Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

[264] metaphysics, not dogmas. Hindostan settled these thou sands of years ago. Christianity did not bury itself in the pit of Oriental metaphysics; neither did it shroud itself in the hermitage of Italian emotion. The pulpit is not, as seen in the north-west of Europe and in this country, a thing built up of mahogany and paint and prayers. It is the life of an earnest man; it is the example of the citizen, the reformer, the thinker, the man, who means to hold up, help, broaden, and unfold his brother. That is a pulpit; and that is the reason you and I owe it to the community in which we live to perpetuate such a pulpit as this.

You observe, you cannot get the ultimate and entire good from such an institution when you confine its functions to a class, when you set apart a certain body of men to minister at it. In the first place, that is a priesthood, the esprit de corps instantly comes into existence, and they begin to plot against their neighbors. In the next place, they cannot know life. No one can know life except from suffering. A man cannot argue the Woman Question. Literary men never do justice to the wrongs or duties of women. We know nothing of slavery; we never shall know it until God's hand sweeps the strings of four millions of broken hearts, and lets us hear from the plantations of the Southern half of this nation. It is in the protest of men ground ^own under some wrong principle that the world learns the depth and the extent of right. It is only, therefore, by putting into this desk women as well as men, all races, all professions, that you will sound the diapason of man's moral and intellectual nature. And that is what has been done in every great moving age.

The early idea of Christianity was that of a free church. What is the meaning of those directions in which the Apostles said, “Let your women keep silence ”