BAPTISMUS LABORIOSUS.
Early in the fifth century there dwelt on the western bank of the Jordan
a monk named Zosimus, who had served God from his youth.
In the season of Lent A.D. 430, the Abbot Zosimus crossed the Jordan and
penetrated into the heart of the untenanted wilderness on its eastern
shore, there to meditate in silence on the temptation of our Lord.
Having travelled for twenty days, praying as he went, he one day halted
at sunset and sat down to rest. Raising his eyes, he saw what seemed to
be a human form, fragile and wasted, with hair as white as snow. He
approached, and the apparition being about to flee, he cried, “Stay, and
tell me why you inhabit this desert?” Mary of Egypt (for it was she)
stopped, and answered, “Wherefore do you wish to speak to me? You have
travelled far only to find one sinner.” Zosimus, believing he had met
with a saintly recluse, besought her prayers. “It is you,” she answered,
“who should pray for _me_. I have great need; entreat the Lord that he
will have mercy on me.”
Zosimus continued to urge her to reveal her history, and at length she
spoke as follows:—“I am ready to die of shame in telling you what I am.
I shudder to infect your ears, and the very air itself, with my story.
Nevertheless, holy father, I will speak, obeying your request.
“Egypt was my country. I had good parents, who cherished me tenderly;
nevertheless at twelve years of age I left them, and fled to Alexandria.
I cannot speak, I cannot even think, of my life there; be it enough to
say that for seventeen years I lived a life of infamy. This was my
choice; I had not the plea of poverty.
“I saw, one day, a great crowd of people running towards the seashore. I
asked where they were going, and was told they were about to embark for
the holy city, Jerusalem, there to celebrate the feast of the Exaltation
of the Cross of our Saviour. I embarked also, having no intention except
to continue my former course of life. We arrived in Jerusalem. On the
day of the festival, I repaired with the multitude to the sanctuary, but
scarcely had my foot touched the threshold, when I felt myself repulsed
by an invisible power. Attributing this to a superstitious weakness, I
essayed again and again to enter, but was four times arrested and driven
back as by an armed sentinel. The crowd poured in, and I was left alone.
Confused and wearied, I sat down in a corner of the outer court of the
temple. While there, some words which I overheard, addressed to the
people within, opened the eyes of my soul, and then I understood why it
was that I was not permitted even to look upon the symbol of our
salvation. In desolation and anguish of spirit I smote upon my breast,
and vowed with groans and tears that, might I but be suffered to enter
the sanctuary, and look upon the cross on which Jesus died for sinners,
I would forsake every sin, renounce the world, and flee whithersoever
the Lord should guide me. No sooner had I thus spoken, than I felt that
my vows were accepted, and the sentence of exclusion reversed. Once more
I drew near to the barrier, and this time entered with ease. Overwhelmed
with the thought of the incomprehensible goodness of God, and the
readiness with which he receives sinners when they repent, I threw
myself on the ground, and watering the pavement with my tears, implored
divine guidance to show me what I must do. It seemed to me that a voice
bade me fly from cities and from all the paths of men, and take refuge
in the lonely wilderness. I left the church in haste. I ran all day, and
in the evening reached the shores of the Jordan. I crossed the stream,
and penetrated into the depths of the wilderness.
“From that hour to this I have studied to flee from the face of man, in
the hope that one day I may see the face of God.”
Zosimus asked, “How long have you been in the desert, and how have you
lived?”
Mary answered, “I have lived in this solitude more than the number of
years in which I lived a life of sin. The herbs and fruits of the desert
have been my food, and God’s providence has not failed me.”
The abbot asked, “Did not so sudden a transition from a life of licence
to one so severe cost you much?”
“Abbot Zosimus,” Mary replied, “you ask me a question which I hardly
dare to answer. The memory of the anguish I have suffered terrifies me
yet: pray that God may grant me fortitude. Yes, truly for many years
after I had forsaken my evil life, I strove with constant and violent
temptations. I fought with them as with wild beasts. Here, in the
silence of the wilderness, I seemed to be carried back again in spirit
into the tumult of cities; I saw again the crowds of men who followed
me, I heard their flattering words; the air rang round me with their
passionate songs, summoning me to the responses with which I was so long
familiar. Hungry and fainting, I longed for the fleshpots of Egypt;
seeking vainly to assuage my thirst, I drank again in imagination the
wines which had often intoxicated me. There were times when every memory
which could most shake me assailed me at once, and threatened to drag me
forcibly from my retreat. At such times I would prostrate myself on the
earth and cry aloud to God, whose aid I once had known. Many nights have
I passed thus, filling the desert and rending the skies with strong
crying and supplications. God gave me the victory at last. After many
years, these torments ceased. Since then I have suffered much from cold
and heat, hunger and thirst, and many infirmities, but the mercy of God
has sustained me, while year by year I have offered up prayers for every
soul which had formerly fallen and sinned through me or with me. I have
poured out my soul in anguish and in weeping for them; I have offered up
myself a sacrifice for them, night and day, summer and winter, praying
that their sins may be washed away, and that the plea of my broken
heart, cast at the Saviour’s feet, may avail to open the gates of
paradise for them.”
She then took leave of the abbot, requesting that he would meet her
again in a year at the same spot. “Pray for me,” she cried, and
disappeared.
In the Lent of the following year Zosimus went forth on his search. The
way was long, the desert barren and scorched. As he drew near to the
appointed place, no sound, no movement indicated the presence of any
living thing. His eyes sought long in vain for a human form. At last
they fell upon a corpse. Prone on the earth she lay, her face towards
the east; and by her side, in characters rudely traced upon the ground,
he read, “My name was Mary.”
The abbot wept and raised the body; he buried Mary in a lion’s lair.
For surely lion-like throughout those seventeen years of mortal strife,
alone, in the wilderness, among the wild beasts, tempted of the devil,
had that weak woman endured to raise indignant protest against the
horrors of her former sin, dared to confront God’s outraged majesty with
that mute, unquenchable appeal.
In some church of Northern Italy, I remember to have seen a picture of a
woman clinging to a cross in a sanctuary to which she has fled for
refuge; around her throng on every side innumerable faces of men. She
cannot safely look for one moment this way or that; desperately, with
closed eyes, she clings to the cross. Shall we blame such an one because
her foes are so many and so strong? or, if she knows that in flight is
her only safety, shall we forbid her to flee?
If this fervour of repentance and indomitable fortitude, I hear you say,
had found expression in active labours for those fellow-beings for whom
Mary besieged heaven with her prayers, many would have been blest, and
she herself a nobler being. True; nevertheless might Mary, and such as
she, rise up in judgment against the men of this generation, who dally
with temptations, and above all things fear to push their virtue to
extremes; who may have courage for action, but have not courage or
endurance to dare to be for a season _alone with God_; to whom a few
years of self-denial seem a burden too grievous to be borne; whose
repentance may be a fervour of sentiment, but is seldom a reality of
pain.
Thus did they sorrow, and thus did they endure, those heroes strong in
humility, those heroines of the olden time. They bore the cross till the
weak flesh sank beneath the burden; they hasted from the city of
destruction, though their path was as a slender thread hung over gulfs
of fire. So came it that they subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness,
obtained promises, turned to flight the armies of the aliens, stopped
the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire; so came it that the
outcast of Alexandria has left a name greater than that of the
Ptolomies, insomuch that when the pure-hearted Van Eyck was summing up
in one great argument the annals of the early faith, he painted even
her, Mary of Egypt, in the forefront of that glorious company who gather
to the adoration of the spotless Lamb.
“Yet show I unto you a more excellent way.”
In the beginning of the thirteenth century lived Margaret of Cortona.
