● ● ● complicity in the evil of the world. Increasingly the nineteenth century was seeking to so absolve Him. In 1853 Lyman Beecher’s son Edward brought out his own radical revision of Calvinist doctrine, The Conflict of Ages, which demolished original sin, total depravity, and a literal hell.118 He explained the inborn tendency to do wrong by a pre-existent state in which the soul was free to do right but chose wrong. His sister Catharine thereupon wrote him:
I reply how do you get this?
If you say by a Revelation from God, I say before I can confide in his teachings I must have proof that all this horrible misery and wrong resulting from the wrong construction or nature of mind is not attributable to the Creator of All Things. His mere word is nothing from the Author of a system which is all ruined and worse than good for nothing. He must clear his character before he can offer me a Revelation!119
One is reminded by this of twelve-year-old Mary Baker’s comment to her mother regarding a God who would inflict eternal punishment on corrigible men: “Then he is not as good as my mother, and he will find me a hard case.”120 This sort of refractory, feminine common sense ran wholly counter to the ideal of submissive piety which was held to be appropriate for Christian ladies. It refused to accept the traditional wisdom of men as an adequate substitute for a clear revelation of God’s will.
Oddly enough, Mrs. Glover found support for refusing to call evil good in an unexpected place. Martin Tupper’s Proverbial Philosophy, which Bartlett had given her, is usually looked on as the ne plus ultra of Victorian platitude. Nevertheless, among all Tupper’s bourgeois moralizings there is a certain amount of vigorous common sense. Mrs. Glover marked numerous passages, including one which attacks the sort of “meekness” ordinarily enjoined on the fair sex: