January 20, 1872
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WOMAN ITEMS.
Mrs. Amelia F. Southgate has been elected a member of the school committee in Taunton, Mass.
A kiss, says a French authoress, costs less and gives more pleasure than anything else in the world.
“I will be in fashion, if I dye for it!” said the ambitious belle, whose locks were not of the ruling tint; and dye she did….
In the Elgin watch factories three hundred of five hundred employe[e]s are girls. These girls earn from $10 to $20 a week, and perform the delicate operations incident to the business more skillfully than men.
A “Western woman” says in a letter that her sex will never rest contented until their sins are treated as leniently as are those committed by men. Yes, the sex has more than an equality of wrongs; it is about time to have an equality of rights.
Mrs. Rolles has knocked one “objection” entirely out of sight by the statement that an invention has been perfected in Boston by which the cradle can be satisfactorily, securely and continuously rocked while the women go to vote.
The Emperor of Germany had no less than fifteen thousand applications for the cross of merit from ladies who acted as nurses during the war. Only three thousand of them were successful. Of course killing must be rewarded before curing.
Rev. Dr. Peabody, in his election sermon yesterday, said: “The sole reason why women were underpaid was that women who did not need work were mean enough to underbid those who did, and the lowest bid ruled the market.”—Boston Transcript.
In an election held at Greeley, Colorado, on the 2d, the people of that town nominated by ballot the man they wished to receive the appointment of postmaster. Ninety-eight women participated in the election.
A married lady in Connecticut recently fell into a river, and would have drowned except that her cries attracted the attention of her husband, who, mistaking her in the dark for another woman, worked like a beaver to get her out….
A couple were married at Great Barrington, Mass., on Tuesday, and on Saturday the husband returned the bride to her mother. He said he wasn’t in the habit of being kicked out of bed by women, and he wouldn’t stand it. If the story be true here is a man who needs protection by a free love law. What will society do for him now? Laugh at him….
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Beecher stock is declining. Choice of pews only fetched two-thirds what it did last year.
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THE CONVENTION OF THE THEOLOGIANS.
Last week we presented some of our views as to what the proposed action of the theologians means, when they shall attempt to indoctrinate the Constitution with their interpretation of God and the Bible. Against all such despotism we have always protested, and shall always continue to protest. No living man or woman has any right to force his or her convictions upon another person, and what these Pharisees propose, is simply the most high-handed outrage upon human rights that was ever attempted. They know that they represent but a miserable minority of the people of the country, or of the world, and when they assume to dictate to the great mass of people, we can but call to mind the old adage, “that whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.”
Their egotistic, self-righteous call we have already published. We now propose to take it, sentence by sentence, and expose its monstrous and absurd assumptions. Its very first sentence is a plainly-stated falsehood, which everybody who is not prejudiced in its favor must discern at first sight. It declares that “government is instituted for man as an intellectual, social, moral and religious being. It corresponds to his whole nature.”
By whom, pray, is government instituted for man? We deny the proposition. Government is instituted by men, as members of a common humanity, the rights of each one of whom are sacred to him and beyond the reach, by any but despotic means, of all people who meddle with what is none of their business. If we believe to-day that Jesus Christ took this view of humanity, teaching that they are all brothers and sisters, what business have these religious demagogues to attempt to compel men to believe that there are sheep and goats in humanity, and that the goats shall be separated from the sheep and burned up in a lake of fire and brimstone, which, by the way, is a natural impossibility and a burlesque upon science, which is the exponent and natural handmaid and companion of all true religion.
Are we told that these long-faced hypocrites do not intend to use torture to convert us to Christianity? Don’t you believe it. Anybody who believes that an infinite God can eternally burn His own children for a few miserable years of ill-spent earth life, can commit any heinous crime in the name of such a God, since anything that they might do to save us from His wrath, even the use of the rack and the stake would be merciful when compared with His horrible judgment. Therefore we say those who pretend to believe in a God who can be such an Infernal Fiend as they represent Him to be, will be justified by their belief, in proceeding to any terrible resorts to convert the world.