Her painful history, the sins and sorrows of her youth, have been
recorded by annalists of the Church in Italy. The eyes of her soul were
opened by a tragical event; she resolved, once for all, that her future
life should be one constant act of repentance. She sought her father’s
home, from which she had long strayed; he rejected her, and drove her,
with bitter reproaches, from his house. She took her little child by the
hand, and wandered forth; retiring to a distant part of a deserted
garden, she fell on her knees and wept bitterly. Then there drew nigh
for her one of those terrible hours when the powers of hell seem to
gather all their forces together for the destruction of a tempted soul.
Even thus in a garden Augustine fought his last and fiercest fight with
hell, till peace came to him in the message of a singing child. Thus in
a garden the Saviour of the world “began to be sore amazed and very
heavy,” enduring and vanquishing the “unknown agony,” and making victory
possible for men.
Forlorn and hopeless, Margaret’s first thought was of suicide. Then
there rushed back upon her the recollection of her brilliant, sinful
past. She was twenty-one years of age, and exquisitely beautiful. What
had she not still in her power? How often has such a moment come to a
frail girl who through her fall becomes the despised and rejected of
men!—a moment when on the one side are famine, friendlessness, and
shame, on the other an easy road to immediate luxury and praise, with
scope for all her power to please, and satisfaction for her instincts of
passionate affection. “If they will not love me in my penitence, let
them love me in my sin;” how many times has this thought decided the
ruinous relapse, overcoming a deep and genuine horror of the sin!
But Margaret was reserved for better things. After a long struggle, an
inspiration of grace seemed to bear into her heart the words, “When my
father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.” “_His_
mercy,” she said to herself, “his mercy endureth for ever;” and calm at
last, and strong, she rose from the earth, prepared to go wherever the
guardian of her soul should guide her. She took the road to Cortona,
which she reached at sunset. As she entered the city, two ladies met
her; struck by Margaret’s wearied movements, her maternity, her beauty,
her sadness, they accosted her. Margaret told them her story; they
offered her a home. She lived for a brief period under this generous
protection; but her life there was too easy and delicate to satisfy her
desire of self-abnegation. She began to devote herself to the most
forlorn and miserable of her fellow-women, nursing them in sickness, and
proclaiming to them the unfathomable mercies of God. Though courting
seclusion, her devoted life became known, and she was invited to enter
the third order of St Francis, an order of seculars, who were bound to
maintain the active duties of life in the world. “From this time,” her
biographer says, “she seemed like a new creature in Christ Jesus; her
heart was set on fire with the love of God and of man. Sadness and
terror gave place to peace, and that tender sorrow, sweet and bitter,
which the accepted soul alone can know.” She laboured now with redoubled
assiduity. In the hospitals in which she served, the attendants, in the
intervals of work, sang and chatted together; but Margaret prayed, and
“often those who saw her ceased to sing, and kneeled with her and prayed
also; and when she spoke of the love of God and the severe purity of his
holy law, no heart, however much the slave of pleasure, remained
unmoved.”
Finding that the work she was doing drew her away too much from the
poor, and into the ranks of the more prosperous classes, she abandoned
it, and took a small room in the humblest part of the city, and there
she consecrated herself entirely to the service of the poor and the
outcast. To these she became a mother indeed. Her work, her time, her
humble dwelling, all that she had was theirs, insomuch that, giving to
their necessities of her own clothes and bedding, she was found
sometimes in winter with scarcely covering sufficient for the protection
of her worn frame. So maternal was her attitude towards them, so
delicate and bountiful the sympathy she gave to all, both men and women,
that multitudes forsook the doors of other helpers and spiritual guides,
and crowded round her humble dwelling. She laboured with her hands in
order to gain money to help the indigent, and to give an impulse to the
self-help of young girls and needy women. Margaret, however, had her
dark hours, when memories of the past and present allurements combined
to trouble her soul and shake her faith. Her sole resource at these
times was to take refuge in the deepest shadow of the cross. Fragments
of her private writings remain to this day, wherein is revealed the
motive power which enabled her to be “faithful unto death.” Advised by
an aged priest to moderate her labours and her self-denial, she replied,
“My father, never while I live shall there be a truce between my soul
and the evil that is in me.” Sometimes she would rally her body in the
quaint fashion of the saints of old: “Wherefore servest thou not the
Lord as eagerly as thou formerly servedst sin? Nay! do not lament, do
not pretend thou art dying. If thou wouldst dwell with Christ, win thy
crown and slack not.”
To the soul which has learned truly to love God, God’s choice, whether
of work or of suffering for that soul, is welcome. When men sin, and he
afterwards appoints for them a lot of privation, or pain, or of
redoubled effort through the whole of life, his appointment is not for
the destruction and defeat of their newly-awakened hopes and aims, but
in order to their fulfilment.
I address myself to you, friends, whose faces are now turned towards the
light, who have laid aside, or earnestly desire to lay aside, “every
weight and the sin which does most easily beset you.” You have ceased,
perhaps, to bewail the defeat of earthly ambitions, or your lessened
power of enjoyment of the best things, and you now only mourn over your
weakened energies of body and mind, because they render you less able to
serve him effectually while you live. A deeper knowledge of God and of
his ways will, I think, tend greatly to reassure you on this head. You
speak of a life baffled in hope and in action; these are sad words, yet
it may be asked, Does it not seem almost a law in the kingdom of grace
that every life which is finally victorious shall be at first baffled?
Was not our blessed Lord’s life baffled for a time? To human eyes it
was. It appeared a great failure, ending tragically.
Now that you have risen above despair, and are quickened by a mighty
hope, and have received the gift of life and love, one of the first
things needful for you is, doubtless, a complete acquiescence, an
acceptance, once for all and without a murmur, of the measure of
correction and of outward disappointment which is apportioned to you
now, presenting your souls to God as blank, clean-washed tablets, for
him to write upon them what he pleases, as instruments ruined, it may
be, for every use except the highest use of all. Even though you had now
all but spun your last thread, and your earthly future had dwindled into
a few weeks or months of inaction, suffering the penalties of sin,
remember the dying malefactor! Even he bore his testimony to Christ (a
testimony which will be carried down to the remotest ages), firmly
rebuking the blasphemy of his companion, and preaching from his cross of
shame the virtue of the sinless One. But many to whom I speak have still
much of life, and of the more serious work of life, before them. I wish
that I could by any words convey to you that which I feel may be in
store for you, if by the grace of God you are enabled not only to
receive the inward healing, but to dedicate your lives wholly to God.
Some of you, who have fallen, and have been lifted up again, and
strengthened by him whose feet you have not ceased to kiss, will
understand me when I speak of a more complete self-dedication than any
which we commonly see among Christian people. To you Christ’s words will
not seem intolerable when he speaks of forsaking houses, brethren,
sisters, father, mother, wife, children, and lands, for his name’s sake
and the gospel’s; to you it will appear a light thing that you should
deny yourselves in the matter of meat and drink, of ease, and sleep, and
social enjoyments. There are idols of the heart and soul, sweet dreams,
golden futures, reasonable ambitions of this world, resting-places,
homes, loves, hopes—to give up all these for Christ’s sake!—“who is
sufficient for these things?” You are the men whose past should make you
ready for these things, and whom God can make sufficient for them. I
believe that much of the work of God which is waiting to be accomplished
in our days on earth will not be accomplished until Christ has large
armies of voluntary martyrs. Society is in peril from dangerous wounds
which will not close until the young, the brave, the undaunted, the
reckless, for Christ’s sake, armed from head to foot in the impenetrable
armour of God, shall cast themselves into the yawning gulf. It is from
among you that this army may be greatly recruited. God can make of you,
who have been so terribly marred by sin, the boldest, bravest soldiers
of the cross; he can use you for great necessities, for hard and noble
service, as pioneers in wildernesses and rough places of the earth, as
leaders of forlorn hopes, to do the fatigue-work of God’s army, and to
fill every post of the utmost danger and exposure. It is to his glory
that he is able to furnish precious material out of the very rubbish of
the earth, that he should gather up the fragments that remain, that
nothing be lost, and direct to one holy end all these scattered and
desecrated energies. In order to this, Christ requires whole-hearted,
willing martyrs.
