Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Faith and enlightenment
viduality, and argued that ‘acquiescent and submissive mediocrity is too often the
attitude of good women’. 61
Spence may have learned a more secular approach to her faith from Martha
Turner, for although she was critical of the new humanist depiction of Jesus arising
in Unitarian discussions, Turner was maintaining that ‘God speaks by the voice of
science today as he spoke by the prophets of old, and it has given us the gospel of
natural law, of cause and consequence, of evolution … and upon these foundations
we have to build the temple of the spirit’. 62 Apart from her excursion into astronomy
and atomic physics, Spence did not follow Turner into a terrain still throbbing from
the impact of Darwin and his followers upon the churches. But, unlike Turner, she
did come to believe that ‘Jesus Christ was not to us an incarnate God, but a more or
less godlike man’, 63 doctrine which showed how far her views had slowly diverged
from those of Woods. When she wrote expressing her sympathy to Woods’s widow
on his death in 1906, she observed, ‘my faith has undergone some modifications –
for we cannot stand still’. 64 In the early 1880s she had written a religious allegory
which simultaneously marked the conclusion of her spiritual journey away from the
infant pilgrims burdened with ‘Inbred Sin’ which had terrified her childhood, and
demonstrated her seizure of the independence of mind so strongly endorsed by the
church she had joined. She said she wrote An Agnostic’s Progress from the Known to
the Unknown
to satisfy myself that reverent agnostics were by no means materialists;
that man’s nature might or might not be consciously immortal, but it was
spiritual; that in the duties which lay before each of us towards ourselves
and towards our fellow-creatures, there was scope for spiritual energy and
spiritual emotion. 65
Such a spiritual exploration carried her far beyond the teachers of her youth, into an
arena in which most men trod warily. 66 Writing it was an act of great courage; finding
a public for it, an even greater one.
Towards the end of her life, the church’s founding fathers may well have regarded
Spence’s preaching with some qualms. Certainly, she could draw a large congregation
to the Wakefield Street church to hear her deliver a stinging tirade against monopolisers
and ‘greedy men’ who appropriate ‘the victory and the spoils of political
life’, or to expound the ‘great wave of socialism which has invaded all the churches’. 67
A journalist from the weekly paper of opinion and satire, Quiz and the Lantern, went
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