Read the next sentences and ponder them well, and see if they do not mean all we have hinted at. “It” [government] “acts well when it watches over domestic life, and asserts and enforces,” mark the language, ” the sanctity of the marriage bond; when it frowns on profanity, lewdness, the desecration of the Sabbath, and other crimes.” Here it is seen that a clear statement is made of what its intents are. It is a perfect departure from the theory of our present government, and a reversion to the extreme doctrine of Romanism*, which has murdered, mercifully as it thought, millions of men and women, in the name of their God, before whom
they bowed. And these bigots, who are now moving in this direction, are imbued with the same spirit, and were they to attain to the requisite power, they would hesitate at nothing to save souls from hell.
The Justice of the Supreme Court, whose name, William Strong, is appended to this case, set all rules of logic at defiance, and, as Religious Bigotry has always done, assumes everything. He says, “Moral principles of conduct are determined by moral relations.” Now, if any school girl of twelve years could not detect that absurdity we should say her teaching had been in vain. Why, the very reverse is true. Moral relations are determined by moral principles. The principles exist in the souls of men and determine what relations they shall maintain. Relations of all kinds are the outgrowth of principles. Do these supercilious egotists suppose they can cram such stuff into the intellectual maw of humanity with the prospect of its being digested to yield fruit unto them? Our estimate of human intellect is too good to admit such an absurdity.
But he proceeds: ‘The relations of a nation to God and his Moral Laws are clear and definite: 1. A nation is the creature of God. 2. It is clothed with authority derived from God. 3. It is under the dominion of Jesus Christ, the appointed ruler of the nations. 4. It is subject to the Bible, the special revelation of the moral law:” and he should have added, to complete his position, 5. And we whose names are hereunto signed are the elect of God and Christ to assert and enforce these propositions.
The relations of a nation as such to God and his moral law are not clear and definite. The relations which a nation sustain are determined entirely by the character of the moral and intellectual conditition [sic] of the people who compose it. It proves quite too much to admit Justice Strong’s proposition. They are clear and definite to him. So also are they to every other human being, but not in the same way that they are clear to him. But he assumes that he is right and everybody else wrong; while everybody else has
the same right to assume that Justice Strong and the long list of Reverend Doctors are wrong and that he is right. Can Justice Strong make that application?
Absolutely—in the absolute sense—”A nation is the creature of God,” and in the same sense are all things creature of God just what He has made them. He should certainly be satisfied with His own work, since nobody interfered with Him in its performance. In the absolute sense, all things are good. To God all things are good, because God is absolute.
In the relative sense, a nation is not the creature of God, but the construction of man, in the same sense that the railroad and steamship are the construction of man. Men construct them by taking hold of the absolutely good things which God had created and fashioning them into forms of which they can make use. Even these bigots will not assume that God constructed the locomotive engine, except in the absolute sense that he created man and all things else as results of a general constructive process. Man contrived it, and, so far as these theologians have ever shown us, without any superior help. In the same way have men constructed nations, and unless these people assert that God has made all things just as he wants them, and that all the things of which they complain are creations of their own diseased fancies, then they must admit that they have no cause of action, since they do not propose to fight against God, nor should they fight against man when he has done so many things so well.
In the relative sense it is not true that government is clothed with authority from God. The authority of the government is derived from the people who construct it, except in governments which exist by the divine right of kings. If a king assume that he is clothed with power from God, as kings have claimed, and that he has the power to enforce his rule, then, of course, the will of the people is submerged. Is that the kind of authority to which these people refer? If so, we are of opinion they had better remove to some other country not quite so far enlightened as this before attempting to put their ideas into practice.
So far as their proposition regarding Christ is concerned we have no comment to make, except that we shall require the direct authority of Christ as to who are his representatives. The rules which he laid down by which his disciples were to be known, do not attend these assuming people. We are skeptical about their being the disciples of Christ. In short, we do not believe they are at all, except in the absolute sense in which all people are his disciples. In the relative sense in which we must treat all things relating to human progress and needs, we are obliged to leave the absolute and deal with persons, things and circumstances as facts, separated from the general whole. In this sense we
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admit his third proposition, but deny the application. Any other person might just as well assume the same thing, and he would have just as good authority. Neither Justice Strong nor any of his associate vice-presidents have any commission from Christ to specially represent Him, or if they have, let them bring it forward.
Government is no more subject to the Bible than to the Koran. The truths enunciated by Confucius, Budha, Brahma, Zoroaster, Plato and every other great person, are just as much authority to us as anything contained in the Bible. In fact there is no moral law contained in the Bible that is not copied from some of the earlier authorities. Every one who ever proclaimed a truth is an authority, not of his own personality, but because of the truth. Had the most terrible tyrant this world ever knew discovered and uttered the Golden Rule, it would have been all that it is now.
We must therefore enter our protest against the last proposition. In fact they deny it themselves, since they denounce in Brigham Young what they worship in Solomon. If the Bible is the moral law, then Solomon and his 1,000 women are a part of it. If only parts of it are moral law then we have just as good right to judge what parts are moral and what immoral as Justice Strong and Governor Geary have. We don’t believe they will permit us to judge for them in this matter. We know they would fight rather than be compelled to take our judgment as against their won; and we know we shall fight when they attempt to compel us to take their judgment as against our own.
These would-be tyrants have not yet been the recipients of the first principles of freedom. It has yet to germinate within their souls. They want their own freedom but refuse to grant the same to anybody else. They want their freedom to be despotism to everybody else, and not being able to accomplish this by the force of their moral power they propose to assert and enforce it through a government shaped to suit their designs.
The fundamental propositions of these people being erroneous, all their deductions fall to the ground. A moral law which does not find itself written in the hearts of the people will never, if written in the Constitution of the country, accomplish anything except to
become a basis of persecution.
Prohibitory laws of all kinds are equally a fallacious kind of government. Religion, morality, or any other sentiment can ever be legislated into human souls. He would be crazy who should attempt to legislate intellectual truths into the heads of people. But he would not be more so than they are who attempt to produce morality and religious growth by means of the power of government.
Education is legitimate in all departments of life, as well in religion as in science. But nobody can become a legitimate, religion teacher, until the perfect moral law is discovered, as the perfect mathematical law has been discovered. Nobody thinks of speculating upon mathematics. A theology of mathematics would be received as an absurdity. But it is not more so than a theology of religion. The world is not religious only, it is intellectual and affectional. In fact, the devotional nature of humanity is nothing more than the expression of the affections in their relation to the Unknowable, while true religion consists entirely of works.
If these would-be exemplars of religion would follow the precepts and practices of their professed Master, they should set them about doing practical good, even breaking the Sabbath day as He did. They should begin the inquiry as to who are their neighbors. Some of them should even look into their own hearts to see if they have not already committed adultery. They should learn what Jesus always taught, that the law is unto death, but the spirit unto life. They should endeavor to learn the truth, that they have no right to judge, lest they be judged. In short, while they should desire a government to protect themselves from interference by others, they must learn that every other person desires governmental protection from their schemes for despotism.
Government, in its latest and best significance, is a form of organization by which the people secure to themselves protection from each other in their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. That is its only function. It can never have any other power in this country beyond what it now has. And what it now has, outside of that, will soon be taken away from it and returned to the people, to whom it belongs individually and not collectively.
But we want these professing hypocrites, these I-am-holier-than-thou people, to go on with their convention. Their resolutions will all appear well on the surface. They are nothing. But the spirit which lies back of them is what we must regard. That spirit of proselytism is a dangerous one to intrust with any power. It will never get any in these United States. But, we repeat, let the convention proceed.
Webmaster’s note: *The reference to millions murdered by Romanism is referring to historical church-state violence, like the Crusades and the Inquisitions, and should not be construed as an attack on Catholics themselves. This particular article was written in response to an upcoming national convention to be held in Cincinnati, Ohio, on Jan. 31, 1872. The “God in the Constitution” movement proposed adding an amendment to the Constitution recognizing God and Jesus Christ. The movement, led by conservative Protestants, drew significant opposition from both the religious and the secular. The above is a full transcript of the article, “THE CONVENTION OF THE THEOLOGIANS,” published in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly.
When this web site began in September 1999, there were no digitized copies of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly available online. Now you can find an almost complete run on the IAPSOP web site which has no affiliation with Victoria Woodhull & Company: