Status of Woman

Southland Times, Issue 15156, 29 January 1902, Page 4

Status of Woman

(Nineteenth Oentury). The estate of woman in the Roman Empire has been pithily expressed by one of the most recent, and nob the least authoritative, of its historians. 'She was degraded in her sooial oondition,' writes Merivale, 'because she waa deemed unworthy of moral consideration ; and her moral consideration, again, sank lower and lower, preoisely because her sooial oondition was so degraded.' Among the Jews — and we must never forget that Christianity first came before the > world as a Jewish teot— her plaoe waa no higher ; indeed it was lower. Divorce was practised by the Hebrews to an extent, unknown even in the lowest decadence of Imperial Rome. Tbe text in Deuteronomy authorising a man to put away his wife if he found in her aome blemish (aliquam fceditatem, as the Vulgate has it) was interpreted most liberally by the Rabbis. Any oause of offence was sufficient, according io Hillel ; for example, if a woman let the broth burn ; and Akiva lays it down that a man might give his wife a bill of divorcement if he could find a better-looking spouse. Polygamy too, waa at the least tolerated, if it was not largely practised ; indeed, it still survives among the Jews of the East, and did .not disappear among those dwelling in the West until tho prohibitory law of Rabbi Gershom ben Jehndah was passed in the Synod of Worms (a.d. 1020). But Christianity did more than merely vindicate the personality of .women. Itpr.oteoted her personality by what a learned writer has well oalled ' the new creation of marriage.' There ara few things in history more astonishing— we may say, in the strictest sense, miraculous— than the faot, for faot it Is, that a few words spoken in Byria two thousand years ago by a Jewish peasant, 'despised and rejected of men/ brought about th's vast change, which has wrought so muoh to purify and ennoble modern civi lisation; surely an emphatio testimony to the truth of tbe Evangelist's assertion : 'He knew what was in man." De Wette remarks, with his usual judiciousness : 'Christ grounds wedlook on the original interdepen dence (Zusammengehorigkeitj) of the two sexes, and lays it down tbat as one c.nnot exist without the other, the inseparability of their union should follow. This union is, indeed, the work of man ; but it takes place, and ever should take place, through an inner tendenoy (Drang), proceeding from the, original interdependence of the sexes, through love. The reparation, on the other hand . . . [of those who thus come together] tikes plaoe through human arbitrariness (Willkur), or through lusts and paesionß, whioh unfairly or inconsistently annul what was ordained in conformity witb the original law of Nature, ('was dem ursprunglichen Naturgesetze gemass ge.tiftet war'). < This is the Magna Charta of woman ia ■ modern civilisation: this lifelong union of i two equal personalities ; this gift of one wo- ■ man to one man as adjutorium simile sibi, a * help like unto him— 'not like to like but like A to difference ;' a union, a gift, consecrated 1 by religion and made holy matrlnfony. Bat < Z may observe in passing, Christianity did even more than this to secure the position of ; feminine humanity in that new order of so- < ciety which it wee to mould. Soon— how t soon the Catacombs bear witness— the type < of womanhood idealised in the Virgin Mo- , ther assumed a prominent plaoe in the devotions of the faithful ; and as this idea germi- ! nated in the Christian consciousness, Mary . reoeived a worship inferior only to that offered to her Son. The conception pre- { sented by the Madonna would have been , foolishness to the antique Greeks, and Ro- 1 mans too. It was a stumbliog-blook to the J Jews, contemptuous of the daughters of her , who figures so poorly in the aooount re- ' oeived by them 'of man's first disobedience J and the fruit of that forbidden tree.' The < Christian Cburch, from the earliest times, ' delighted to think of Mary as the second ; Eve, who had undone the work of the fiist, , and had brought life instead bf death into the world, mutans Ev® nomen ; changing the ; name of the temptress into tbe 'Aye' of the ( angelio salutation. And when a thousand years had passed away, and chivalry arose, ; the 'all but adoring love' of Christians for ( her powerfully btimulated the quasi-religious ' veneration paid io the Middle Ages to the ; graces of feminine nature, a veneration t whiob, striking a note before unheal din the ' world, has inspired tbe highest poetry of ; modern oivilhation. Suoh was the influence t exercised on the place of her sex in the new ' order of society by 'the Mother of fair love, < and fear, and knowledge, and holy hope.' . •Born of a woman' is the true account of the *~

modern home, with its refined and elevating influences. That is the characteristic specially marking off the Christian family from the other families of the earth. Ib is founded on woman, not on man.