WOMEN'S SCEPTICISM. THERE is in the new number of Fraser's
Magazine a curious J paper, at once very able and very feeble, very bold and very cautious, on " Women's Scepticism; " or rather hints to women how to take up an attitude of external theological observation which shall not commit them to any particular convictions, but shall reserve their right to occupy at a moment's notice any theological position which shall appear to be winning the suffrages of educated thought. It concludes with a strange little creed which the writer recom- mends to educated women of, the present day. Might not a sen- sible woman reasonably say, says the author of the paper,— "I cannot see that it has pleased God to reveal out of Heaven any set of doctrines which we must all receive, or to' institute any scheme of discipline which we must all obey ; but He has placed me under cir- cumstances in which I have reason to believe that eighteen hundred years ago transactions took place and doctrines were taught which gradually changed the face of the world I can worship contentedly according to the forms constructed upon this theory. Perhaps later generations may have more knowledge and more light, and may modify those forms and the views on which they were framed ; perhaps they may confirm them and discover new arguments of their truth ; but, in the meantime, I will use them without condemning others ; and I hope that worship will be acceptable to the Being whom it is designed to honour, notwithstanding any mixture of error which it may contain."
All which might, perhaps, be more simply expressed by, "I believe in no set of doctrines; I believe in no scheme of discipline; but I believe in remarkable transactions' at the beginning of our era ; I believe those transactions had a wonderful and endur- ing effect ; I believe it, at least innocent to allow my own mind to take its religious colour from that effect in a vague indetermi- nate way ;—I believe all this without prejudice to further infor- mation ; and either by this general faith in remarkable transac- tions eighteen centuries ago,' or in spite of that faith, as the case may be, I hope to become acceptable to God." We know a minister of the Gospel who once spoke of the scene in Gethsemane as " that interesting transaction." We conclude that it is some- what in the same spirit that the able writer in Fraser has conceived the main article in this new feminine confession of faith. The writer's drift obviously is,--to exorcize the enthusiasm from women's creed ; to convince them that the Christian faith, perhaps even the Theistic faith, is only at best a highly probable ' working hypothesis; which you ought to adopt provisionally—just as you would Darwin's theory of the origin of species in science—so far as it seems to agree with the facts of the universe ;—but that even in prayer you ought to keep in mind that you are praying on an uncertain hypothesis, just as you should remember in taking a medical prescription that you are acting on the very uncertain assumption that your physician knows beet what you ought to take. By thus persuading women to accept, if they do accept, the religion of their time and country " as the coloured glass through which their position compels them to look beyond this life, if they are to look beyond it at all," and trying to saturate their minds with the sense of a profound uncertainty lying beneath and behind the most passionate faith, the writer in Fraser evidently hopes to drive women out of fanaticism into a charity that shall be rooted in inward hesitation. if you can but firmly base their faith upon a doubt,—if you can but thoroughly convince them that conviction itself is a hazard (even though with odds in their favour), if you can but make them feel permanently the warning tremor of the earthquake beneath the rock of even the most probable Church, then you could make of women fit companions for intellectual men, if not, not. The remedy for women's fanaticism, thinks this writer, is to make them see not the probability —that is not necessary, and very likely not true,—but the possibility that " the pillared firmament is rottenness and earth's base built on stubble ;" —and if they can realize that, you may be sure of an intelligent feminine treatment of the freest thought ; they may incline against it, but they will, at least, leave room in their minds for the hypothesis of its turning out sound.
Now, we differ from this writer on two very important points, on one of which we have no room now to enlarge,—though we must just assert our utter disbelief in the moral efficacy of fundamental doubt as a natural root of breadth or charity, either in men or women. We believe that few causes have tended more to intoler- ance and narrowness of religious feeling than a haunting funda- mental doubt, and that few causes still tend more to produce that peculiar flush of feminine fanaticism which the writer in Fraser wishes to prevent. The true remedy for that execrable bigotry which anathematizes all doubt, is a profound faith that God knows better how to govern the intellects and hearts of men than we can, and that He does know how to make deep and even lasting doubt the preparation for a deeper and more growing faith than He can get out of any easy acquiescence in all the creeds. We do not mean that the most searching doubt is neces- sarily inconsistent with a wide charity. We do mean that it is not a principle of sympathy, but of polite indifference, at best,—and often, when allowed to remain latent, of absolute antipathy and exclusion,—while large and hearty faith in the spirit of God leaves no room for either scorn or aversion towards any earnest and honest thought. But it is on a second ground of difference with the writer who tries to guide the erratic feet of women by these easy lessons towards a f undamental scepticism, that we wish now to comment. Besides denying that a fundamental suspense of faith does enlarge the sympathy with earnest doubt at all,—on the contrary, we should say that the " case " for it, if a case is to be made by men of the world, is that it hardens the mind and gives it a certain power of repelling from it alien forms of thought,—besides denying this, we deny altogether that women are in any need of easy lessons in scepticism, of this kind at all events. There is, perhaps, a kind of searching scepticism to which women's intellects are not very much exposed, and the passage through which, if they could make it safely, would do more to give them a strong ultimate hold of faith than any amount of feminine sentiment. But it is certainly not the glorious truth that their religious faith, like their medical creed, must be at best a second-band presumption, which the Fraser essayist urges so eagerly on them, that will brace them up into masculine convic- tion. There is, as we have said, a certain hardness to be gained by establishing doubt well at the core of the heart, and braving steadily its depressing effect,—but this will assuredly never enhance, as our reviewer seems to hope, the sympathetic elasticity of the feminine intellect. The men who have it most, are exactly the men
of wet-blanket intellects,—and if this is what the essayist wishes to make of women, we confess we think a good hot fire of feminine seal and bigotry a thousand times preferable to it, even in a com- panion for life.
