COVERED HEADS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIV, Issue 9, 21 December 1933, Page 3

COVERED HEADS

WOMEN IN CHURCH “A SEEMLY CUSTOM.” INTERESTING OPINIONS. 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 Rev. C. A. Allington, Dean of Durham, in the London, ‘‘Daily Telegraph.” The Paulinists who provoked St. James to fury by their exaggerations of their master’s doctrine of the sufficiency of faith would have 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 whose 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 Epistle shows, was a very emotional man; it is significant that he records that “that he spake with tongues” more than all his disciples, and 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 uses it with an inconsistency which would be 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 he 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 be brought to understand that their duty was to live “in Christ,” no legislation would have been necessary, but, like Moses, “for the hardness of their hearts,” he found it necessary to give them commandments. CHURCH IN CORINTH. No great man likes to be called upon to give orders about trifles. We may recall how the great Duke of Wellington lost his 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 ride in the 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 nuts 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 better conduct of the 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 he thought the obvious and necessary rule, and proceeded, after his fashion, to support his rule by a very doubtful argument. It is not necessary to hold that ho 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 in ancient days.

The passage came into his head, as such passages do to any man with a strong verbal memory, and he put it down in his letter; there is no reason to believe 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 the female sex, there is even less justification for it than for the similar charge levelled against St. Cuthbert. No one denies that 'Sfc 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 bo judged by what he actualy said. When lie said that “in Christ Jesus there was neither male nor female,” he meant it as surely as he meant that there was neither Jew nor Gentile; he devoted most of his life to fighting for the equality in the sight of God or every race of mankind, and it is not hard to believe that had the circumstances been different he would have fought with equal zest and courage for the equality of women If St. Paul were alive to-day he would be the first to welcome all that women have done and are doing for the cause of Christ. He would be the last

to insist on the eternal validity of regulations made for a particular time. He would see in such an insistence a revival of that un-Christian Jewish spirit which nearly cost him his life. There are few Christian documents which ho would read with greater pleasure and sympathy than the preface to the Prayer Book, in which it is laid down that “the keeping or omitting of a ceremony in itself considered is but a small thing.” He would be glad to see that his own dictum is quoted, that all things should be done in a seemly and due order, and would agree that the appointment of such order pertaineth not to private men. But he would realise, no man better, that no one “order” can be eternal, and would laugh . indignantly at the suggestion that he himself had instituted anything of the kind. No one suggests that it is desirable to abolish the custom which ordains 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 the presumed literal inspiration of St. Paul’s Epistles.