"John Kessel - The Invisible Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

Before a bride was made.

I looked up at Lydia in the choir. Her eyes closed, she sang as sweetly as an angel; one would think her
the picture of feminine submission. Another angel was Sarah, mother and homemaker. Certainly Henry
Fletcher considered Iris an angel sent from heaven to entice him.

I felt for Robert's hand, and held it as I sang.
This woman was not taken
From Adam's head, we know;
And she must not rule o'er him,
It's evidently so.
The husband is commanded
To love his loving bride;
And live as does a Christian,
And for his house provide.
The woman is commanded
Her husband to obey,
In every thing that's lawful,
Until her dying day.

As the song ended the Reverend Hines climbed to the pulpit. He stared down for some time without
speaking, the light from the clerestory gleaming off his bald pate. Finally he began.

“I take my text, on this day of retribution, from the letter of St. Paul to the Ephesians, chapter 5, verses
22 through 24. ‘Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the
wife, as also Christ is head of the church; and He is the Savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church
is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.'”

The minister rested his hand on the Bible. “My brothers and sisters, the sword of a righteous God is
raised over the heads of those rebellious women who walk among us today. They think that by hiding in
the dark, we will not see them. But to the Lord God Almighty, there is no darkness but the darkness of
eternal perdition to which those women condemn themselves. God saw Eve when she ate of the
forbidden fruit; He sees you now.”

Did God see when a father in Bristol, Connecticut knocked the teeth of his eighteen-year-old daughter
down her throat because she entertained the attentions of a boy he did not approve? Did He see when
Charles S. Smith, a married man, got with child the simple-minded eleven year old Edith Wilson in
Ostego County, New York?

“But my message today is not only to the wives,” Hines went on. “Brothers, I ask you: Why was Adam
cast from the garden? It was not because he ate of the apple! I put it to you that he was cast out because
he sacrificed his judgment to that of his wife. The minute Adam saw Eve with the apple of which she had
eaten, he knew she was damned. Adam's sin was that he loved Eve too much. He loved her so much
that, despite his knowledge that in violating the injunction of the Lord God she had committed the gravest
crime, he could not bear to see her damned by herself. So he ate of the apple too, and damned himself,
and all of his posterity, with her.
“From that one act of submission to a wrongheaded woman have come five thousand years of suffering.

“My word today to you wives is obvious: obey your husband. He is born to a wisdom you cannot grasp;
his hand is the hand of the Lord. When you turn against a man, you turn against the utmost power of the