. He would bo the last to insist on the eternal validity of regular tions made for a particular time. He would sco in such an insistence a revival of that un-Christian Jewish spirit which nearly cost him. his life. There are few Christian documents which he would read with ■; greater pleasure and.sympathy than the-pre-face to the Prayer Book, in which it is laid down that "the .keeping or omitting of a ceremony in iteelf considered is but a small thing." He would be glad to see that his own dictnm is quoted, that all things should be dono in a seemly and due order, and would agree that the ap^ pointmont of such order pertaineth not to private men. But he would realise, no man better, that no one "order 2' can be eternal, and would laugh indignantly at the suggestion that he himself had instituted anything of tho kind. No one suggests that if is desirable to abolish the custom which ordainß that men should not wear hats in church, ' nor «is there anything unreasonable in maintaining the old tradition that women should worship with covered heads'. The point is that these and similar customs are ultimately based on our own conception of what is seemly, and not on tho presumed literal inspiration of St. Paul's Epistles.