The
Third Blast of the Trumpet
Women’s Suffrage
JOHN
KNOX:
One of the great and timeless classics written against the timeless heresy
of “Women’s Liberation” is Knox’s work of 1558, “The First Blast Of The Trumpet Against The Monstrous Regiment (or
rule) of Women,” the main body of which is subtitled, “The
First Blast to Awake Women Degenerate.” Through Nimrod’s Babel to
Plato’s Republic, Karl Marx’s Communism and John Stuart Mill’s
Libertarianism, it is doubtful if the doctrine of female political equality ever
had such a determined foe as “The Thundering Scot.” Rising to the occasion
when triumphant error was well enthroned and the declaration of such
well-applied truth was hazardous, Knox declared, “My
purpose is thrice to blow the trumpet in the same matter, if God so permit:
twice I intend to do it without name, but at the last blast, to take the blame
upon myself, that all others may be purged” (Preface to The First Blast).
But God did not so ordain. Knox had been so “provoked
by the tyranny of the queen of England, and wearied out with her increasing
cruelties, he applied the trumpet to his mouth, and uttered a terrible blast. To
promote a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion, or empire, above any realm,
nation, or city, is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most
contrary to his revealed will and approved ordinance, and, finally, it is a
subversion of all equity and justice…Knox’s theory on this subject was not
novel… but…it exposed him to the resentment of two queens, during whose
reign it was his lot to live” (M’Crie’s Life Of John Knox, pp.
142-143).
At the death of Bloody Mary and the elevation of the Protestant Elizabeth,
although Knox himself had not changed a whit, the English Reformers prevailed on
him to desist from another blast lest Elizabeth be turned against the
Reformation and treat as treason such revolutionary doctrine. Knox chafed at the
imposed silence, and it is to his indomitable zeal and courage that we dedicate
this “Third Blast Of The Trumpet Against
The Monstrous Regiment Of Women.”
THE
ORIGINS:
The tree is known by its fruits, but the converse is also true. Jesus
taught, “For a good tree bringeth not
forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. For
every tree is known by his own fruit. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor
of a bramble bush gather they grapes” (Luke 6:43-44).
But the apologists for the unfruitful works of darkness keep insisting that it
is the fruit of a good tree and henceforth must be good. We hear that it
is in the very spirit of 1776 and
of the New Testament teachings of Jesus Christ that they are declaring the total
equality of the sexes. As in the temptation in the wilderness, Satan again seeks
to summon Scripture to sustain his cause, quoting, “There
is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male
nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28), and that declaration, of The Declaration, that declares, “We
hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal…” That
the biblical doctrine of equality adhered to by our founding fathers is far
different from the interpretation that these modern plagiarists place on their
words is obvious when one compares the society that they established with the
one that the cult of equality is fashioning today. As for Galatians 3:28,
such an interpretation would require not only women elders and pastors in
the church, women presidents and senators in the state, but its logical and
consistent application would have to include support for lesbian and homosexual
marriages since, after all, there is no difference. Since the Scripture is its
own interpreter and the Scriptures loudly condemn all such corrupt and perverted
innovations in God’s social order, Galatians 3:28
must obviously be limited to its context, that God’s grace to his elect, the
spiritual seed of Abraham, the community of the redeemed, is not
restricted on the basis of either race, class or gender. It should not be made
into a covering mantle to justify a social revolution that is intrinsically
alien to the Scriptures.
THE
SOURCE:
The Scriptures admit of no neutrality. If the source lies not in our godly
and Puritan heritage, nor in the word of God, then it must originate with Satan,
the Father of Lies. Indeed the movement can historically and readily be traced
back to various fountainheads of apostasy and infidelity. It was no accident
that the first “Women’s Rights Convention” held in America was held in
Seneca Falls, New York in 1848, which was also
the year that Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto. Both espoused
the same radical doctrines concerning the women’s role in society. Both were a
total departure from, and subversive of, the civilization they sought to so
radically reform. Both represented the spirit of their age...APOSTASY! But
although in the America of the civil war era the thrust for women’s rights had
to take a temporary back seat to the drive for abolition of Negro slavery, both
movements were the fruit of the same tree and founded on the same ideology, the
egalitarianism of the French Revolution. In fact, most of the early leaders of
the movement were rank abolitionists without the patience to await the
consummation of the other battle. But when the infidel but victorious juggernaut
that had plunged the nation into a bloody, destructive, and fratricidal war and
had swept the land with the scourge of tyranny and social revolution known as
“Reconstruction,” had finished establishing the cause of abolition, it
immediately sought other prey and channeled its destructive energy into the
feminist revolution. And indeed it was inevitable that it do so. As Dabney
stated it, the same egalitarianism that obliterated the distinctions between the
races and decreed that the meanest, illiterate slave barely emancipated from
witchcraft and cannibalism is the full social and political equal of the highest
products of a race that spawned a Washington, a Jackson, and a Lee, must also
necessarily obliterate the distinctions between the sexes.
THE
FAMILY:
The family is the handiwork of God. But the family is not composed of equals.
The husband is the head of the home and over the wife, who is subject to him,
even as the children are not equal but rather are subject to the authority of
the parents. Logical and consistent egalitarianism must necessarily be totally
destructive of the family, its mutual relationships, duties, and
responsibilities forever obliterated. As Dabney declared in the last century…
“Women’s
Rights’ mean the abolition of all permanent marriage ties…Mrs. Cady Stanton
avowed this result, proclaiming…that woman’s bondage is not truly dissolved
until the marriage bond is annulled. She is thoroughly consistent...The
abolition of marriage would follow again by another cause. The divergent
interests and the rival independence of the two equal wills would be
irreconcilable with domestic government, or union, or peace. Shall the children
of this monstrous non-union
be held responsible to two variant co-ordinate
and supreme wills at once? Heaven pity the children! Shall the two parties to
this perpetual co-partnership
have neither the power to secure the performance of the mutual duties nor to
dissolve it? It is a self contradiction, an impossible absurdity. Such a co-partnership…must
be separable at will. The only relationship between the sexes which will remain
will be a cohabitation continuing so long as the convenience or caprice of both
parties may suggest—and this, with most, will amount to a vagrant concubinage”
(Discussions; vol. 4, pp. 501-502). The family is the divine handiwork of
God and is neither of human cultural expression nor one of the effects of sin
and the fall. The family existed in Eden before the fall into sin, when God saw
that it was not good for man to be alone and created a helpmeet for him. It was
not God’s will in even a perfect and sinless creation that mankind should live
as independent and equal individuals but rather to be integrated into a family,
with all the subjection and duties that that implies. It is in Eden, the
paradise of God, that we first find the subjection of the female and logically
of the children also. Thus the family clearly supersedes both church and state
and was pre-existent to both. The church, the community of the redeemed
separated from the world, obviously came after the fall and was established as a
visible entity in the household of Abraham over twenty centuries after the
expulsion from Eden. The state, civil government, ordained of God to punish sin,
also clearly originated after the fall into sin and was not established till
God’s covenant with Noah after the flood, nearly a millennium and a half after
Eden. The family was the original creation ideal and the church and state both
were established as the result of sin. Thus the church and state clearly exist
for the family, and not the family for them. Rather, they exist to respectively
redeem and protect the family and not to wage war upon it. Thus both church and
state consist of families and are to deal with them as such.
THE
MANIFESTO:
The Communist Manifesto declared war on the family and sought to abolish it,
even as it seeks to abolish the church and claims it will someday abolish the
state. Although the Manifesto openly called for the abolition of the family and
the communization of the women (i.e., holding wives in common versus marriage),
the means to obtain that end in the ten point program proclaimed were less
direct. And although points one and three, the abolition of property and of the
right of inheritance, destroyed the economic base of the family and its economic
independence, the real thrust at the family lay in point eight, the “equal
liability of ALL to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for
agriculture.”