He has had such martyrs as witnesses and landmarks at all times. There
have been men and women who have endured the breaking of their own
hearts for the love of Christ, who have resolutely cut off the right
hand or plucked out the right eye for his sake. Upon the altars of such
self-sacrifice has ofttimes been kindled a holy fervour which moved the
world. A strange and inextinguishable energy has appeared in some of
these lovers of Christ, these unwearying evangelists and lifelong
martyrs, which it has perplexed the world to account for. They have been
enabled to work miracles among the hearts and souls of their fellow-men.
They have passed through life as unknown, yet well known; as dying, and
behold they live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always
rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet
possessing all things; taking pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in
necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake.
I cannot greatly admire the reformed profligate, professing now the fear
of God, who greedily gathers to himself every good thing that life can
give him, avoiding actual sin, but enjoying himself to the utmost of his
remaining power of enjoyment. God is munificent, bountiful, generous to
the evil and the good, the just and the unjust. It is true that he
oftentimes allows the man to take all that he can get, and to be happy
in his own way; but it is not the highest happiness which he has chosen,
it is not the noblest choice nor the truest life; but then it is a life
without the heavy cross, and therefore to most men it is the chosen, the
welcome life. I am filled with grief and shame when I see how little
there is among men of that noble self-scorn which would urge them,
having been great in sin, to be great in self-denial. If such men could
see their past in the true light, see what it is to have wasted youth,
and strength, and energy, to have desecrated love, and aided in the
destruction of bodies which should have been temples of God, they would
put away from themselves henceforward in disdain the precious gifts of
earth, not in contempt of the gifts, but in anger at the thought that
they themselves should seem to know so little of true sorrow and true
revenge as to touch such gifts. They would put away all thoughts of ease
and of enjoyment, and of striking roots to bind them to a world in which
they must henceforward be as strangers and pilgrims, dispensers of
blessing and succour, enriching out of their own deep poverty. They
would make haste to live the life of the Crucified, freed from private
cares and joys, taking their lives in their hands, “counting not their
own lives dear unto them,” and to go forth whithersoever the Lord should
send them, their faces heavenward, pressing on to labour in the great
harvest-field before the sun goes down, and, for every soul which they
have hurt by their past neglect or open sin, to gather in and repay to
the Lord a thousand. Their desire would be to be claimed entirely, to be
laid hold of by God, to be gathered up in the hollow of his hand, that
they may be hurled forth again as fiery arrows from the hand of a giant
whose quiver is full, to execute his will to the ends of the earth. They
would cease to make nice and niggardly calculations of how much of the
world, of ease, and of pleasantness they ought to give up, and of how
much they may lawfully keep, but would question rather how they may give
up their all, and make their life a complete holocaust, heaping
sacrifice upon sacrifice at the feet of the Holy One who redeemed them.
I know that to some men such words as these are “a hard saying;” yet I
know also certainly that there are others in the world to whom the
thought of a whole surrender is more attractive than that of a half
surrender, who do not shrink from the darkest valleys and the most
rugged ascents of the _Via Crucis_; indeed to whom, looking back on
their past life, this new life of entire self-abandonment seems the only
one for them; to whom its glory is revealed in the midst of its anguish;
who feel it would be a shame to them to live as other men, or even to
linger among the green pastures and by the still waters where the
happier of Christ’s flock are nourished, who have been led by gentler
paths to a high wisdom and purity in the knowledge of God. These men are
content to put by all rest and enjoyment until they see God face to
face. And yet, from the moment that the vow of complete self-dedication
is made, the future joy dawns upon these hearts with a clearness never
known before. From the moment that the resolution is taken, a great calm
begins to fill the soul. There is a distinct loss and a distinct gain.
The Master whom we serve is so generous that he will never suffer those
who have stripped themselves for his sake to be without full
compensation. He lavishes his greatest wealth, his most precious gifts,
upon his poor ones who have deliberately made themselves poor for his
sake. Henceforward their life of outward hardship, of toil, of poverty
in the matter of life’s best things, may make them to appear in the eyes
of men of the world as “of all men most miserable,” but the inward
vexation and conflict are at an end; sorrow still fills their hearts,
but it is no longer the restless sorrow of the world; it is the sorrow
of the Man of Sorrows, which he who has been made a partaker of them
would for ever choose rather than the purest joys of earth.
And when did any age call for great devotion of heart more than our own?
The malady of the age deepens; men’s hearts are filled with doubt and
perplexity. How will God restore faith and establish righteousness on
the earth? We know he can do it, but by what means we know but very
imperfectly. It will surely be in a great measure through the individual
life of his witnesses on earth that he will renew the spiritual life of
the world; through men and women “full of the Holy Ghost and of power.”
It is through the human voice that he will speak in pleading accents. He
will make himself felt through the warm pressure of human hands
stretched forth for help, and through the earnest affection of human
eyes accustomed to penetrate the unseen. The miracles of men’s lives are
the only miracles which will convince the incredulous.
And now, I beseech you, let the honest and courageous contemplation of
the character of the day in which we live, its worst symptoms and its
most threatening dangers, be to you who are aspiring to a renewed life
an added incentive to humble, determined, and indomitable efforts. Such
a contemplation may lead you to a clearer conception of the part you
(young men especially) are called on to play at this time, and of the
manner in which your past experience, humbling or sad as that may have
been, may be subordinated to the service of suffering and sinful
humanity, which now more than ever groans and travails in pain and in
expectancy of a coming redemption.
Our own country seems at this time to stand hesitatingly, like Hercules
in the Greek fable, at the point of divergence of two paths leading in
opposite directions. Her future seems to hang in the balance. Without
moral faith it is impossible that any nation should ever progress; and
there has lately seemed to be a decay of moral faith, tending to a
universal and fatal lapse, and leading downward to that state which
Proudhon, in words which have in them the sound of a funeral-bell,
declares France to have reached, that of “an effete people,”—“_une
nation finie_.” Rank, wealth, and power are too often seen to be in
league with profligacy and materialism. There is much hollowness and
hypocrisy in the upper stratum of society, while a spurious _Science_
vaunts itself as the future redeemer of mankind, trampling under foot
the feelings, aspirations and sensibilities of all God’s
wonderfully-fashioned, sentient beings, and aspiring to sit in God’s
seat as omniscient ruler, not only of the material creation, but of the
souls and affections of men. Our high material civilisation has armed
the human brute with new instruments of his lust and his ferocity. We
are in danger of being carried back to the “uncertainties and despair of
a paganised philosophy, which in time, sweeping away all that elevates
man, will land us among the ferocities and lusts of a paganised
society.”
If our country is to escape moral and political ruin, the spirit of a
deep and true repentance, that replenishing shower promised for the
refreshing of God’s inheritance when it is parched and weary, must be
poured out upon us from on high. We must be rebaptized in first
principles; pure and holy truths must be accepted, taught, and
proclaimed perseveringly by the people and among the people. We must not
stand still and wait, expecting this teaching from our recognised
spiritual instructors, and from the churches; though, as sharers in the
blessings of a moral revival, these will lend their aid. Still less must
we be sanguine in any expectation of an initiative of good from the
upper classes, and those who have a factitious influence borrowed from
rank or some conventional prestige. It is in the more serious classes of
the people (under God) that we hope, and especially in the rising
generation, if they can “escape the corruptions that are in the world
through lust,” and the deadening materialistic creed which attracts in
crowds the votaries of pleasure and men of the world.
