The Ordination of Women
Should Women be Priests ? By R. W. Howard. (Basil Blackwell. 2s. 6d.)
IN three sermons recently, preached before the University of Oxford, the Master of St. Peter's Hall has ventured upon a topic usually surrounded with more heat than light. Canon Howard deals with it in a spirit of sweet reasonableness. He has himself moved from opposition to the full ordination of women to his present support of it. In a foreword, which must carry great weight, the Regius Professor of Divinity, Dr. Leonard Hodgson, admits that he, toe, has been led to a similar conclusion. " I am myself one of those who hold with Canon Howard that the ordination of women to the priesthood and their consecration to the episcopate is a step forward which Our Lord is urging upon His Church, and I believe that sooner or later the whole Church on earth—Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant—will hear and be obedient to his voice."
• It is already true that a few women have been admitted to the full Ministry in the Congregational and Baptist Churches. The Society a Friends makes no ministerial distinction between men and women. But for Anglicans such a step is a venture into the unknOwn. It Must arise from an .interpretation of the character and puipose of God justifying an action taken neither in New Testament days nc'r in later Church history. It means the rejection of the traditional Catholic view, based upon many Biblical passages, that women are by nature subject and subordinate to men and thus incapable of receiving Holy Orders. Canon Howard values the opportunities offered to women in the Order of Deaconesses, but he argues that in a ministry of persons to persons, the prophetic, pastoral and priestly aspects are all interconnected and should not be cut apart. An entirely male priesthood is also likely to present a one-sided picture of the Creator, in whom father and mother elements are both included. Only a ministry which includes women can adequately present all humanity to God and represent God fully to all persons.
There are many practical difficulties, fully admitted by Canon Howard. He thinks that they all arise from fear. Some very peculiar sex taboos evidently survive in the minds of too many ecclesiastics, and these will need elimination. Matrimony and the claims of home and family could be another problem, which might mean following the idea in More's Utopia that "none but widdowes and old women " be ordained when the experiment is tried. Such an experiment might delay the day of unity with Rome and the Orthodox, but Canon Howard would not regird that as a sufficient obstacle to the undertaking of a right course of action. Canon Howard has not dealt with the fact that women themselves are in general so hostile to the ordination of other women. Nor does he examine the question whether affections in women are more intensive than in men, thus making it harder for them to reach the kind of detachment which is necessary for dealing with !the " unruly wills and affections of sinful men "—and women.., But he has carried the debate a step forward, and probably brought ma= the day when the experiment will be tried. MARCUS KNIGHT.
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