The Natural Order

 It was from Adam that God took the substance that He meant to fashion into woman, indicating that as man was formed first and as woman sprang from man, so man is to be her head. He from the dust, she from him. He directly from the Former’s hand, she indirectly and through him. “Adam,” says the apostle, “was first formed, then Eve” (1Ti 2:13). Therefore, says he, she is “not to teach nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.” Thus, again, he states the gradation: (1) the head of the woman is the man, (2) the head of the man is Christ, (3) the head of Christ is God (1Co 11:3). Further, he adds that “the woman is the glory (or ornament) of the man”; for, says he, “the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man” (1Co 11:8-9). Such is God’s order of things; such His assignment of place and rank to the creatures that He has made. We may be sure that there is a reason for this gradation, not merely a typical [typological], but a natural one, whether we fully understand it or not. We cannot alter this law and be blameless. We cannot reverse it and not suffer loss. The construction of our world’s fabric is far too delicate and complex for man to attempt the slightest change without dislocating the whole. One star displaced, one planet thrown off its orbit, will confound the harmonies of space and strew the firmament with the wrecks of the universe. [Likewise,] one law lost sight of or set at naught will mar the happy order of God’s living world below.

In one age or nation, man treads down woman as a slave; in another, he idolizes her and sings of her as of a goddess. Both cases inflict a social wrong upon the race, in the latter case as truly as in the former. And who can say how deep an injury—both spiritual and social—has been wrought and how fatal an influence has been sent forth, by that fond sentimentalism that, impregnating our poetry and coursing like fever through the veins of youth, not only “costs the fresh blood dear,” but saps the whole social system, nay, propagates a principle of subtle ungodliness and creature-worship in its praise of woman’s beauty and idolatry of woman’s love.

- Horatius Bonar