If ALL ARE EQUAL, then all are equal to labor, to ALL THE LABORS that can be
devised by the socialist totalitarian state. Women are no longer to be protected
and sheltered, “chaste, keepers at home” (Titus 2:5) but rather they are to
join the socialist proletariat in the factories as free-love laborers. Now we
truly begin to appreciate the fruit of this corrupt tree and see in it the
enslaving work of the serpent who tempted Eve. As Engels put it, “Among peoples where the women have to work far harder than we think
suitable, there is often far more real respect for women…The lady of
civilization, surrounded by false homage and estranged from all real work, has
an infinitely lower social position than the hard working woman of barbarism” (Origin
of the Family; quoted from ‘The Woman Question,” p. 13). And as Lenin echoed
it, “The Bolshevik Soviet Revolution
cuts at the root of the oppression and inferiority of women more deeply than any
party or any revolution in the world has dared to do. Not a trace of inequality
between men and women before the law has been left in Soviet Russia. The
particularly base, despicable, and hypocritical inequality of marital and family
rights…has been completely abolished by the Soviet government…This was only
the first step towards the emancipation of women…the second and principal step
was the abolition of the private ownership of the land, the factories, and
mills. This, and this alone, opens the way for the complete and real
emancipation of women, their emancipation from “domestic slavery,” by
passing from petty, individual, domestic economy to large‑scale social
economy”; and, “In order to
achieve the complete emancipation of women and to make them really equal with
men, we must have social economy, and the participation of women in general
productive labor. Then women will occupy the same position as men” (The
Woman Question, pp. 46 and 52). Truly, as in Orwell’s 1984, freedom, the
freedom of the family, is slavery, the domestic slavery of the household; and
slavery, the slavery of the urban proletariat, is trumpeted as freedom. This is
the LIBERATION of total female equality, and the Communists are touting it with
a vengeance. Civilization, that is, a godly social order based on the family, is
equated with crypto‑slavery, but a return to barbarism, to hard, grueling
masculine work, is liberation. But there is nothing voluntary about this
liberation from oppression, for this equality is impressed on all. Remember, it
is a LIABILITY to labor. That, and that
alone, is sufficient to define it all as SLAVERY. But as the Communists have plainly seen and openly declared, this
kind of slavery is impossible within the framework of the family and of the
home. Only when these have been utterly abolished, and the woman stands stripped
and defenseless before the state can she be reduced to just another unit of
production, a laboring drone, in the economy of the socialist slave society.
CHURCH
AND STATE:
If the state and the church are composed of families, and if families are not
composed of equals, then for either the church or the state to treat all people
as equals will be destructive of the family and of any society based on the
family structure. For either the church or the state to disregard the various
relationships within the family, to ignore the subjection of children to their
parents and of wives to their husbands, and to deal with them all as sovereign,
individual entities is to effectively destroy the family as a social unit of any
meaning. When the state decrees that a wife or a daughter can contract for an
abortion (see Numbers 30) without their husband’s or father’s consent, and
when children can get birth control information and materials, venereal disease
treatment, pregnancy tests, and so forth from state clinics without parental
knowledge or consent, then the family has been effectively abolished.
WOMEN’S
SUFFRAGE:
As already previously stated, although Marx’s aims were openly avowed and
publicly proclaimed, the means to achieve them were often less direct. Marx
openly called for the abolition of private property. Yet he later affirmed that
this had been accomplished when the political franchise had been extended to
those who held no property. When the non-property owner can legislate for the
property owner and when the have-nots can legally vote to plunder the property
of the haves, then Marx declared that private property has been abolished (See
issue 2-3, The Property Tax). Thus, in a similar vein, when the poll tax, which
taxed the family as a unit through its head, was abolished and replaced with the
Marxist income tax, which taxes each member of the family as an individual
entity, the family suffered a severe attack.
