he male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level.
But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things
is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it. You had better agree
with your adversary quickly.'
'You mean I shall have to become a Christian?' said Jane.
'It looks like it,' said the Director.
They offer their children to God in baptism, and there they promise to teach
them the doctrine of the gospel, and bring them up in the nurture of the Lord;
but they easily promise, and easily break it; and educate their children for
the world and the flesh, although they have renounced these, and dedicated them
to God. This covenant-breaking with God, and betraying the souls of their children
to the devil, must lie heavy on them here or hereafter. They beget children,
and keep families, merely for the world and the flesh: but little consider what
a charge is committed to them, and what it is to bring up a child for God, and
govern a family as a sanctified society.
Again every man complains about his wife, saying, I cannot live with her, she
is a mad beast, there is nothing in her but pride and haughtiness and rebelliousness.
I cannot say a word to her without her paying me back with four. Now it is certain
that husbands have for wives such as they make them . . . but as for well-ordered
amity, such as depends on God and is grounded on his Word, he shall hardly find
one among a hundred houses where husband and wife are so well reformed.
I realize too that, because this book concentrates on patriarchy and male dominance,
anyone who reads it through feminist eyes may feel that the book is biased in
a male direction and may react against it. This is because we are focusing on
the very areas which have been emphasized by those feminists who value masculine
qualities more highly than feminine ones. If a woman feels that it is better
to be relatively tall and muscular than relatively short and elastic, she may
be tempted to ignore the evidence presented by the physiologist who demonstrates
that height and muscularity will be associated with the man whether she likes
it or not. The feminist can argue that when a society is endangered the women
"get" the men to risk their lives while they remain safely at home, and she can
argue that the woman's longevity is superior to the man's dominance. But if she
believes that it is preferable to have her sex associated with authority and
leadership rather than with the creation of life, then she is doomed t o perpetual
disappointment.
Only with violence to the text can it be asserted that the idea of authority
is absent from the language of headship and submission in Ephesians 5:22-33.
However, a significant difference between the two passages must also be noted.
Chapter 1 stresses that by God's design all creation has been subjected to
Christ for the sake of the church. In chapter 5 Paul sees God's design as calling
upon women to subject themselves (=submit) to their husbands as the church
subjects itself to Christ. Husbands are not told to make their wives to be
subject. Both Peter and Paul follow this pattern whenever they speak to persons
called upon to be subordinate, whether wives, children, slaves or citizens. Submission
for the sake of the love of Christ is set before the one who is to submit.
But although the obedience of the wife to her husband is of the nature of a religious
duty, because determined by religious motives, it has, in common with all other
commands of God, a foundation in nature. The apostle says wives are to be obedient
to their husbands, because the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ
is the head of the church. The ground of the obligation, therefore, as it exists
in nature, is the eminency of the husband; his superiority in those attributes
which enable and entitle him to command. He is larger, stronger, bolderhas more
of those mental and moral qualities which are required in a leader. This is just
as plain from history as that iron is heavier than water. . . . This superiority
of the man, in the respects mentioned, thus taught in Scripture, founded in nature,
and proved by all experience, cannot be denied or disregarded without destroying
society and degrading both men and women, making the one effeminate and the other
masculine.
A man who is oriented toward a family he lovesor wants to createis apt to work
more consistently and productively than a man oriented toward his next fix, lay,
day at the races, or drinking session with the boys. A man who feels affirmed
sexually by his work environment, and his relation to other men and women in
it, will produce more than a man who finds his job sexually erosive and confusing.
A man who is integrated into a community through a role in a family, spanning
generations into the past and future, will be more consistently and durably tied
to the social order than a man responding chiefly to a charismatic leader, a
demagogue, or a grandiose ideology of patriotism. Sexuality is our principal
way of perceiving and relating to people, and these relationships are more fundamental,
psychologically, than our responses to anything elsegoods, money, ideology, or
law.
We men may often make very bad priests. That is because we are insufficiently
masculine. It is no cure to call in those who are not masculine at all. A given
man may make a very bad husband; you cannot mend matters by trying to reverse
the roles. He may make a bad partner in a dance. The cure for that is that men
should more diligently attend dancing classes; not that the ballroom should henceforward
ignore distinctions of sex and treat all dancers as neuter. That would, of course,
be eminently sensible, civilized, and enlightened, but, once more, "not nearly
so much like a Ball."
There is no sin so gross as that of unchastity, which is so nearly tolerated
in males, by public opinion, partly because so seldom discussedteachers being
deterred by a theory of delicacy. Hence the necessity that all the sins be rebuked.
But it is also common to speak of the animal impulse to these sins as one so
strong that it is scarcely reasonable to expect its control; and, indeed, to
regard their uncontrollable strength as rather an element of praiseworthy manhood.
The shameless impudence of this is sufficiently rebuked by naming such men as
Lee and Jackson, men as chaste as Dian, at whose mess-tables, though surrounded
only by rough, battle-stained men, no word was ever heard or tolerated that would
have tinged the cheeks of their pure and venerated wives and daughters. Had these
heroes full manhood? Were they less men, because scrupulously chaste, than the
creatures whose chosen trait of manhood most assimilates them to the ass and
the goat? Faugh! He is most the man who can always govern himself. He who cannot
is, to that extent, an imbecile.
Malone: "See what I'm saying? What are you prepared to do?"
Ness: "Everything within the law."
Malone: "And then what are you prepared to do? If you open the ball on these
people, Mr. Ness, you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they won't give
up the fight until one of you is dead. . . . That's the Chicago way. That's how
you get Capone. Now do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that? I'm making
you a deal. Do you want this deal?"
Ness: "I have sworn to put this man away with any and all legal means at my disposal,
and I will do so."
Malone: [Long pause, then in a self-reflective whisper] "Well, the Lord hates
a coward. Do you know what a blood oath is Mr. Ness?"
Ness: "Yes."
Malone: "Good, because you just took one."
The Untouchables
He which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us. . . .
He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is named. . . .
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, "These wounds I had on St. Crispian's day."
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: . . .
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon St. Crispian's day.
" A wise man fears and departs from evil, but a fool rages and is self-confident
. . . . A fool vents all his feelings, but a wise man holds them
back."
Prov. 14:16; 29:11
"Moreover all these curses shall come upon you and pursue and overtake you, until
you are destroyed, because you did not obey the voice of the LORD your God, to
keep His commandments. . . . The sensitive and very refined man among you will
be hostile toward his brother, toward the wife of his bosom, and toward the rest
of his children whom he leaves behind."
Deut. 28:45,54
