Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/821

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Woman, Church, and State.
787

for equality of right in Church and State. On the Sunday following the Thirtieth Anniversary Woman Suffrage Convention, held in Rochester, 1878, the Rev. A. H. Strong, D.D., President of the Baptist Theological Seminary of that city, preached upon "Woman's Place and Work," saying:

In the very creation of mankind in the garden of beauty, God ordained the subordination of woman.

This president of a theological seminary, where Christian theology is taught to embryo Christian ministers, said that woman's subordination would be most perfectly seen in the "Christian humility and gentleness and endurance of her character, and in her indisposition to assume the place or do the work of man," forgetting, apparently, that subordination, humility, and endurance are precisely the qualities which tend to destroy nobleness of character. The sermon was especially directed against the following resolutions of this Convention, which throughout the country met much clerical criticism and opposition:

Resolved, That as the duty of every individual is self-development, the lessons of self-sacrifice and obedience taught women by the Christian Church have been fatal, not only to her own highest interests, but through her have also dwarfed and degraded the race.

Resolved, That the fundamental principle of the Protestant Reformation, the right of individual conscience and judgment in the interpretation of Scripture, heretofore conceded to and exercised by man alone, should now be claimed by woman, and that in her most vital interests she should no longer trust authority, but be guided by her own reason.

Resolved, That it is through the perversion of the religious element in woman, cultivating the emotions at the expense of her reason, playing upon her hopes and fears of the future, holding this life, with all its high duties, forever in abeyance to that which is to come, that she, and the children she has trained, have been so completely subjugated by priestcraft and superstition.

Professor Christlieb, a distinguished German clergyman who was in attendance upon the Evangelical Alliance in New York, a few years since, expressed severe condemnation of the marriage relation as he saw it in this country. His criticism is a good exemplification of the general religious view taken of woman's relation to man. After his return to Germany, a young American student called, it is related, upon the professor with a note of introduction, and was cordially received by the German, who, while he praised this country, expressed much solicitude about its future. On being asked his reasons, he frankly expressed his opinion that "the Spirit of