But Marx’s real thrust to accomplish the destruction of the family lay in another extension of the franchise. When the state ceased to recognize the family as a unit and the man as the head thereof; when the state ceased to recognize that the man represented the family and cast the vote of the family as the family was represented in the state, then the state effectively abolished the family as a unit of the body politic. When the state considered itself as solely composed of independent individuals and passed the 19th and the 26th amendments to the Constitution, granting to women and then to children of 18 years and older the right to vote, it effectively accomplished Marx’s dream of abolishing the family. Now not only did women and children have a direct and possibly a controlling influence on the state that governed the men, their husbands and fathers, so that they could now rule over them (Isaiah 3:12), but then we were treated to the spectacle of wives voting contrary to the choice of their husbands and the McGovernite youth voting against the candidates of the parents. Then, truly, the family as a unit and as a structure of authority has ceased to exist. Then the subjection of wives and children has become a manifest impossibility.
THE
CHURCH:
That an apostate state has accomplished the above in what was once the American
Republic is not to be denied. But what has exceeded even this in degrees of
wickedness and apostasy is when the church, called to be the ground and the
pillar of the truth, has mimicked the state in legislating the destruction of
the family. When the church denies the family and repudiates the very creation
ordinances of God; when the church extends its franchise so that the women and
the children can now elect the elders and call the ministers that are to rule
over the assembly, then truly the hour of apostasy has come upon us.
BIBLICAL
SOCIOLOGY:
Although the modern, quasi‑science of sociology is patently unChristian,
that does not preclude the Scriptures from giving a “thus saith the Lord”
on all these matters. Not only does the Bible deny radical individualism and
exalt the family but it recognizes further distinctions of race and nation. Two
Biblical concepts of sociology, utterly alien to modern thought on the subject,
are the concepts of “REPRESENTATION”
and “IMPUTATION.” Men are
not born with a clean slate but are conceived in iniquity, guilty of the
original sin of Adam (not Eve, for Adam was the head), who REPRESENTED them as
the federal head of the entire human race. His guilt is IMPUTED to all his
posterity. Similarly, all the elect are REPRESENTED
by Christ, the second Adam,
who REPRESENTED us on Calvary’s cross and whose righteousness is IMPUTED to
us. Thus, to deny these doctrines is to deny the very atonement of Christ. The
Bible gives many more applications of these doctrines too numerous to mention
here. But then it clearly follows that if free government is based on
representation, as it obviously is, then it cannot be objected to that the
husband REPRESENTS the wife and
the children in both church and state, and that the adult males of the family
represent the family in the outside world. Unless we deny the principle of
representation and insist that all the people personally go to Washington to
participate in the Congress, we cannot deny that even as the men are represented
in the state by their elected representatives, so the women and children are
represented in the state by the political franchise of the husbands and fathers,
who represent them in the elective process. To deny representation is to deny
the family, the state, and the very redeeming work of Christ in the atonement.
DEBORAH:
Futile efforts to “Christianize” unBiblical sociologies often hinge around
the offices of Deborah, who was a prophetess and a judge over Israel. The
exception proves the rule, and special cases, ordained directly by God who is
above all law, do not provide a mandate for men to sinfully transgress the law
that God has put his creatures under. It was a time of apostasy in Israel, and
that a woman was called to these offices only indicates an element of judgment
rather than propriety in this act of God. As Isaiah declared, “As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them.
O my people, they which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy
paths” (Isaiah 3:12). Also, she was directly called to her office by a
special act of God. Abraham received a special call of God to go and sacrifice
Isaac, although human sacrifice was strictly forbidden by God’s law. For us to
break God’s clear commandments on subjection because of Deborah’s example
would also justify us sacrificing our children on Abraham’s example. It is
nothing more than rebelliousness, evasiveness and stubbornness; it is purely
straining at the gnat and swallowing the camel, to overthrow all of God’s law,
God’s social order, God’s creation ordinances on the example of Deborah.
THE
FRUITS:
The tree is known by its fruits. What are the fruits of this new sociology? I am
not speaking here of the so-called “Equal Rights Amendment,” which is not as
yet in effect and whose defeat will neither wipe out the past gains and
accomplishments of this infidel drive, nor seriously impede its future progress.
