in
certain moral qualities--in self-sacrifice, sympathy, purity, and
compassion, and in religious feeling, reverence and devotion: but
inferior to them in the moral qualities which are concerned with
government--in justice, love of truth and judgement, in stability and
reasonableness. Intellectually women have very often greater quickness
of apprehension and memory, greater power in learning languages,
greater artistic sensibility. But they are conspicuously inferior in
the constructive imagination, in creative genius, in philosophy and
science. It is sometimes said that if women had been as well educated
as men--and assuredly on Christian principles they ought to be, if
differently, yet equally well educated--they would have created as
much. Why, then, have almost no women been poets of the first order,
or musical composers, or painters? For in these artistic walks of life
their education has been in many countries better and more continuous.
To maintain that men and women are only physiologically different is to
run one's head against the brick wall of fact and science, no less than
against St. Paul's and St. Peter's principles[19].

{224}

It remains true that

'women is not undevelopt man
But diverse ... seeing either sex alone
Is half itself, and in true marriage lies
Nor equal, nor unequal[20].'

4. It is necessary to add something about the position assigned by St.
Paul, in other epistles, to unmarried women; and to notice the relation
of his 'theory of women' to earlier Jewish ideas and those current in
general society.

Nothing could well exceed the influence or nobility of the position of
the Jewish wife and mistress of the household, as it is given, for
example, in the Book of Proverbs[21]. That position St. Paul can
perpetuate and deepen, but hardly augment. And the Old Testament
recognized an altogether exceptional position in certain women endowed
with the gift of prophecy, like Miriam and Deborah and Huldah, who in
virtue of their gift exercised a public and {225} quasi-political
ministry. Thus in the Christian community also there were
prophetesses, and St. Paul, in the same epistle in which he forbids
women in general to teach in public, seems to leave room for such
exceptional women to 'pray or prophecy' in the Christian congregation
with their heads covered[22]. Thus in fact all down Christian history
there have been at intervals exceptional women with unmistakable gif