Holy woman

“ Blessed Lord! I adore the love with which Thou didst teach a woman, who had refused Thee a cup of water, what the worship of God must be. I rejoice in the assurance that Thou wilt no less now instruct Thy disciple, who comes to Thee with a heart that longs to pray in spirit and in truth. O my Holy Master! do teach me this blessed secret.
Teach me that the worship in spirit and truth is not of man, but only comes from Thee; that it is not only a thing of times and seasons, but the outflowing of a life in Thee. ”

“ Ecce ancilla Domini, at the most exalted moment of her life. "Who is she?" She is the "fairest among women" because of her conformity to God's will, say those who have heard over and over again her Fiat when the sword was piercing her soul. "Who is she?" We, too, can answer the question, for we know her. We have watched her, and meditated upon her life, from the moment of her Immaculate Conception till her holy death of love and desire; and we have seen that she has always been growing in grace and in conformity to her Divine Son. ”

“ Women ought to be religious; faith was the natural fragrance of their minds. The more incredible the things they believed, the more lovely was the act of belief. To him the story of "Paradise Lost" was as mythical as the "Odyssey"; yet when his mother read it aloud to him, it was not only beautiful but true. A woman who didn't have holy thoughts about mysterious things far away would be prosaic and commonplace, like a man. ”

“ I think that many of our earnest, eloquent, high-minded, religious women should make for the pulpit. I have always felt that there was great point in the doctrine of the orthodox Church on the birth of Christ. We have a greater share in Him than men can have, as He received His humanity—His sweet, tender, suffering humanity—wholly from woman. ”

“ We have seen that Christ—the embodiment of all manly properties—turned his face towards and lavished his blessings upon womanly characteristics, such as meekness, purity, love, and humility, and that, because of His influence, woman is invited to take her place in the church on an equality with man, to help on the cause of truth by an illustration of those virtues which received the glory shed upon them by the life of the Son of Man and the Son of God. ”

“ Remember that on the day of your baptism you renounced the pomps and vanities of the world, and, if you are allowed to conform to customs not contrary to the maxims of the Gospel, you ought at the same time manifest in your dress, as in the rest, the glorious character that God has stamped in your soul. You should show by your conduct the striking contrast that exists between the Christian woman and the woman who, being incredulous or indifferent, does not draw her rule of life from the precepts of the Gospel. ”

“ Strength and Grace, Wisdom and Love, Courage and Purity,—Divine Manliness, Divine Womanliness. In all noble characters, the two are blended; in Him—the noblest—blended into one entire and perfect humanity. The spirit which pervades the world because of Christ's coming, and of the influence exerted by his Gospel, opens to woman a faith which has been growing clearer and brighter for eighteen centuries. By this we do not affirm or imply that the coming of Christ restored woman to the equality she enjoyed in the morning of creation, or that his coming removed the curse then pronounced upon her. ”

“ Every writer speaks of Christlikeness as the real crown and completeness of all womanly character. I have not space to quote the words of any letter. I may say only that Christ is not merely the ideal, the pattern, for every young woman to model her life upon, but that Christ is to be her Friend as well as her Saviour, her Master, her Helper. Mary, sitting at Christ's feet, is a loving picture which every young girl ought to keep framed in her heart. One letter sums up the ideal womanhood in these elements: "Trustfulness, hopefulness, joyfulness, peacefulness." ”

“ Nay, even the gaze you fix in devout prayer on the image of our Mother Mary is wanton, as it looks at the fair woman, at the lovely work of the painter's brush. And how then should it not wanton with the first living woman of flesh and blood who comes before you, as the first woman in Paradise appeared to the first man. You are yourself as fair to see as sin, and pleasure-loving women will everywhere run after you; for the doors by which sin may enter into you and go forth from you, are in truth fair and enticing, and those doors are your love-inviting eyes. ”

“ When I listen to the outpourings of overcharged feminine hearts, and read the diaries, confessions and novels of innumerable women, I am forced to the conclusion that the church thoroughly understood one of the first needs of a woman’s heart when it established the confessional. ”

“ She raises them to a participation in her ministry and apostleship, and pledges herself and all the power of heaven to the protection of the humblest as well as the most exalted of the sex, in her rights and dignity as woman, wife, and mother. She has suffered persecution and dismemberment rather than yield an iota of the vested rights of helpless woman; she has decreed the immaculate conception, the most perfect testimony of the exalted function of maternity and the crowning human glory of the sex, and raised one of their number to be queen of heaven, the crowning superhuman glory. ”

“ I ought to understand them because my grandmother, mother, and all my female relations were women, and I am a woman myself, but I don't. For the most part women are good hearted creatures, but they fail in judgment when you strike them on religion. The true Christian woman believes in the infallibility of her preacher. He defines her sphere and duty and she proceeds to walk therein. Her sphere is silence and subjection, and her duty is to devise catch penny devices to bring in the shekels and lay them on the altar of the Lord. ”

“ To quote from Good Words, for 1860: “Wherever there has been any purity, any zeal, any activity, any prosperity in the Church of Christ, there woman’s presence and aid, as ‘a help meet for’ the other sex, while they have been bearing the heat and burden of the day, will be found no unimportant element. It is so at this day in an eminent degree. Nor do I at all doubt that in the Church’s further efforts to carry the gospel into all lands, and get for their Lord the sceptre of the world, the spirit and mind of our Galilean women will be more and more seen stamped upon Christian womanhood.” ”

“ That dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which her dream had come to strengthen, was a blow dealt by the Church to woman, both wife and mother. To decree that woman is only worthy of worship on condition that she be a virgin, to imagine that virgin to be herself born without sin, is not this an insult to Nature, the condemnation of life, the denial of womanhood, whose true greatness consists in perpetuating life? ”