The ideological victories of this movement were won decades ago, primarily in
the last century, and now it but remains to reap the remaining logical
consequences of the structure built on such a foundation. As a result, most of
the opposition to the E.R.A., is not ideological but only a “conservative”
reaction to some of the more horrifying and radical aspects of its full
implementation. Already, without the E.R.A., this movement has accomplished the
destruction of the family, abortion on demand, government day care centers, a
host of tyrannical so-called fair hiring practices that have been a federal
shoehorn to force women into every male vocation regardless of ability, court
ordered affirmative action programs to compel the sexual integration and balance
of every labor force, the sexual integration of physical education classes,
sports and little leagues. It has produced all the social nightmares of easy
divorce and remarriage. The emancipation of women from motherhood and the
destruction of the family logically paved the way for the children to become
wards of the state rather than members of families and their consequent
compulsory attendance at statist indoctrination centers (i.e., public schools),
enforced subjection to sex education programs and forced bussing, and so forth.
The fruits are all there, and are receiving some criticism. But
Where Is The Courage To Denounce The Tree!?
WOMEN’S PLACE:
The woman’s place is in the home. The woman’s office is to be a wife and a
mother. Look at godly women of the Old Testament. Examine the lives of Sarah,
Leah, Rachel, Hannah and especially the daughter of Jephthah, and see how they
prized marriage and motherhood, how they prayed and pled and wept with tears for
God to give them husbands and children that their womanhood might be fulfilled.
Although the woman is a member of both the church and state as well as of the
home, her place, her office, is in the home. She has no office in either the
church or the state. It is her glory to be a helpmeet to her husband in whatever
offices that God may call him to fill and to raise her children in the nurture,
fear, and admonition of the Lord. It is her blessed duty to train up a child to
take its place in the state and the church to the honor and glory of God. It is
her pride to mother a soldier or a statesman, a patriot or a preacher, to raise
up a Cromwell or a Washington, a Witherspoon or a Dabney. It is her duty to see
that all of society is not afflicted with immature, irresponsible
self‑seekers, without moral stature, spiritual restraint or
self-discipline, which are the bane and curse of both church and state.
THE
OPPOSITION:
Dabney prophesied the victory of the women’s rights movement stating…“that
the present movement will certainly
prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a
party which never conserves anything…What was the resisted novelty of
yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now
conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow
be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to
be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the
shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition…This
pretended salt has utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted?…It is
worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy
principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of truth, and has no
idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom…No doubt, after a few years,
when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism
will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforth plume itself
upon…opposing…the extreme of baby suffrage” (Women’s Rights Women;
Discussions: Vol. 4, p. 496). Dabney went on to predict that the so-called
conservatives, allegedly to counteract the effect of the radical women, will,
under the seductive call of duty to their country, entice more women from their
homes and organize more women into the political processes than the radicals
could ever have hoped to do. And so it has been, and today so‑called
conservative third parties are outdoing the Democrats in running women for
political office, party office, and in enrolling women in the political life of
the nation.
CONCLUSION:
Over 400 years ago Knox declared, “To promote
a woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation, or city,
is repugnant to nature, contumely to God, a thing most contrary to his revealed
will and approved ordinance, and finally it is the subversion of good order, of
all equity and justice.” It may
sound somewhat harsh on twentieth century ears, but it was eminently scriptural.
And pray what was the alternative? It produced a godly, peaceful, stable, and
blessed social order. Those who refuse to accept it and only carp at the
excesses of the E.R.A. have not a leg to stand on. Those who reject this
position must inevitably learn to accept the social order of the Marxist
totalitarian state. They must learn to accept the abolition of marriage, the
destruction of the family, and the socialist bureaucracy required to eliminate
all sexual discrimination and enforce that kind of radical equality. They must
accept “the
thesis…that real freedom for women is possible only through communism”
(Clara Zetkin, The Woman Question, p. 89).
But there is another thesis. The thesis that God’s law is just and his social order is good. The thesis that the great bulwark of women’s rights is contained in the Scriptures, which declare that he made them male and female. The thesis that liberty is in Christ, in subjection to his law, and in conformity to his truth, for “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” AMEN!