Nothing has more forcibly indicated the materialistic tendency of our
day than the public endorsement, which the last ten years have
witnessed, of the _unequal standard of morality_ for the sexes. This
double standard is man’s invention, for his own base convenience. It is
not the standard of Christ, and it is inconsistent with every principle
of justice and right. Christ taught the absolute equality of the moral
law in its application to men and women, to rich and poor alike. As if
to correct with scourging the false standard—oppressive of women and
indulgent to men—which he found existing in his day on earth, he
pronounced the sternest denunciations of high-class male profligacy,
while he received with the utmost gentleness the woman of the city who
was a sinner, who had crept to his feet, and restored her to her lost
place in society, separating her for ever from her sins. From this
standard and this judgment, founded on the eternal truth of the unity of
the moral law, men have separated themselves as far as the east is from
the west; and not men only; women of the higher classes, “women that are
at ease,” possessing, themselves, a merely negative virtue, become
capable, through a cowardly subserviency to custom and masculine
opinion, of deep and positive cruelty towards their own sex.
Christ’s teaching in this matter has been practically frustrated and
denied century after century, and upon its denial have been founded
legislation, customs, and public institutions, criminally and cruelly
immoral and unjust. Man, claiming for himself an impure privilege to
sin, is, in spite of his profligacy, received in society and entrusted
with moral and social responsibilities, while the lapse of a woman of
the humbler classes, though that lapse has been induced by the pressure
of poverty or the allurements of love, is made the portal for her of a
life of misery and shame. Society drives such an one out of bounds, sets
its hell-hounds on her track, and makes recovery all but impossible. It
is not now by profligate men alone that theories of life are propounded
in accordance with wicked practice. It is not the sensualist and
materialist alone who declare that unchastity is a “necessity” for man,
and that the “priestess of humanity,” the degraded and outcast woman,
must continue to the end of time to offer up sacrifices for society,
_herself_ the victim on the sacrificial altar, her soul, affections,
will, immortal spirit, cast, together with her frail and suffering body,
into the burning fiery furnace, the Gehenna of the insatiable lust of
the male brute who rules her destiny here on earth. We now hear good men
echoing this deadly doctrine in a somewhat milder form. Christian
ministers themselves are not free from this dire confusion of the moral
vision; if they had been so, it would have been impossible for them to
stand aside, silent as they have been, while the audacious doctrine of
the necessity of unchastity was publicly proclaimed, and the lie was
openly given to the truth of the unity of the moral law by the
proclamation and endorsement in public enactment of the unequal standard
accepted in society. The attitude of Christian ministers towards the sin
of unchastity, and their silence concerning the vice and cruelty of men
in their relations with women of the poorer classes, are a mournful
comment on the ease with which right principles may decay, and yet the
servant of God himself may not mark their decay. It has indeed been
reserved for us at this day to see something of the “infinite capacity
for cowardice in men.” How is it that, when our nation said, through the
voice of its rulers, “Evil, be thou my good!” when those rulers elevated
that destroyer of peoples and tribes and nations, sexual vice, into a
recognised industry officially organised, every pulpit in the land did
not ring with a clear denial of the impious doctrine underlying the
cynical deed? I have indicated the answer. The whole moral atmosphere
around us is poisoned by the influence of the “old and chartered lie”
which scourges humanity, that that which is sin, degradation, and shame
for woman, is but a light and venial offence, if offence at all, in man.
But we see a light as of the approach of the dawn of day. The night is
indeed far spent, and many are watching for the promised revival as
those that watch for the morning. There is conflict around us, strong,
persistent, increasing. God be thanked, wherever there is conflict there
is life! On the one hand there are faith, virtue, freedom; on the other
hand materialism, profligacy, oppression, and slavery. Great
antagonistic forces are drawing nearer for battle. There is a sound as
of nations arousing; the heart of this people is more deeply stirred in
our day than it has yet been in this century. We have fallen upon a
solemn time. It is a period of sifting, when God, by his messengers and
his providences, shall “throughly purge his floor,” and sift the nations
as chaff is sifted from the wheat. The innermost thoughts of men’s
hearts are being revealed; light has penetrated “the dark places of the
earth, which are full of the habitations of cruelty.” Light, too, has
visited the consciences of men; they that are of the light are hastening
towards the light; they who “hate the light because their deeds are
evil,” horrified at the presence of light, are flying from it. Iniquity
abounds; yet the Lord is pouring forth his Spirit, “as the latter rain,”
abundantly. The enemy comes in like a flood, but the Spirit of the Lord
is raising up a standard against him.
Religious awakenings have lately been realised among us far and wide,
and continue to spread over many parts of Europe and America. It is
clear that, in order to combat with any success the materialism of our
age, embodied in accepted theories, customs, laws, and institutions, we
need some great manifestation of the power of God. That much-wished-for
breath of heaven appears to be now visiting us. Indolent souls are
aroused, and baptized into a fresh spiritual life. A cloud of blessing
is hanging over many lands. We stand in awe and expectation, seeing in
these things the hand of God. Without entering into the mystery of these
spiritual visitations, we must recognise the fact that there are periods
when it seems as if God granted a special audience to waiting souls on
this suffering earth, and as if the prayers sent up through many barren
years met at last a quick and abundant response. Such times have been
frequently accompanied or followed, in a greater or less degree, by the
casting off of national evils and the overthrow of great instituted
abominations, the overturning of conventional standards, and the revival
of a higher morality. It was strikingly so when, in America, a
widespread and earnest religious revival preceded that final encounter
of antagonistic principles which resulted in the overthrow of the great
slave system. It will tend somewhat to discredit the thoroughness of the
present religious impulse if it should fail to come into direct
collision with the greatest of our social evils. It is not enough that
the spiritual teachers now appealing to the masses of the people should
include in their ministrations certain “women of the city who are
sinners;” they ought directly to deal with the false and guilty theory
that impurity is necessary for men, that the institution of harlotry
must for ever remain in the heart of Christendom, and that a mere
remnant of souls is all we may expect to save from the grasp of that
tyranny. It will be a sad thing for the future of our country if we do
not avail ourselves of this Pentecostal breath of Heaven in order to
bring down the strongest of Satan’s strongholds to the ground. The holy
men who are the appointed instruments for the promotion of this revival
movement devote themselves daily and hourly to the work of receiving all
anxious inquirers who come to them, unweariedly teaching, praying, and
comforting; infinite pains are bestowed on the individual. And in this
they act as Christ acted. It is to the awakening of the private
conscience that God has committed the real history and progress of
mankind. But if, the private conscience being awakened, the man who is
the subject of the awakening regards all those lost and unhappy beings
who are not, manifestly to him, the subjects of the same awakening
grace, as permanently excluded by a decree of Providence, as a portion
of the “world lying in wickedness,” which must for ever continue to lie
in wickedness; if he persistently declines to seek the reform of our
social institutions lest he should soil his own soul by contact with
something which he deems to belong to the domain of Satan; then the
progress which God has committed to the awakening of the private
conscience will be indefinitely arrested, and extraordinary spiritual
awakenings will be discredited; reproach will lie at the door of those
to whom the gracious advances of the Spirit of God have been made, and
their fidelity will be impugned. A bright and cheering hope will rest
upon the future when the present religious movement becomes more
aggressive and more openly hostile to evils which are patronised by the
rich and influential; and of this practical development signs are not
wanting, especially in Switzerland and in the South of France, where the
religious awakening has been felt, and is continuing to spread, and
where its leaders have emphatically pointed to the overthrow of the
“typical crime of the universe,” prostitution, as the necessary sequel
to a deeply-renewed spiritual life among the nations. We want a far more
stern, searching, and uncompromising religious work than we have yet
seen in _our own_ land; one which shall boldly attack the gigantic sins
of the day, the greed of wealth, those trades which flourish on the ruin
of the bodies and souls of men, and that conspiracy of avarice and lust
by which is accomplished the destruction of tens of thousands of the
daughters of our people. We want a spiritual and moral awakening which
shall probe and combat the great social inequalities and wrongs that are
undermining the very foundations of religious and social life. It will
scarcely be denied, that the evils which those who desire to see
righteousness established on earth are called on to attack and to
destroy, culminate and find their last and most terrible expression in
that gigantic iniquity, that systematised profligacy, which is now
openly advocated. Isolated efforts will not avail. Whole communities of
men and women, unanimous in respect of the end to be attained, must
arise simultaneously to the rescue; and we already see the beginning of
such a movement in many lands. This movement has arisen precisely at the
moment when the evil itself had become aggressive in a sense never
before witnessed in the history of the world; when it had found
apologists among teachers and disciples of science and philosophy, and
when the very foundations of society had begun to be threatened by the
prevalence of the lying dogma, that any faculty, because it exists, may
be used without further question; that the practice of fornication, and
the devotion to destruction of those who minister to it, are based on an
imperious and unconquerable _necessity_, and that a truce must now be
proclaimed between society and these monstrous evils, against which it
is at once unwise and hopeless any longer to make war. The birth of the
movement in opposition to this “lying dogma” has been the signal for
fearless speech. Silence on the subject is at an end. Immorality,
however fashionable, and however influential its apologists, will
henceforward no longer be allowed to fortify itself in conventionality
by the abject silence of public opinion, nor shall it be permitted to
retain its place in civilised societies and professedly Christian
countries as one of the officially recognised and protected institutions
of society.
The “new word of progress” among us is clear; and while contending on
every hand against all the unmistakable proximate _causes_ of
prostitution, we shall wage a spiritual warfare against its ultimate
_cause_,—the permission and sanction of the double standard, the
doctrine that impurity in man is a slight and excusable offence, while
in woman it is a deadly and unpardonable sin. Our task at this day is to
teach unremittingly, unweariedly, both publicly and privately, the great
and forgotten truth of the _unity of the moral law_. There is no double
dispensation of the moral law; that law is one, as God is one. “The law
of personal purity obliges men and women equally to rule their lives by
their highest spiritual ideal, to fulfil their highest conceptions,
moral and intellectual. It prohibits any violation of the spiritual
nature for the temporary and apparent satisfaction of the physical
nature. Such a violation of the soul is rightly called impurity. It
destroys the purity in human life which lies in the supremacy of the
spiritual will and affections, mastering, moulding, and animating the
material body. The natural law ordains a contest as the necessary
condition of spiritual life. In this contest the purest personal
motives, manly and womanly honour, modesty and courage, are engaged in
the service of the spirit. But the defeat of the will degrades the human
being beneath the level of a brute; since self-indulgence, contrary to
the higher nature and the will, its instrument, is not the natural
obedience to a true, self-sufficing instinct, but is abnormal, impure,
and evil in its personal as in its social consequences.”[7]
Much scepticism prevails, even among those who profess the faith of
Jesus Christ, on the subject of the permanent reclamation of the victims
of society, outcast women. Baffled or disappointed in two or three
attempts to elevate such women, and reinstate them in society, most
persons abandon the effort, and too often thenceforth go about
proclaiming the moral irreclaimability of these poor fallen ones. With
as much reason might they proclaim it to be an impossibility for trees,
stripped of their foliage by the winter’s cold, ever to regain their
leaves in spring, inasmuch as they themselves find it beyond their power
to redress the woods with verdure, or to call to a new life the dormant
and buried root hidden in the frost-bound earth. God alone can give life
to the soul; and these souls, sinned against and despairing beyond all
others, will answer only to the call of God, or of the follower of
Christ who has derived, through deep spiritual communion with him, the
secret of the rare and awful power of quickening souls. “The works that
I do,” said that Holy One, “shall ye do also, and greater works than
these shall ye do.” “I perceive that virtue is gone out of me,” he said,
when a trembling woman, who had touched the hem of his garment, stood
upright before him, “healed of that plague” which had blighted her life.
That Holy One alone could say in its fullest sense, “I and my Father are
one;” hence he alone in the fullest sense could be the channel of
healing virtue to suffering men; and for the working of miracles of
healing in the soul, they alone are sufficient who live in unbroken
communion with God.
John Eudes of Normandy, who lived in the seventeenth century, coming
forth from a retirement of five years spent in unceasing prayer and
thought, accomplished a great reformation work in France, especially in
the matter of public morality and the overthrowing of the conventional
ideas concerning the relative guilt of men and women who were impure. It
is told of him, that one day while preaching to a vast congregation in
the great church of St. Stephen’s at Caen, carried away by the thought
of the sin of the world and of the numbers before him who were its
slaves or victims, he ceased for a moment to speak, and then cried out,
in a voice of piercing emotion, “Mercy, O my God, have mercy!” The whole
congregation, falling on their knees, began to weep and to sigh, and
repeated, as with the voice of one man, the words, “Mercy, O my God,
have mercy!” Another very talented and popular preacher, a great admirer
of Eudes, believed, on hearing this, that he could produce the same
effect by the same method; he tried it, and pausing in the course of a
beautiful sermon soon afterwards, used the same words in a voice of deep
emotion; but though he repeated them twice, no heart was touched, no one
knelt, all remained seated and silent. This preacher had _not_ won,
through years of deep communion with God, that “virtue” which, like an
electric fire, flowed from the inmost soul of Eudes to the hearts of all
who heard him. Thus, among ourselves, the outward means by which
repentance and life are brought to dark and dying souls may be employed
by men and women who have not the spiritual power to render those means
effectual. In that case, their actions and appeals are but a
performance, a representation, instructive to the beholder, and
edifying, it may be, by way of example, but no more.
Yet is there not a work to be done by those who are conscious that they
lack the faith which would enable them to “receive their dead to life
again,” and to bring their fellow-sinners to the feet of God? Assuredly
there is. Of this same John Eudes it is said, that when he had daily
proclaimed the love of God to multitudes of the poor women of his city,
lost in misery and sin, he called some of his disciples around him, and
explained to them his need of their help. He “found that the weak seeds
of better feelings, of repentance and a desire to return to God, which
by grace were sown in their hearts while listening to his words, could
not take root under the pressure of poverty and the pestilential
atmosphere of vice and misery in which they lived.” He accordingly
induced many of his friends “to receive these poor women into their
houses, to give them work, to educate them, and, as far as possible, to
improve their moral character.” Thus they were placed in conditions more
favourable for the restoration of self-respect, and for the reception of
the hopes and aspirations of the spiritual life. There is not one among
us, however faltering our own advance in the better life, however
unworthy, however ignorant as yet in spiritual matters, who has not
within his or her reach the possibility of aiding in this holiest
mission of restoring the fallen, or of arresting the progress along the
path of destruction of some fellow-man or woman. A word, but one word,
of gentle human kindness, has marked, thousands of times, the
turning-point in a career of ignorance, recklessness, or despair, and
has given the impulse in the opposite direction. Multitudes of the most
unhappy class of sinners might be drawn out of the mire, separated from
the entanglements of the circumstances which surround them, and set
forth in the paths of honour and virtue, by the mere stretching forth of
a helping hand, succeeded by the patient combined efforts of those who,
in repentance and humility, sincerely desire to redress some human
wrong, and who, if not yet spiritually strong, are at least full of
human sympathy. For this work of raising from the dust the daughters of
our country’s shame, a generous faith in human nature and its
capabilities is indispensable. When this kind of faith is associated
with a sound understanding, common sense, a tender heart, and a lively
and healthy imagination, those who possess it are able to meet every
fellow-creature, however unfortunate or degraded, however far removed by
class distinctions or education, on the broad ground of a common
humanity. The secret of reclamation, viewed from the human side, is
delicately and frankly to elicit the true God-given character, buried
beneath the guilt and shame, and to give permanence to that character.
It is in vain for any one, not possessing in some degree such generous
faith in and reverence for human nature in its saddest plight, to
attempt to influence the women who are the victims of our social
depravity. There are men who continually spread abroad on all hands the
false and cruel belief that such women are past hope, unsexed, incapable
of purification, and more degraded than the men who have sinned with
them.
