Woman, Church & State. Gage Matilda Joslyn

---

Скачать книгу

---

aside from regularly promulgated canons, came from time to time into force. When once applied they assumed all the power of custom and soon bore all the force of common law. The evils of ecclesiastical law were soon increased through the unsparing use of forgery and falsehood. Lea says:

      In the remodeling of European Institutions, so necessary to the interests of Christianity and civilization, one of the most efficient agencies was the collection of Canons known as the False Decretals. Forgery was by no means a novel expedient to the church. From the earliest times orthodox and heretics had rivalled each other in the manufacture of whatever documents were necessary to substantiate their respective positions whether in faith or discipline. An examination of these Decretals tends to the conclusion that they were not the result of one effort or the work of one man. Their constant repetitions and their frequent contradiction would seem to prove this, and to show that they were manufactured from time to time to meet the exigencies of the moment or to gratify the feelings of the writers. Interpolated into codes of law, adopted and amplified in the canons of councils and the decretals of popes, they speedily became part of the civil and ecclesiastical policy of Europe, leaving traces on the constitutions which they afflicted for centuries… The pretenses and privileges which they conferred on the hierarchy became the most dearly prized and frequently quoted portions of the Canon Law. In each struggle with the temporal authority, it was the arsenal from which were drawn the most effective weapons, and after each struggle the sacerdotal combatants had higher vantage ground for the ensuing conflict … theories of ecclesiastical superiority which left so profound an impress on the middle ages and which have in no slight degree molded our modern civilization.

      Even Magna Charta strengthened Canon Law, confirming many liberties of the Church, and injuring women by prohibiting appeal to them unless for the death of their husbands. While the general tenor of the church was against marriage, an unmarried woman unless dedicating her life to the church was regarded with more contempt than the married. To be under control of a husband was looked upon as the normal condition of women not living celibate lives. Consequently women were driven into marriage or monastic houses,201 and no reproach so great as the term “old maid.” The influence of custom is nowhere more discernible than in Blackstone himself. The great commentator while fully admitting the blending of Canon with Common law, also acknowledging its most prejudicial effects to have fallen upon woman, yet attempts to prove that the liberties of the English people were not infringed through ecclesiasticism. He is so entirely permeated with the church doctrine of woman’s created inferiority as not to be willing to acknowledge the infringement of her natural liberty through it, although at the same time he declares that “whosoever would fully understand the Canon Law must study Common Law in respect to woman.” Such benumbing of the moral faculties through her doctrines is among the greatest wrongs perpetrated by the church upon mankind. Nor is it alone in regard to woman. During the Franco-Prussian war a writer declared the great and absolute need of the French people to be education; that of moral character there was absolutely none, either in the higher or lower classes. Even the sons of aristocratic families educated in Jesuit schools, being at most taught that wrong can only be measured by a formal religious standard, and that every wrong can be wiped out by confession to the priest. French education, this writer declared to be that of two centuries ago, when might was looked upon as identical with justice. Nor can morality be taught while its basis in the church remains the same.

      The priestly profession held the most brilliant promises of gratified ambition to every man that entered it. Not alone did he possess the keys of heaven and hell, but also those of temporal power. The laity were his obedient servants upon which he could impose penance and from whose coffers wealth could be made to flow into his own. Through long continued false teaching the people believed their fate in both worlds more fully depended upon the priesthood than upon their own course in life, God having deputed a share of his power to every priest and monk, no matter how debased; and that when he spoke it was not himself, but God, through his lips, as asserted by the priesthood themselves. This impious assertion so capable as shown of being used for the most tyrannous purposes, came also into the Reformation, and is even heard from the lips of Protestant clergymen today.202 Denied recognition of a right to decide for themselves whether the priest spoke from God, or from his own ambitious and iniquitous purposes, deprived of education as well as of free thought – the latter a crime to be punished with death after the most diabolical torture – it is not a subject of surprise that the majority of the christian world was a prey to the vilest superstition. The claim of infallibility, which may be unsuccessfully combated when urged by a single individual, became all-potent when advanced by a large powerfully organized and widely distributed class under guise of religion, into which the element of fear largely entered. No salvation outside of the church was a fundamental doctrine of that body. Hell was declared not to be peopled alone by the heathen, but by christian heretics, and the excommunicated who had died without obtaining forgiveness from the Church. These were depicted as in eternal torments of a more terrible character than even those whom birth had left ignorant of the plan of salvation. The strength of the church lay in its control of the conscience and the will. Upon the State it fastened double bonds; first, by its control of each individual member; second, in its capacity of secular ruler. Long before the days of Torquemada and Ximenes, the Inquisition had practically been brought to every man’s door. The imagination, that faculty that in its perfection constitutes the happiness of mankind, was made the implement of excessive mental torture.

      Common Law as it exists today is the outgrowth of Ecclesiastical or Canon Law touching upon all the relations of life but falling with heaviest weight upon woman, as Blackstone so frankly admits.203 From the X to the XVI centuries is the period when the features of the Canon Law most derogatory to woman became thoroughly incorporated into English common law, since which period the complete inferiority and subordination of woman has been as fully maintained by the State as by the Church.

      Common Law is not alone English law, it is the basic law of the United States. Chancellor Kent said of it, “Common Law is part of the fundamental law of the United States.” It has been recognized and adopted as one entire system by the constitutions of Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and Maryland. It has been assumed by courts of justice, or declared by statute, as the law of the land in every State, although its influence upon the criminal codes of England and the United States has but recently attracted the attention of legal minds. Wharton whose Criminal Law has been for years a standard work, did not examine this relation until its seventh edition. In the preface to this edition he gave a copious array of authors in English, German, Latin, in proof that the criminal codes of those two countries are permanently based upon Ecclesiastical Law.

      An early council of Carthage thus ordained: “Let not a woman however learned or holy presume to teach a man in a public assembly.” To this Canon may be ascribed the obstacles thrown in the way of women even during the present century, who have come before the world as public teachers in the pulpit, at the bar, in medicine, or the more customary branches of instruction. Advancing civilization of the present century is still hampered by the laws of an imperfect church, enacted many hundred years since. The trial of Mistress Anne Hutchinson in New England, during the XVII century, was chiefly for the sin of having taught men.

      All modern legislation can be referred to the church for its origin although most especially noticeable in reference to women legislated for as a class, distinct and separate from men. Under Church laws, the humble, the ignorant, the helpless have been the most oppressed, because of their powerlessness, but upon no part of humanity has this oppression so heavily fallen as upon her whom the church has declared to be the author of all the misery of human life.204 The laws of bastardy and illegitimacy still extant in Christian countries which decree that a child born outside of marriage shall be known by its mother’s name and she alone responsible for its support, and which do not allow it to inherit its putative father’s property even when he acknowledges the child as his own, are of ecclesiastical origin. Enacted by the Church in its most powerful days, as protection to a celibate priesthood against all claim by mother or child, they are still a reminder of the Matriarchate when the sole right of the mother to the child was unquestioned. But under Church ruling this law that the child

---

Скачать книгу