Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

3
Faith and enlightenment
T he faith in which young Catherine Spence had been nurtured was a harsh one.
In the religious allegory which she wrote in the 1880s, she depicted it as a doctrine
of fear. 1 She had learned that the creator ‘hath foreordained whatever comes to
pass’, that ‘our first parents being left to the freedom of their own will, fell from the
estate wherein they were created, by sinning against God, and that all people, being
descended from Adam, sinned in him, and fell with him in his first transgression’. 2
This crude and narrow version of Calvinism, drawn up in the 17 th century expressly
‘for the more rude and ignorant’, puzzled and appalled her. 3 She found the deity who
exacted retribution for Adam’s sin, from all his posterity for all time, unjust. ‘Why
oh! why!’ she exclaimed ‘had not the sentence of death been carried out at once, and
a new start made with more prudent people?’ God’s injustice made him ‘unlovely’,
but ‘it was wicked not to love God’, so she saw in her question and judgement her
own condemnation. Furthermore, if she, an outwardly virtuous person, was already
damned, so too must be almost everyone in the world. Even children could not be
saved. One book that had profoundly influenced her childhood told of three child
pilgrims following the path of Bunyan’s Christian. But the children had the added
burden of an imp called ‘Inbred Sin’ which never left them, not even at the point
where Christian’s burdens had fallen away. Spence was tormented by this doctrine
which, she remembered, ‘made me doubt of my own salvation and despair of the
salvation of any but a very small proportion of the people in the world’. 4 Yet the
63