It fills me with grief and shame to see the hold that this belief has
got among large classes of virtuous people, especially in the higher
ranks, where it has least of all the opportunity of correction by
practical and personal knowledge of the conditions of life which
surround the daughters of the people, and of the character and homes of
the poor. But I doubt whether the most powerful reasoning on this
subject would convince any one who in his heart believes that fallen
women are lost, irreclaimable, unsexed, mere animals, harpies, and the
like; for the cause of this misapprehension lies in the heart and
character of the person who misapprehends; and unless the heart of that
person can be reached, and his whole mode of thought and of life be
changed, there is no hope whatever of influencing him on this head. A
single look at a man’s face is often enough to indicate whether it is of
any use to ask him to aid in the reclamation of fallen women. In some
men’s faces I see faith; in others, none. In order to convince these
doubters in this matter, I must ask them to come with me to haunts of
evil repute, and to poor homes and hiding-places of shame, and learn the
reality of the lives of these poor women, and then say whether they are
not altogether human beings like ourselves, with hearts and consciences,
sorrows and joys, tender hopes and poignant regrets. But then I reflect
that this would be, in some cases, useless; for the very approach and
presence of some men, and of some women too, paralyses the good there is
in these outcasts.
If I were to take with me one of these sceptics about human nature, and
introduce him among these women, they would look in his face in their
peculiar, keen, and inquiring manner; they would read his thoughts with
a quickness of perception which is developed in these Pariahs by the
pain of their position, and they would at once turn to him their bad
side—the hard, or bitter, or defiant side: hence it is impossible to
convince these same men even by this means, because there are certain
affinities lacking which are needful to draw out the goodness which
there is in these outcasts; and therefore these sceptics will ever
continue to assert that such women are beyond hope, and to call them by
every contemptuous and ungracious epithet.
Nothing is more common than the assertion (we hear it reiterated _ad
nauseam_), that women who sell themselves for money are degraded beyond
all other beings, and that the sin so perpetrated is one with which the
sin of the man, her partner, is not to be compared for moral turpitude.
In the face of this assertion, I will fearlessly avow, and I speak from
a large experience, that some of those who thus sin are among the least
guilty—I will even say the most capable of nobility of motive, of that
unhappy class.
I could tell you of a girl whose father was pining in sickness, and
could not even get a farthing candle or a bit of coal to lighten and
warm the cellar where his agonised nights were spent. I have seen the
daughter with her face buried in his rags of bedclothes, weeping her
heart out. Then she goes forth, and returns with various unexpected
comforts, and says, “Don’t ask, father, where I got them;” and so she
ministers to him till he dies, buying a shell to place his body in, and
a bunch of violets to lay on the breast of the corpse; and all out of
the sale of her own cold, trembling, hungry person, not carried away,
mark you, by any vanity, or morbid instinct, or passion, except the
_passion of pity for a dying father_. And yet we hear doctors and
statesmen and philosophers, and even women, say, “If women will be so
base as to sell their persons, they are no longer women; they deserve
anything, even to endure the ‘seal of their degradation,’” in the
official recognition, as a patented industry, of that dark and degrading
traffic, which to themselves has been only the last resort of hunger and
despair.
I could tell you of one whom I entreated that that day on which I found
her should be the beginning of a new life; and who, looking despairingly
at the skeleton of a child on her knee, replied, with white lips,
“Gladly would I cease to do evil; but what is to become of my little
boy? I am obliged to go out at night to get him a piece of bread.” I
could tell you of another to whom I said the same, and who, looking with
clear, frank, sorrowful eyes in my face, said, “I never _chose_ evil;
but I can get no work. Look at my mother; neither she nor I have broken
our fast since yesterday at this hour.” Her mother was an old woman,
stone blind, who clung to her one support, her daughter, to guide her
across the floor to her corner by the fire and to bring her her daily
crust. These are not fictions, but facts.
Strange that it should be needful to put to the consciences of men who
have sinned, the question, Did _you_ sin because of hunger? Were _you_
driven by want and starvation to the baseness of bartering virtue for
money? Nay; you were not poor; it was you who _paid_ the money. What,
then, was your motive? Was it _love_? You shudder at the word in such a
connection. I press you no further. But I adjure you to echo no more the
false and shallow verdict that she is the greater sinner whose poverty
is an incentive to, ofttimes the sole motive of, her sin. It is
difficult for those who are raised far above those conditions which
press so cruelly on the sons and daughters of toil and poverty to
realise what hunger means. They have never experienced, and have no
power to imagine, what is meant by the pain of hunger—I mean starvation
hunger—that gnawing and faintness, increasing through weeks, months, and
years, of insufficient nourishment, that passion for sustenance which
becomes a raging instinct, and drowns all other feeling.
Here is a truthful history, which has its counterpart in every city, in
every poor quarter of every city, in every street where the
poverty-stricken swarm and cower.... “With a few clothes, a few
shillings, a Bible and a Hymn-book, the orphan made her venture in the
world. She sought long for service, but in vain. She had no credentials.
She next turned to the city, and to the thousands fiercely struggling
for employment she added one more. Work proved scarce and hands too
plentiful. Long had the little bundle of clothes given by the kind nurse
at the hospital been exchanged for a smaller bundle of pawn-tickets, and
yet only just enough occasional work could she find to keep up doomed
hope. Then day by day, with boots which disclosed almost the whole
stockingless foot within, in a gown too thin even for summer wear,
almost her only covering, to the city she tramped through snow and mud;
night by night she sat in her room in wet clothes by a fireless grate.
She had taken a little room for herself: it was an empty attic, but when
she first entered it, she felt as Jacob on the Syrian common after his
vision of the ladder and the angels. It was her Bethel. There, like the
patriarch, she ‘vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will
keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment
to put on, then shall the Lord be my God.’ But heroic effort and long
patience left her in bitter winter, without ‘bread to eat,’ and without
‘raiment to put on.’ One night she entered this room, and throwing
herself starved and weary on her bed, looking towards the little Bible
on the window-sill, madly she cried, ‘It’s no use—it’s no use; I am not
the sort for God;’ and covering her face with her thin black shawl, she
sobbed and shrieked in blank despair. Day by day she had sought work for
her fingers, and day by day, through wanton eyes and wanton tongues of
warehousemen and clerks, she had learned that she could make a market of
her beauty. The one she had strenuously sought; the other she had
heroically refused; but what must be the end? So far as starvation and
suicide were concerned, neither seemed unlikely to her. Yet was not that
dreaded life as good as friendless girls of that kind ought to expect?
What had been the experience of her honest, almost martyr’s efforts
after a virtuous and independent life?... Two years gone by; a crowd
become acquainted with the hysterical laugh, the wild reckless despair,
of a miserable woman in the custody of the police in a well-known
thoroughfare. But they had not seen the struggles and tears which in
solitude had often knitted the now brazen brow, and dimmed the now
fiendish eye. They had not heard the vows and prayers which had arisen
in an agony from the lips that now poured forth curses. At what cost the
purer life had been exchanged for this, God only knew.”[8]
Hear a tale told by one of the victims herself of our social
inequalities. “I am,” she said, “the daughter of a minister of the
gospel; and I pledge my word, solemnly and sacredly, that it was the low
price paid for my labour that drove me to sin. I could only make
two-and-ninepence a week at shirts, and should have starved but for the
streets. At last I swore to myself that I would keep from it for my
boy’s sake. I had pawned my clothes, and slept in a shawl and petticoat
under a butcher’s shed. I was trying to get to the workhouse. I had had
no food for two days. My baby’s legs froze to my side, and I sank upon a
doorstep. A lady found us, and would have fed us, but I could not eat;
she rubbed the baby’s legs with brandy. That night I got to the
workhouse; but they would not take me in without an order; so _I went
back to sin for one month_. It was the last. In my heart I hated it; my
whole nature rebelled at it; and nobody but God knows how I struggled to
give it up. I pawned my only gown more than once.” At the time when this
woman told her story, she had been eight years at service, honoured by
her employers. She was on an errand of mercy to save other women from
the same fate, when the recipient of her narrative met her: he took a
day’s journey to confirm the facts. Her employers spoke of her sobriety,
industry, and modesty. She told her story with her face hidden in her
hands, the tears dropping through her fingers, and sobbing so as
scarcely to be understood.
