The teaching of "Love your enemies, do good unto them that hate you, and serve them that despitefully use you and persecute you," has too often resulted, when practised at all, in a sentimental negation; a pathetically useless attitude of non-resistance. You might as well base a religion on a feather pillow!
The advice given was active; direct; concrete. "_Love!_" Love is not non-resistance. "Do good!" Doing good is not non-resistance. "Serve!"
Service is not non-resistance.
Again we have an overwhelming proof of the far-reaching effects of our androcentric culture. Consider it once more. Here is one by nature combative and desirous, and not by nature intended to monopolize the management of his species. He assumes to be not only the leader, but the whole thing--to be humanity itself, and to see in woman as Grant Allen so clearly put it "Not only not the race; she is not even half the race, but a subspecies, told off for purposes of reproduction merely."
Under this monstrous assumption, his sex-attributes wholly identified with his human attributes, and overshadowing them, he has imprinted on every human institution the tastes and tendencies of the male. As a male he fought, as a male human being he fought more, and deified fighting; and in a culture based on desire and combat, loud with strident self-expression, there could be but slow acceptance of the more human methods urged by Christianity. "It is a religion for slaves and women!" said the warrior of old. (Slaves and women were largely the same thing.) "It is a religion for slaves and women" says the advocate of the Superman.
Well? Who did the work of all the ancient world? Who raised the food and garnered it and cooked it and served it? Who built the houses, the temples, the acqueducts, the city wall? Who made the furniture, the tools, the weapons, the utensils, the ornaments--made them strong and beautiful and useful? Who kept the human race going, somehow, in spite of the constant hideous waste of war, and slowly built up the real industrial civilization behind that gory show?--Why just the slaves and the women.
A religion which had attractions for the real human type is not therefore to be utterly despised by the male.
In modern history we may watch with increasing ease the slow, sure progress of our growing humanness beneath the weakening shell of an all-male dominance. And in this field of what begins in the nurse as "discipline," and ends on the scaffold as "punishment," we can clearly see that blessed change.
What is the natural, the human attribute? What does this "Love," and "Do good," and "Serve" mean? In the blundering old church, still androcentric, there was a great to-do to carry out this doctrine, in elaborate symbolism. A set of beggars and cripples, gathered for the occasion, was exhibited, and kings and cardinals went solemnly through the motions of serving them. As the English schoolboy phrased it, "Thomas Becket washed the feet of leopards."
Service and love and doing good must always remain side issues in a male world. Service and love and doing good are the spirit of motherhood, and the essense of human life.
Human life is service, and is not combat. There you have the nature of the change now upon us.
What has the male mind made of Christianity?
Desire--to save one's own soul. Combat--with the Devil.
Self-expression--the whole gorgeous outpouring of pageant and display, from the jewels of the high priest's breastplate to the choir of mutilated men to praise a male Deity no woman may so serve.
What kind of mind can imagine a kind of god who would like a eunuch better than a woman?
For woman they made at last a place--the usual place--of renunciation, sacrifice and service, the Sisters of Mercy and their kind; and in that loving service the woman soul has been content, not yearning for cardinal's cape or bishop's mitre.
