aying
it down that a woman should not be a priest, he shows some elementary
conception of what many of us now hold to be the truth of the matter.
"The bringing-up of women," he says, "is commonly such" that they cannot
have the necessary qualifications, "for they are not brought up in
learning in schools, nor trained in disputation." And even so, he can
ask, "Are there not in England women, think you, that for learning and
wisdom could tell their household and neighbours as good a tale as any
Sir John there?" For all that, his advocacy is weak. If women's rule is
not unnatural in a sense preclusive of its very existence, it is neither
so convenient nor so profitable as the government of men. He holds
England to be specially suitable for the government of women, because
there the governor is more limited and restrained by the other members
of the constitution than in other places; and this argument has kept his
book from being altogether forgotten. It is only in hereditary
monarchies that he will offer any defence of the anomaly. "If rulers
were to be chosen by lot or suffrage, he would not that any women should
stand in the election, but men only." The law of succession of crowns
was a law to him, in the same sense as the law of evolution is a law to
Mr. Herbert Spencer; and the one and the other counsels his readers, in
a spirit suggestively alike, not to kick against the pricks or seek to
be more wise than He who made them.[73] If God has put a female child
into the direct line of inheritance, it is God's affair. His strength
will be perfected in her weakness. He makes the Creator address the
objectors in this not very flattering vein: "I, that could make Daniel,
a sucking babe, to judge better than the wisest lawyers; a brute beast
to reprehend the folly of a prophet; and poor fishers to confound the
great clerks of the world--cannot I make a woman to be a good ruler over
you?" This is the last word of his reasoning. Although he was not
altogether without Puritanic leaven, shown particularly in what he says
of the incomes of Bishops, yet it was rather loyalty to the old order of
things than any generous belief in the capacity of women, that raised up
for them this clerical champion. His courtly spirit contrasts singularly
with the rude, bracing republicanism of Knox. "Thy knee shall bow," he
says, "thy cap shall off, thy tongue shall speak reverently of thy
sovereign." For himself, his tongue is even more than reverent