ct.
The whole corps of female divines in the country might be herded into
one small room. Women, when literate at all, are far too intelligent to
make effective ecclesiastics. Their sharp sense of reality is in endless
opposition to the whole sacerdotal masquerade, and their cynical humour
stands against the snorting that is inseparable from pulpit oratory.

Those women who enter upon the religious life are almost invariably
moved by some motive distinct from mere pious inflammation. It is a
commonplace, indeed, that, in Catholic countries, girls are driven into
convents by economic considerations or by disasters of amour far oftener
than they are drawn there by the hope of heaven. Read the lives of the
female saints, and you will see how many of them tried marriage and
failed at it before ever they turned to religion. In Protestant lands
very few women adopt it as a profession at all, and among the few a
secular impulse is almost always visible. The girl who is suddenly
overcome by a desire to minister to the heathen in foreign lands is
nearly invariably found, on inspection, to be a girl harbouring a theory
that it would be agreeable to marry some heroic missionary. In point
of fact, she duly marries him. At home, perhaps, she has found it
impossible to get a husband, but in the remoter marches of China,
Senegal and Somaliland, with no white competition present, it is equally
impossible to fail.

40. Piety as a Social Habit

What remains of the alleged piety of women is little more than a social
habit, reinforced in most communities by a paucity of other and more
inviting divertissements. If you have ever observed the women of Spain
and Italy at their devotions you need not be told how much the worship
of God may be a mere excuse for relaxation and gossip. These women, in
their daily lives, are surrounded by a formidable network of mediaeval
taboos; their normal human desire for ease and freedom in intercourse is
opposed by masculine distrust and superstition; they meet no strangers;
they see and hear nothing new. In the house of the Most High they escape
from that vexing routine. Here they may brush shoulders with a crowd.
Here, so to speak, they may crane their mental necks and stretch their
spiritual legs. Here, above all, they may come into some sort of contact
with men relatively more affable, cultured and charming than their
husbands and fathers--to wit, with the rev. clergy.

Elsewhere in Christ