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p265 [To the same] Miss Prior, Two things are forbidden to women, speaking in the assembly and teaching anywhere. This makes the matter to me very simple: silence in the assembly and never teaching.

If a reading meeting be in a private house, and practically a private meeting, sisters are free. I believe that comeliness will restrain them where brethren are, but as in a private house they have the liberty of speech. The moment brethren assemble as such in the Lord's name, then their place is silence; also asking a question, may be, as you say, covert teaching. A meeting in the meeting room of the assembly takes more or less necessarily the character of a meeting of the assembly, if it is open for all to come. There are, if there be liberty, many things connected with comeliness which must guide us. "Doth not even nature itself teach you," says the apostle, and everything is beautiful in its place: the women had a lovely one in the gospels, and even in the epistles. They are found clinging round Jesus when the disciples were not, but it is their own place devoted attachment to Him, not any public teaching. God's order brings more progress than any superiority of intelligence. As to having faith to keep silent, I believe that trusting the Lord could make them to be silent when they fancied they must speak, but it is really a matter of decorum, not of faith. "I suffer not a woman to teach," &c. I believe I have answered all your inquiry as far as I am aware, and I trust the Lord may guide you in spirit and in heart.

Yours very truly in the Lord.

1874.

[52166E]

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