Another true story:—A beautiful Jewess, in years still a girl, but worn
and aged by suffering, came to my door. Mention of her had already been
made in the police columns of the daily papers. She had sought to
conceal the birth of her child; she had been followed, and all the
circumstances hunted up by a certain vigilant and zealous police-agent,
who was highly commended for the deed. She had undergone her legal
punishment, and now, broken-hearted with the sense of wrong suffered,
even more than of wrong done, she sought help that she might go “far
away, somewhere.” Some months had passed, and she was gone “far away,
somewhere,” into the presence of God, when a letter arrived for her. She
had asked me to open any such letter, even if addressed “private,” as
this was. “I have nothing to hide from _you_,” she said. The letter was
that of a man inviting her to return to him. It flattered: “Among the
many girls I see, none are so handsome as you. Why don’t you write?” And
the writer pleaded in selfish and inflamed language, as the father of
the infant, for renewed favours from the persecuted mother. The writer
was Police Constable ——,[9] the father of the infant, the same vigilant
and zealous agent who had hunted up the shrinking mother, dragged her
before the court, sought out “_the_ child” (his own!), and received the
commendation of his employers. I think I hear you utter words of scorn
or indignation as you read this. But why, I ask, why feel indignant with
the policeman? Policemen are “men of like passions” with yourselves.
This man did but perform the duty which he had been taught in dragging
to light and conveying to jail this young and frail victim of his own
seduction. His case does not differ greatly from that of the magistrate
who committed to prison the girl to whom he had paid money (the price of
his sin) in the street the previous night, and who, as he sat on the
bench, heard the charge from her own lips with unflinching countenance;
nor does it differ greatly from that of the legislator who waxes
eloquent in Parliament in advocacy of laws for the punishment of women,
far, far less morally guilty than himself. As we sow so must we expect
to reap. We have made the police the judges of the morality of the
people, or rather, I should say, of the morality of our women only. We
have invested them with powers with which the wisest and purest man
might tremble to be entrusted; and then we send them forth to watch and
dog the feet of women; to repress women, and to call it repressing vice;
to punish immoral women only, and call it punishing immorality. The men
who share the guilt of women are carefully, even studiously ignored, or
suffered to pass on, permitted to enter and re-enter the abodes of
infamy unrebuked and unchecked, protected by the law even there, allowed
to solicit the inexperienced or innocent wanderer in the street, to take
their fill of sensuality, and to hunt after “all uncleanness with
greediness.” The police, our despots of the future, are daily and
systematically trained, by our customs, laws, language, and acts, to
believe that the man may sin with impunity, and that the woman alone is
responsible, that there is, in fact, one moral law for the man and
another for the woman; and through this perpetual pursuit of the weaker
sinner, while privilege is reserved for the stronger, the “old and
chartered lie” is unceasingly promulgated anew, and is ever obtaining a
firmer hold on popular belief, while the victims of this false standard
become ever more faint and hopeless as the hour chills and darkens
before the dawn appears. Nevertheless “the morning cometh.”
I said that the secret of reclamation is gently and delicately to elicit
the true God-given character; but characters differ, and present an
infinite variety; hence a machinery of a uniform nature, brought to bear
upon these infinite shades of natural disposition and capacity for good,
must present an obstacle through its lack of elasticity in its
application as a reformatory discipline. It is beginning to be more and
more felt that the old system of bringing together large communities of
young women separated from the rest of society, and all more or less
blighted by the one form of sin, is not the happiest or most successful
means for the rehabilitation of character. Everywhere the attempt is
made to approach more and more to the ideal of a _Home_, in the true
sense. Blessings innumerable have, doubtless, during the past century,
followed the efforts of the “lovers of the lost,” even when their
methods were rigid, and lacking in enlightenment and generosity. The
mere motive of compassion and the desire to save have borne fruit; but,
like many other designs or institutions, approved and successful in
their origin, their _form_ of charity is worn out; it has fulfilled its
office; it has tided over a period when nothing better could, perhaps,
have been conceived or maintained. It has had its day, and has become
effete. The victims themselves of our social impurity begin to feel a
yearning for some more natural and generous dispensation towards
themselves of the pity and charity which Christian hearts feel for them;
and this yearning has something in it of the prophetical. “Give me
_work_,” they ask sometimes; “if I may go straight to work, I shall do
well;” and “why,” they naturally question, “why is a certain fixed
period of quarantine required for us which is not required for sinners
of the other sex?” There had indeed come to be something superstitious
in the way in which the Penitentiary quarantine, as a necessity for
women alone, is regarded by society. If a young son of your own were to
fall into profligate habits, and you, hastening to the rescue, were
planning, with deep concern and the best wisdom you could summon, the
means most likely to restore him to virtue and set him forth once more
on an honourable career, how would you act? Would you desire to place
your young son in a walled establishment, where he must promise to
remain for one year or two years, where he would see no one save male
companions of his own age, whose antecedents were in every case very
similar to his own, where certain employments would be assigned to him,
in company with the other profligate youths in course of being
reclaimed, and certain religious exercises enjoined? Possibly, in a case
of dipsomania, some such forced discipline may be resorted to, when the
unhappy subject becomes more of a patient than a criminal, and the
restoring influence of a constant appeal to individual responsibility
must be dispensed with. But in a case where the sin has been that of
impurity, I believe that no parent would desire precisely such a
discipline for his son as is commonly imposed upon the _daughters_ of
the people. It would be deemed by you safer and better to surround him
with some homelike influences, with a prudent amount of external
enjoyment, freedom, and exercise, and to give him constant and suitable
work; you would strive to place him under the influence of good men and
good women; above all, under some holy maternal influence; and you would
seek to bring him in contact, while in the world (not secluded in an
institution), with strong, virtuous, and honourable men, whose example
and counsel would fence him round with safeguards. But industrial
training, you will say, is required to fit the poor women for
self-dependence and honest work. True; and such industrial training can
often be had only in communities where a number of persons of similar
age and position are assembled. The attainment of this object, however,
is not incompatible with the essential elements of the home-life. It is,
nevertheless, but imperfectly recognised as yet that the true idea of a
home embraces more than the kindness and maternal influences which are
seldom lacking in the modern refuge, more than the comparative freedom
now allowed, and more than the sense of security and protection,
valuable as all these are. When God set human beings on earth in
families, he bestowed on them not only the happiest earthly conditions,
but those most favourable for the development of unselfishness, mutual
sympathy, and growth in moral character. In our homes, we are not all of
one age and one condition; the old and young, the enfeebled through age,
and the helpless infant, are placed together with the full-grown man and
woman, and with the young man and the maiden. Every sweet and holy
combination arises out of these differences; sympathies, duties, mutual
help, and mutual dependence are created, which give to life so much of
its holiness, its sweetness, and its strength. The family is God’s
order. So far as we make social arrangements in which the family order
is set aside, we lose just so much of the help and the comfort which
Providence intended for our feebleness, and we just so far create
artificial conditions which do not tend to the wholesome and natural
development of what is best in the human being.
This begins to be felt to be true in regard to the work of rescue and
rehabilitation. A wild and wayward girl, who has many a time been found
to be little amenable to any motives of a direct spiritual nature, or to
the influence even of a kindly matron set over her, has changed her
whole character when entrusted with the care of a little child or of an
aged man or woman. Some who rebelled against the restraint of the house
of penitence have become as it were new creatures when called to some
serious responsibility in regard to a fellow-creature even more erring
or weak than themselves. Others, apparently unmoved and indifferent,
have found their lives transfigured through an introduction to some
active and holy office of tending the sick or the dying. The utmost
scope should, when possible, be allowed, for the widely-differing
capacities, desires, and gifts of these poor women. What may be an
irksome or unsuitable task to one, may be, humanly speaking, the
salvation of another. Skill in music or in some delicate art, or manual
labour in the open fields, among gardens, and under the blue heavens,
have in other cases been the means whereby the broken energies and
dormant motives and tastes have been revived and encouraged, and through
which soundness of mental health has been slowly regained.
