Highland recorder. (Monterey, Highland County, Va.) 1877-1972, 1901-08-23
WOMAN'S SPHERE.
Rev. DR.. Talmage Says She Should
RUE as Queen in
the Home.
Its Value as q Field of Usefulness :. The
Mothers influence.
ICOpNriRht 1901.

Ut. lalmage eXtoIS home as neld OF use
ia:ness and especially encourages wives
and mothers; text, Genesis i, q, Male
and female created He them"
In other words, God who can make no
mistake, made man and woman for spe'
elhc work and to move in particular
spheres, man to be regnant In MS realm,
woman to be dominant in hers. The
boundary line between Italy and Switzer-
land, between England and Scotland, is
not more thoroughly marked than this
distinction between the empire masculine
and the empire feminine. So entirely dis.
similar are the fields to which God called
them that you no more compare them
than you can oxygen and hydrogen, water
and grass, trees and stars. All this talk
about the superiority of one sex to the
other sex is an everlasting waste of ink
and speech. A jeweier may have scale
so delicate that he can weigh the dust of
diamonds, but where are the scales so deli
cate that you can weigh in them affection
against affection, sentiment against senti-
ment, thought against thought, soul
against soul, mans word against a wom-
ans word!
You come out with the stereotypcd re-
mark that man is superior to woman in
intellect, and then | open on my desk the
swarthy, iron typed, thunder-bolted writ
ings of Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth
Browning and George Eliot. You come on
with your stereotyped remark about wom-
ans superiority to man in the item OF at
lection, but / ask you where was there
more capacity to love than in John, the
disciple, and Robert McCheyynSe, the
Scotchmau, and john Summerfeld, the
Methodist, and Henry Martyr, the mis-
sionary? The heart of those men was so
large that after you had rolled into it the
hemispheres there was room still left to
marshal the hosts of heaven and set up the
throne intellectual. l deny to woman the
throne affectional. No human phrase
ology will ever define, the spheres, while
there is an intuition by which we know
when man is in his realm and when
woman is in her realm, and when either
of them is out of it. No bungling lsglsla-
ton ought to attempt to make definition
or to say, "This is the line and that is the
line"
My theory is that if woman wants to
vote she ought to vote, and that if man
wants to embroider and keep house he
ought to be allowed to embroider and keep
house. There are masculine women and
there are effeminate men. My theory is
that you have no right to interfere with
any ones doing anything that is righteous:
Albany and Washington might as well
decree by legislation how high a brown
thrasher should fly or how deep trout
should plunge as to try to seek out the
height or the depth of woman's duty.
The question of capacity will settle finally
the whole question, the whole subject.
When woman is prepared to preach she
will preach and neither conference nor
presbytery can hinder her. When wom-
an is prepared to move in highest CONNER
cial spheres, she will have great influence
on the exchange, and no boards of trade
can hinder her. | want woman to under
stand that heart and brain can overflow
any barrier that politicians may set up,
and that nothing can keep her back or
keep her down but the question of capac-
ity.
I know there are women of most unde
slrable nature who wander up and down
the country, having no homes of their
own or forsaking their own homes, talk
ing about their rights, and we know very
we'll that they themselves are fit neither
to vote nor fit to keep house. Their mis-
sion seems to be to humiliate the two
sexes at the thought of what any one of
us might become. No one would want to
live under the laws that such wom-
en- would enact or to have cast upon
society the children that such women
would raise. But / will show you that
the best rights that woman can own she
already has in her possession, that her
position in this country at this time is not
one of commiseTation, but one of congrat-
ulation; that the grandeur and power of
ner realm nave never yet Deen dppTe-
ciated, that she sits to-day on throne so
high that all the thrones of earth piled on
top of each other would not make her a
footstool Here is the platform on which
she stands. Away down below it are the
ballot box and the Congressional assem-
biage and the legislative hall.
Woman always has voted and always
will vote. Our great-grandfathers thought
they were by their votes putting Wash
ington into the Presidential chair. No.
His mother, by the principles she taught
him and by the habits she inculcated,
made him President. 1t was a Christian
mothers hand dropping the ballot when
Lord Bacon wrote, and Newton philoso-
phized, and Alfred the Great governed,
and Jonathan Edwards Numbered of
judgment to come: How many men there
have been in high political station who
would have been insufficient to stand the
test to which their moral principle was
put had it not been for wife's voice that
encouraged them to do right and wife's
prayer that sounded louder than the cla-
NOR of partisanship! Why, my friends,
it seems to be feeble thing. You, n
Christian man, come up to the ballot box,
and you drop your vote. Right after you |
comes a hbertine or a sot the offscouring
OF the street, and he drops his vote, and |
his vote counteracts yours. But if In the |
quiet OF home life a daughter by her |
Christian demeanor, wife by her indus
try, mother by her faithfulness, casts a
vote in the right direction then nothing |
can resist it, and the influence of that |
vote will throb through the eternities.
My chief anxiety, then, is not that
woman have other rights accorded her,
but that she by the grace of God rise up |
to the appreciation of the glorious rights
she already possesses. / shall only have
time to speak of one grand and all absorb
ing right that every woman has, and that
is to make home happy That realm no
one has ever disputed with her. Men may
come home at noon or at night, and they |
tarry comparatively little while, but she
all day long governs it, beauties it, sancti-
fes it. 1t is within her power to make
it the most attractive place on earth. 1t
is the only calm harbor in this world |
You know as well as [ do that this outside |
world and the business world is long
scene Of jostle and contention. The man
who has dollar struggles to keep it; the |
man who has it not struggles to get it. |
Prices up. Prices down. Losses. Gains
Misrepresentation. Gougings Under
selling Buyers depreciating; statesmen ex-
aggerating. Tenants seeking less rent;
landlords Demanding more. Gold fidgety.
Struggles about office. Men who are in
trying to keep in; men out trying to get
in. Slips, tumbles. Declarations. Panics.
Catastrophes. o woman, thank God you
have home and that you may be queen
in |