“ The influence of Christianity tended at once to elevate and to narrow the position of women. It elevated her position, for, while the pagan ideal of life is essentially masculine, the Christian ideal is in part feminine. Justice, energy, strength, are the pre-eminent qualities of the pagan ideal; and mercy, love, gentleness, and humility, of the Christian. The coincidence of the characteristics of Christianity with the characteristics of the female heart resulted in the elevation of woman. ”

“ The mystery of love, God has mainly trusted it to women: the Church itself, in its liturgy, expresses so,13 and, therefore, you, beloved daughters, must cooperate to extent the gospel among men, always leaded by that sublime affection that determined the eternal Word of God to come down from heaven to earth and dress itself in our humble nature, taking human flesh. And so both sexes contribute to the propagation of our lineage, bodily and spiritually; and the social perfection that Christianity proposes, that is the preparation of eternal happiness, must be collaborated by both man and woman. ”

“ The woman is no longer a simple, childlike personage, but a wonder; she walks not among the trees and flowers, but amid the orbs of heaven. She is clothed with the sun, the moon is under her feet, and upon her head is a coronet of twelve stars. In her you see the great cause of truth and righteousness embodied—she is, in fact, the church of God in all ages, the woman whose Seed blesses all the nations of the earth.”—C. H. Spurgeon, in The Tabernacle Pulpit, March 15, 1896. ”

“ But it is a powerful appeal to woman's healthy domestic sentiment. She feels, if she does not know, that marriage is her sheet-anchor, and the home an ark on a weltering flood. When the priest tells her that religion is the surety of both, he plucks at her heart, which vibrates to its depths, and she regards him as her savior. ”

“ And the preacher's wife who does not cultivate the wisdom of a serpent and as much harmlessness of the dove as will not interfere with her duty to him in protecting him from such women—whose souls are merely mortal and who are to be found in so many congregations—may have a damaged priest on her hands before she knows it. And there is not a more difficult soul to restore in this world except a woman's. ”

“ A spark of this Christ-like grace in the soul of a humble woman, once a heathen, can produce the same blessed spirit of self-sacrifice as that which animates the breasts of the most cultured ladies of Christendom ”

“ It is profoundly significant that in the world of the past, divinity was associated with woman on the ground of observations concerning the continuation of the race; while in Christianity, woman became divine as the Virgin Mother. ”

“ When she dreamed of being a woman of the harem, with great white warm limbs, she awoke to shudder, defenseless in the dusk of her room. She prayed to Jesus, always to the Son of God, offering him the terrible power of her adoration, addressing him as the eternal lover, growing passionate, exalted, large, as she contemplated his splendor. ”

“ I, therefore, entreat and desire all women, through the mercy of the Lord, to take this sinful, sorrowing woman as a pattern and follow her faith, humble yourselves before the Lord, and reprove your avarice, pride, obscenity and all manner of evil. Let all your thoughts be pure, and let your words be circumspect and seasoned. And whatsoever you do, that do in the name and fear of the Lord Jesus, and do not adorn yourselves with gold, silver, costly pearls, and embroidered hair; but dress yourselves in such apparel, as becomes women professing godliness, and which is serviceable. ”

“ At the entrance to every path that leads to heaven or to the abyss of hell you will find a woman—the image of Mary, at the former, the image of Eve at the latter. It almost invariably happens that it is woman who deals out to mankind sin and death like Eve, or life, redemption and salvation like Mary. ”

“ The fact is the only prop of Christianity today is the subjection of women. The whole system is like unto an elegant chariot, caparisoned, cushioned and curtained, wherein sit the councils, synods, conferences, priests and laymen, who with wise looks and sanctimonious air, hold their conclaves, and interpret to the women the "Word of God." ”

“ When women forget to kneel,—when women cease to teach their children the ‘Our Father,’ by whose grandly simple plea Humanity claims Divinity as its origin,—then shall we learn what is meant by ‘men’s hearts failing them for fear and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth.’ A woman who denies Christ repudiates Him, Who, above all others, made her sex as free and honored as everywhere in Christendom it is. ”

“ So long as ministers stand up and tell us that as Christ is the head of the church, so is man the head of the woman, how are we to break the chains which have held women down through the ages? You Christian women can look at the Hindoo, the Turkish, the Mormon women, and wonder how they can be held in such bondage. Observe to-day the work women are doing for the churches. The church rests on the shoulders of women. Have we ever yet heard a man preach a sermon from Genesis i:27-28, which declares the full equality of the feminine and masculine element in the Godhead? ”

“ The Tribal Goddess as a Christian Saint.
Before considering the beginnings of convent life as the work of women whose existence rests on a firm historic basis, we must enquire into the nature of women-saints. From the earliest times of established Christianity the lives of men and women who were credited with special holiness have formed a favourite theme of religious narratives, which were intended to keep their memory green and to impress the devout with thoughts of their saintliness. ”

“ The apostle proceeds to exhort the women, who thus publicly made intercession to God, not to adorn themselves with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array, but (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.' The word in this verse translated ' professing,' would be more properly rendered preaching godliness, or enjoining piety to the gods, or conducting public worship. ”

“ Compare the woman of the modern with her of the ancient world; compare the woman of christendom with her of the heathen, and then will you behold the mighty agency of the religion of Christ in the amelioration of her destiny. Well then may woman cleave to this religion, as the ark of her safety and dependence. Well may she worship the Saviour of the world, for he was the true friend of woman—the husband to the widow, and father to the fatherless.
Woman is most deeply interested in the success of every scheme which curbs the passions and enforces a true morality. ”

“ If the deed of the poor sinful woman in the Gospel, who anointed our Lord’s feet, was to be proclaimed throughout the world, how much more that of a modest, dignified, chaste woman, who displayed such piety in the midst of imperial state. ”