THE ORDER OF PRISCILLA.

Otago Witness, Issue 3500, 12 April 1921, Page 58

THE ORDER OF PRISCILLA.

By

Jessie Mackay.

Without haste, with a good deal of rest, and not without some pioua hesitation, the Lambeth Conference has successfully achieved a step towards reopening the ministry to women. I say “reopening” advisedly. Westcott and Hort, strong names both, stood for the inclusion ci' women in the great original commission to the Church granted by Christ Himself after the Resurrection. It went without saying that the women chosen to tell the glad news to the unbelieving disciples would share that tremendous evangelising trust to which the one-sex priesthood of reaction has proved so unequal. This wide spiritual franchise, indeed, had been reaffirmed by the Fulham Conference on Confession and Absolution in 1901. Nineteen yeans have gone, leaving the outer fabric of the Christian Church caught in the rocking ruin of all things temporal in Europe, and now the Lambeth Conference recommends, not rules, that the services of devout and gifted women may be utilised by the Church, within certain limits. Women may sit on - all Church Councils to which laymen are admitted, and laywomen may speak and pray within consecrated buildings at hours other than those of regular services. For the rest, the enlargement of women’s clerical sphere lies in the widening of the scope of the Order of Deaconesses. It is recommended that ordained deaconesses shall prepare candidates for baptism and confirmation, read prayers in church, and “instruct and exhort,” in other words, “preach.” Possibly, too, the recommendation that deaconesses should help in administering the sacrament to the sick was finally sustained. All this, from Lambeth, is a long step forward; and one does not belittle the pains of earnest reformers in pushing the wheels of progress out of so many ruts. It is true that when English Bishops licensed Miss Maude Royden and Miss Edith Picton-Turbervill to preach a year or two ago, they antidated the cautious findings of the Conference, and that Miss Royden came back to the Establishment after a full probation of pastorhood at the City Temple. Nor was this the first appearance of women in an English pulpit. The Reverend Gertrude Petzold was not the only woman pastor in the Free Churches of England ten years ago. The full significance of the Lambethan seal on women’s ministration, unlike the material fight to enter the secular professions, depends on the individual attitude towards the Church. We who see in the wide services of a wide and brotherly Church the indispensable ladder to the higher life for the majority, must show the courage of our convictions. One has every respect for the sonorous theory of the man who worships in the green Cathedral of Nature, but the fact remains that ninety-nine take the world with them there for every one that walks unwalled with the Paraclete. Miss Picton-Turber-vill says truly that a great tragedy has fallen on the world, even as the greatest of tragedies seemed to have befallen that little Galilean band nineteen centuries ago. To women did Christ then entrust the greatest of messages, and it may be that consecrated women will once more

speak the word changing “blank tragedy to blazing triumph.” Most reasonable indeed, and how much more reasonable had it been if men bad always been granted the right to preach to women, always the bulk of a congregation, on those free and direct lines appealing specially to themselves. But was it- only to women that the holy sisters of a wider tradition once ministered unrebuked? Going back to first things, has it not been reasonably contended that Priscilla, not Apollos nor another, wrote the Book of Hebrews? The references to this gifted woman would sustain a theory so startling to the later Pauline reactionaries. After all the rapid degeneration of the pure Apostolic ideal, after all the mistranslations and misreadimrg on which the man-made world reared its religious monopolies, there still remained in the Dark Ages, and even the Middle Ages, the idea of an Apostolic succession after the spiritual Order of Priscilla. The life of Hilda of Whitby, the ruler of Abbey and halidom, and the counsellor of princes and scholars, fully bears out the argument, and Saxon Hilda herself never boasted the European fame of the Celtic Bridget of Kildare, “Sweet Saint Bride with the yellow, yellow hair.” The vision, the words, the mothering heart of women like these made the Christian Church the oasis it was in a desert of darkness and war. Let us confess that the rigidity of the Reformation, shutting alike the door on good women in the living world and unregenerated souls in the Beyond, struck at that very liberty which the Reformers so passionately defended. Needless to say, America lit her lamp a long time before Lambeth did. For more than a generation the sainted reformed, Dr Anna Shaw, beaded an ever increasing band of American women pastors. We break the Tenth Commandment over these Deborahs of the West. We must have their like in Britain if there is to be sap, salt, or savour in our British Christianity. Australasia lag 3 behind. Certainlv a Methodist deaconess, some eight or nine years ago, ministered faithfully to a small country charge in New Zealand, retiring on grounds of health. I hardly dare to chronicle the advent of the mouse which crept out of a mountain of parliajjjentary verbosity last year, when women registrars were authorised to perform the marriage ceremony. i out is Caucasian civilisation competent to criticise individual failure in this direction?- From America came the Women’s Bible, somewhat defiantly set forth. But it is not only the correction of bad translations or misconstructions on the part of Aryan scholars or Semitic redactors that we wed. If we would plumb the abyss of ruin in which the manguided world has all but engulfed itself, we must look far ty|ck into the remotest spiritual beginnings'. Dark Shamanisur, childish local idolatries, debasing superstitions, cruel blood rituals—all these are the morass from which the loftiest of our myths, our Meru, our Olympus, our. Valhalla, once rose. But back of all thece gropings of spiritual childhood there rises the first revelation of the dawn in that world-wide conception of a Divine Motherhood, a Vestal Deitv, which lit the true Eden story of Adam’s race. Such are the Maiya of the earliest Yedas, the veiled Isis of earliest Egypt, the Al-Lat of old Arabia, Ri, the mother of the Assyrian gods, her Greek counterpart, Rhea, Vesta, the pure Roman Virgin of the Fire—all these, and a thousand lesser forms of pure, protecting, creative female divinity, show that men worshipped goddesses before they knew of gods, and that the broken fragments of the matriarchate found %mong small, remote, peaceful peoples to-day figure a reign of childlike peace on earth under the smile of those forgotten Mother Goddesses. Later, these names were debarred where the pantheon of the male gods above figured a growing reign of violence and sensuality on earth. This subject is treated beautifully and mystically in the “Ancient Road” and other books of Mrs R. F. Swiney. It is a far cry from the Bona Dea to the Lambeth deaconesses, but at least it is a hopeful sign that in the revised Order of Priscilla we are taking a long step forward to the New Eden.