A happy picture of what might be done is presented in some broken and
fragmentary accounts I have seen of a work accomplished in France, after
that country had been scourged and desolated by the long wars of the
Fronde. The fathers and brothers and husbands of the poor population of
some of the provinces had been almost destroyed by that sanguinary war.
Villages were depopulated and families broken up; famine and pestilence
succeeded; orphan girls and young widowed mothers wandered about
barefooted and ragged, a prey to hunger and misery. One of the noble
ladies of that period, while travelling to her chateau in the country,
was penetrated with grief at the sight of so many forlorn girls and
women; and when she observed that many of them were offering to sell
themselves to any comer in order to obtain bread to allay the agonies of
famine, she said to herself, “It is time that women who are raised above
this terrible alternative should hasten to the rescue of these.” She
asked of these girls, “Are you willing to work?” Willing, even eager,
they all were. The laborious and humble beginnings of the enterprise
which arose from this necessity it is not needful here to record.
Suffice it to say, that an _Industrial Colony_ was founded through the
energy and perseverance of the men and women actuated by a desire to
save these victims. The colony was situated in the country, remote from
any large cities. Hundreds were gathered there. “Industry” was the motto
of the community. After some years, the place had the appearance of a
large and flourishing village; the sounds of busy labour, of the
laughter of childhood, of singing and of praise, were heard by those who
passed through it. The family life was truly realised here. Only while
at work in the factory, which formed the main industry of the place,
were the women assembled in one place. After work-hours they returned to
their homes—little cottages with gardens, some standing alone, others in
rows, facing the central green of the village, shaded by luxuriant
trees; and to these cottage homes were brought from many parts the aged
poor, and orphaned or deserted infants, to be cared for and ministered
to, and in their turn to bless those who tended them. Many a poor Hagar
turned her wandering feet with her starving child to this abode of
industry and peace, leaving behind her the great wilderness of the city.
The mothers of this community lived in its midst, constantly and
lovingly superintending, advising, and influencing, yet leaving abundant
freedom to the citizens of this little colony. When some of these
mothers—the ladies devoted to the work—were called away, others took
their place. A place of worship arose in the midst, and a schoolhouse
for the little ones. Every varied form of human ministration was here
presented to the poor fallen ones, thus calling out such gifts of heart
or mind as each might possess, while the alternation between the regular
hours of industrial labour and the ministering of the cottage-home
filled the affections and the mind, at the same time employing the hands
in a degree hardly attainable under any other conditions. We catch a
glimpse, in the broken record of this enterprise, of the happy evenings,
when the girls, trooping back to their little cottages, would wrangle
amicably for the first embrace of the baby or the tottering little ones
who came forward to meet their adopted young mothers, clinging around
them, chasing far away, with their pure sweet kisses and innocent talk,
all memory of unholy and unwomanly act and thought. We see, in the happy
scramble for the embraces of the babes, defeated candidates among the
young girls pressing forward towards the cottage doors; one throws her
arms gaily and tenderly around the silvered head of a stooping, feeble,
aged man, saying, “This is _my baby_.” He was her special charge, and
long did the hours seem to the aged man till his beloved nurse returned
from her daily work to bring sunshine and gladness to the little room
where he dwelt. She, once “a woman of the city and a sinner,” now poured
forth all the womanly tenderness and abounding love of her poor heart on
this old man, seeing, it may be, in him a father long dead, whom she
seemed now to serve again, as in childhood. Another would be entrusted
with an aged woman, in whom she found again the mother long ago grieved
or dead. In some cases the patience and skill of the young women were
tried and tested, but bore the trial. Some had an aptitude for teaching,
and their evenings were spent in the school. A library was established;
books were read and exchanged in the little homes. Convalescents from
city hospitals were sent sometimes to recover in this happy valley,
through which a pure stream danced and sang, and in which breezes from
the south and west played freely.
Some of the cottages became convalescent homes for these pale visitors
from the cities. The poor women who approved themselves by long service,
or by devotion to the young, or sick, or aged, became promoted by
degrees to the position of mothers of the colony. A preacher would
sometimes visit the place, when a crowd of all ages and conditions would
gather from many a porch of the industrial colony to hear the glad
tidings of the gospel of peace preached under the open sky in the
village green, whence hymns of praise ascended evening by evening. The
products of the industry of the colony were sent to the nearest
manufacturing city, and in the course of years the colony became more
than self-supporting.
Those who have read of the work done by Rosa Govona, and of her happy
industrial colony in the vale of Mondovi on the northern side of the
Ligurian Apennines, will understand still better the favourable
conditions realised by poor and friendless women thus gathered together.
“Thou shalt live by the labour of thine own hands,” was Rosa Govona’s
salutation to every new-comer, thus at once, and without any interval of
prescribed quarantine, establishing them in remunerative labour,
inspired with the principles of independence and self-respect: for this
was one of the most cherished points in her creed.[10]
In travelling over our healthful Yorkshire moors, or through some of the
beautiful secluded parts of rural England, I have sometimes thought, “Is
the realisation of such an enterprise as this an impossibility in our
own time and country?” God grant that ingenuity and courage, as well as
charity, may be brought to bear on this matter, so that thousands (now
humanly speaking without a straw to catch at for life) may be withdrawn
from that great gulf stream which is whirling them downward to
destruction. Even in the heart of our cities, industrial enterprises
might be established with success, where the principle of
self-dependence and the home element might alike be secured. In work
such as I have imperfectly recorded, women must be the chief agents; but
they cannot accomplish so great a work unaided by men.
That portion of the mighty task appointed to us at this day, which is in
danger of being again and again lost sight of, is the elevation of the
moral standard of our sons and our brethren. If this is neglected, the
work of rescuing women will continue to resemble the attempt to dry the
bed of a river by turning away its waters, while the fountainhead
continues actively to pour forth its ever-renewed floods. To you again,
then, young men, I would turn. To you is allotted this high, difficult,
and thrice-blessed work.
“It is right that a moral stimulus so wholesome, an enthusiasm so real,
as their participation in this social movement will furnish, should be
permitted to young men.
“It is true that they must be chiefly engaged in preparation for the
duties of active life. But this is a duty which they are imperatively
summoned to discharge without delay or preparation, since the evil
springs from among their own number. Any antagonism to this iniquity
must be paralysed, if they do not strike the first blow for purity and
justice. Let a young man, whose tacit compliance will otherwise be
assumed, make a resolute protest against this human sacrifice, and he
can liberate, it may be, more than one of the victims; while he will
exercise upon others an influence for good which cannot easily be
measured.”[11]
Thrice happy you, young men, who have escaped the corruption that is in
the world through lust, in whose breasts is no concealed memory of past
shameful deed! Thrice blessed are you! Strength and joy be your portion!
The blessing of the _mothers_ of men rests upon you. Humble, modest, and
watchful, I know many of you are; more humble often than your companions
who might well feel a sense of humiliation in your presence; for
experience in sin does not in itself induce humility, but too often
pride: the heavenly light of God’s grace alone begets humility, alike in
the fallen and in those who have been able to withstand temptation. “Let
no man take thy crown,”—the crown of your noble youth and manhood. In
the name of whatsoever things are pure, lovely, honest, and of good
report, the invitation is this day made to you, England’s joy and pride,
to join in the battle of the Lord against the mighty. May God open your
eyes, young men, to see the noble _rôle_ which lies before you. May you
be filled with the unconquerable ardour of expectation, and with the
irresistible enthusiasm which is possessed by reformers who hold a
position which is _absolutely impregnable_. And let those who are
baffled by temptation, or bruised by falls, or crushed by sin’s
penalties, yet repentant now and resolute, arise together with you, and,
strengthened by you, let them labour for the bringing in of the new
era—that era when the unequal judgment of man on this fundamental
question will cease to poison at the fountainhead the springs of human
life.