The side on which women's minds are really open to a very dangerous, because dull and passive, scepticism, is exactly that on which the reviewer hopes to bring his artillery of argument to bear. Men's scepticism usually arises from some keen one-sided conviction, which takes a tenacious hold of the mind, and drives out everything with which at first sight it seems inconsistent. Women's scepticism, on the other hand, generally arises from clearly recognizing for the first time the second-hand character of their faith. They breathe-in and assimilate all the subtler in- fluences of the religious atmosphere around them with a far more delicate receptive sense than men, and thus faith becomes with them a growth of custom, a luxury of habit, one of the refining influences of home, which has often little or no root beneath the surface of social and intellectual axioms they find around them. Such faith has the merit of softening the edges, and filling in the in- evitable voids, and generally completing the fit of their minds to their circumstances, but beyond this secondary evidence of truth which arises from perfect aptness' it rests on no sort of conviction at all. When the reviewer appeals to this state of mind, and reminds them how many grow up under wholly different circumstances, and with wholly different faiths as a consequence, when he startles them with a picture of equally strong Chinese or Hindoo habits of thought, and exhorts them to remember that, after all, they have no deeper grounds for believing in immortality than in monogamy,—in the eternal existence, that is, of their own life in Christ, than for accepting the absolute obligation of an institution which has only existed among some nations and during some ages, if that is what the reviewer means by "believing in monogamy,"—he will, no doubt, arouse in them a very profound sense of insecurity, which may be either whole- some or the reverse, according as they reject or follow the essayist's earnest adviee to them to remember that the best faith they can attain is only the second-band impression they have always had, coupled with the new knowledge that it is second-hand. If they follow the essayist's advice, and keep murmuring to themselves " After all, I only believe in remarkable transactions,' which pro- duced what is now called Christianity, and which have moulded my mind into some sort of provisional agreement with its spirit,"— they may lose all the natural elasticity of feminine intellects with- out gaining any equivalent whatever. If, on the other hand, they reject that advice, and resist the effort to persuade them that God has only given them the means of guessing judiciously about Him- self and Ills Son, they may probably reach, by long searching, some first-hand glimpses of the eternal world that are worth a thousand times over that keen sense of the graceful aptitudes of the Christian faith in which they have grown up; because they will feel that they could retain it if transported into the centre of a wholly alien and antagonistic world of religious thought. The truth is that women are especially liable to the most depressing kind of scepti- cism, though they seldom or never have any pleasure in expressing it,—the scepticism which arises out of the sense of the limiting power of custom over their minds, and the dread that if that were once broken through they should save no faith at all from the wreck. This kind of scepticism is not only not incompatible, but almost necessarily united with, a reverential tone of sentiment, and simply expresses the fear that that reverential tone of sentiment may turn out to be a social accident of their birth and education. Coleridge once said very profoundly that women are bigots because they love goodness more than truth, and are willing so to clip and squeeze truth as to make it subservient to goodness. Not only is this so, but writers like the essayist in Fraser may find it very easy to persuade them that it is radically impossible for them to get any first-hand grasp of truth, and if they are once convinced of this, those who have the most faith in their own moral perceptions will be heated into bigotry, and those who have the least will be cooled down into apathy. Yet women, if, instead of being intellectually brow-beaten, they were encouraged to push through the mere tyranny of custom to the heart of great intellectual questions, are, perhaps, more fitted than men to gain those direct glimpses of the eternal world which remain the fixed foundations of ail religion, natural or revealed, though they are less fitted for clinging obstinately to such real convictions and never again allowing anything to shake them when once obtained. So long as women are led to think that their religious knowledge must be wholly second-hand their intellects will be spoiled for every religious purpose. They have no great power of dealing with probable evidence, and they have a clear instinct that judgment on probable evidence is not faith. Their intellects are not meant for second-hand use, but when able "to
strip off thought after thought, and passion after passion," till they are face to face with the spiritual world, there are no mascu- line intellects that catch serener, though so fragmentary, visions of the very truth of God. The feminine intellect is not restive to the cramping force of custom. The little domestic habits of home mould women's imagination only too easily, till it can scarcely pierce the cloud. You may shake its self-confidence, if you will, by pointing out that cramping influence ; but something more than this is needed to brace it to a hardy, independent activity of its own. You will only blind it to its highest tasks, without fitting it for the rough masculine guess-work of shrewd inference and judicious doubt.
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