Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Faith and enlightenment
clear and straight; the rebellious heart was made submissive and contented
under his ministrations. I have been a very cheerful person ever since,
more comfortable to my friends, and more serviceable to the world. 28
Spence’s conversion, a decision which she probably reached in 1856, 29 in her 31st
year, ranks second in her formation only to her decision not to marry. From Unitarianism
she learned to regard the Calvinist doctrine of innate depravity as ‘one of the
most paralysing dogmas that human fear invented or priestcraft encouraged’. 30 In its
place, her new faith offered her a deity that was an omniscient creator of marvels that
were slowly unfolding to the inquiring human intellect, a benevolent teacher whose
lessons the rationalist scientific expansion of knowledge was beginning to reveal.
When we think of thirty millions of suns with worlds revolving round
them which is far as modern astronomy has reached – when the six days
of creation are infinitely extended – and when we think of all things
becoming rather than existing – when we turn from the infinitely great
to the infinitely small and distinguish and divide and subdivide the infinitesimal
atom into even more infinitesimal atoms, the most recent discovery
– and when we see that one great spirit is in all, and through all,
as well as above all, we stagger at the greatness of the thought of God. 31
By the time she wrote that, Spence had been a mainstay of the Unitarian congregation
for about 20 years. The joy and wonderment that she expressed, even after so
long, shows how liberating she had found Unitarian doctrine, and how important
it had been to her own development. Adelaide’s Unitarian Christian Church introduced
her not only to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but also to, as she
noted, ‘a number of interesting and clever people’ 32 whose company and conversation
could not but have confirmed and encouraged her own hunger for learning.
Woods also taught that Unitarians ‘think there is something better for a man to
be, than in the condition of concern merely for his own personal salvation’. Better
he argued, to ‘catch … the spirit which has been called the Enthusiasm of Humanity
… which is no less a spirit of unselfish loyalty to God’. 33 Such teaching in Britain
in the 19 th century inspired a host of philanthropic and social intervention activities
designed to combat Old Corruption, address immediate disruptions, and regulate the
whole social order. Mary Carpenter’s campaign for reformatory schools for children
convicted of crime in the 1850s and 1860s, Rosamond Davenport Hill’s work on the
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