any woman would ever have preached the damnation of babies
new-born; and "hell, paved with the skulls of infants not a span
long," would be a region yet to be discovered in theology. A
celibate monk--with God's curse writ on his face, which knew no
child, no wife, no sister, and blushed that he had a
mother--might well dream of such a thing. He had been through the
preliminary studies. Consider the ghastly attributes which are
commonly put upon God in the popular theology; the idea of
infinite wrath, of infinite damnation, and total depravity, and
all that. Why, you could not get a woman, that had intellect
enough to open her mouth, to preach these things anywhere. Women
think they think that they believe them; but they do not.
Celibate priests, who never knew marriage, or what paternity was,
who thought woman was a "pollution"--they invented these ghastly
doctrines; and when I have heard the Athanasian Creed and the
Dies Irae chanted by monks, with the necks of bulls and the lips
of donkeys--why, I have understood where the doctrine came from,
and have felt the appropriateness of their braying out the
damnation hymns; woman could not do it. We shut her out of the
choir, out of the priest's house, out of the pulpit; and then the
priest, with unnatural vows, came in, and taught these "doctrines
of devils." Could you find a woman who would read to a
congregation, as words of truth, Jonathan Edwards' sermon on a
Future State--"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," "The
Justice of God in the Damnation of Sinners," "Wrath upon the
Wicked to the Uttermost," "The Future Punishment of the Wicked,"
and other things of that sort? Nay, can you find a worthy woman,
of any considerable culture, who will read the fourteenth chapter
of Numbers, and declare that a true picture of the God she
worships? Only a she-dragon could do it in our day.

The popular theology leaves us nothing feminine in the character
of God. How could it be otherwise, when so much of the popular
theology is the work of men who thought woman was a "pollution,"
and barred her out of all the high places of the church? If women
had had their place in ecclesiastical teaching, I doubt that the
"Athanasian Creed" would ever have been thought a "symbol" of
Christianity. The pictures and hym