EARLY MANHOOD
If, in the words of the great educator I have already quoted, the chief
moral teaching and moral trend of the character must be given in the
schoolboy days, yet early manhood presents its own fruitful field for
the influence of a mother on the side of whatsoever things are pure and
lovely. The methods of exerting this influence must change as your son
grows from a boy into a man; the inevitable reticence, the exquisite
reserve of sex, must interfere with the old boyish confidences and with
your own freedom of speech. Other barriers, too, will most likely spring
up as your son goes forth into the world and mixes freely with other
young men of his own standing. Whether it be at college, or in the army,
or in business, he will inevitably be influenced by the views of the men
he associates with, which he will enlarge into the opinion of the world
in general, and will probably come home, if not to contradict his
mother, at least to patronize her and go his own way, smiling at her
with an air of manly superiority and with a lofty consciousness that he
knows a thing or two which lie beyond a woman's ken. Probably enough he
takes up with views on religion, or politics, or social questions which
are emphatically not yours, and which make you feel left very far
behind, instead of the old familiar "walking together" which was so
sweet. Worse still, he may evince for a time a cynical indifference to
all great questions, and all your teaching may seem to be lost in a
desert flat. The days of the latch-key and the independent life have
come, and you often seem to stand outside the walls which once admitted
you into their dearest recesses, left with but little clue as to what is
going on within.
But have patience. Early teaching and influence, though it may pass for
a time into abeyance, is the one thing that leaves an indelible impress
which will in the end make itself felt, only waiting for those eternal
springs which well up sooner or later in every life to burst into upward
growth; it may be a pure attachment, it may be a great sorrow, it may be
a sickness almost unto death, it may be some awakening to spiritual
realities. I often think of that pathetic yet joyful resurrection cry,
"This is our God, we have waited for Him"--waited for Him, possibly
through such long years of disappointment and heart hunger--only to cry
at the last, "This is our God, we have waited for Him, and He has saved
us."
But it is not all waiting. If with early manhood the "old order" has to
give place to new, and old methods and instruments have to be laid
aside as no longer fitted for their task, God puts into the hands of the
mother new instruments, new methods of appeal, which in some ways are
more powerful than the old. In early manhood she can appeal to the
thought of the future wife. I believe that this appeal is one of the
strongest that you can bring to bear upon young men.
I once had to make it myself under circumstances of unparalleled
difficulty; and I was struck with the profound response that it evoked.
It was on the occasion of the inaugural White Cross address to the
students of the Edinburgh University, now one of the first medical
schools in the world. The date of the address had been fixed, the hall
taken, when an unforeseen difficulty arose. Eminent man after eminent
man was asked to give the address, but all with one consent began to
make excuse. Spirit and flesh quailed before so difficult and rowdy an
audience on so difficult and perilous a subject. At last the professor
who was chiefly interested implored me to give the address myself, or
the whole thing would go by default. Under these circumstances I had no
choice but to do so. But as I sat in the committee room while the order
of the meeting was being arranged, and heard my audience shouting,
singing, crowing like cocks, whistling like parrots, caterwauling like
cats, and keeping up a continuous uproar, I thought to myself, "I have
got to go into that, and control it somehow so as to be heard"; I
confess I did feel wrecked upon God. Professor Maclagan, who took the
chair, agreed that a prayer was impossible, a hymn was equally out of
the question. The only thing was to push me at once to the front; and
almost immediately after a few very brief words from the distinguished
chairman I found myself face to face with an audience that evidently
meant mischief. By some instinct I told them at once about James Hinton,
whom, of course, they knew by name as the first aurist of his day; how,
with all that this life could give him, he had died of a broken heart, a
heart broken over the lost and degraded womanhood of England, the hosts
of young girls slain in body and soul whom he met with at night in our
terrible streets. This seemed to strike and sober them, that a man
should actually die over a thing which to all of them was so familiar
and to many had been only the subject of a coarse jest. Fortunately,
there is a stage of nervous terror which rounds again on desperate
courage, and having once got hold of my audience, I determined to use
the occasion to the uttermost and venture on the most perilous ground.
In the course of my address I asked them to take notice of a great
silent change that was taking place all round them in the position of
women, the full significance of which they might not have grasped.
Everywhere women were leaving the seclusion of their homes and were
quietly coming forward and taking their place by their side in the great
work of the world. I thanked them for the generous welcome that they
had accorded them. But had they seized the full meaning, the ulterior
bearings of this changed attitude in women, and the wider knowledge of
the world that it brought with it? Not so long ago it was an understood
thing that women should know nothing of the darker side of life; and
there was nothing dishonorable in a man keeping the woman he loved in
ignorance of the darker side of his own past, if such there were. But in
the greater knowledge that has come to women, and the anguish some of
them feel over the misery and degradation of their lost sisters, can
this attitude any longer be maintained without conscious deception?
"What would you say," I asked, "if the woman you loved with the whole
strength of your soul passed herself off as an undamaged article upon
you, and let you worship her as the very embodiment of all that is white
and pure, when something unspeakably sad and sinful had happened in her
past life? You know you would be half mad at the wrong done to you if
after marriage you found it out. And what are you going to do, I ask
some of you who are so careless as to the life you lead, are _you_ going
to pass yourself off as an undamaged article on the woman who loves and
worships you, and who gives herself so unreservedly to you that she
loses her very name and takes yours? Is it fair, is it honorable, is it
even manly? No, I see by your faces you are saying, 'I don't think it
is, I should have to confess.' Well, that is better than basing your
life on a dishonorable lie. But, alas! it is no way out of the misery.
At the very moment when you would give all you possess to be worthy of
that great love she gives you, you have to prove that you are unworthy;
and the whole of the only last gleam of Eden that is left to this poor
life of yours, the pure love of a man to a pure woman, is blotted out
with bitter and jealous tears; the trail of the serpent is over it all.
I know well that women can love, and love passionately, impure men; but
every woman will tell you that there is _a_ love that a woman can only
give to a man who has been faithful to her before marriage as well as
after; and for ever and for ever there will be a shut door at the very
heart of your Eden of which you have flung away the key, a love that
might have been yours had you kept yourself worthy of it. There is but
one way out of the difficulty, now that in the changed position of women
you can no longer honorably keep them in the dark--to make up your mind
that you will come to the woman you love in the glory of your unfallen
manhood, as you expect her to come to you in the beauty of her spotless
maidenhood."
I did not know for one moment whether they would not break out into
cooing like doves; but, on the contrary, they listened to me with
profound attention, and I could see that none of my words went so home
to them as those. When I had finished my address a member of the
committee said to one of the professors, "I think if she had asked them
to go off and storm Edinburgh Castle they would have marched off in a
body and done it." So great is the power of a woman pleading for women.
If I could use this sacred plea with effect under circumstances of--I
think you will allow--such unspeakable difficulty, must it not be
possible to you, the mother from whom such an appeal would come so
naturally, to use this same influence, and in the quiet Sunday walk
through the fields and woods where Nature herself seems to breathe of
the sanctity of life in every leaf and flower, or in the quiet talk over
the winter fireside before he leaves home, to plead with your son to
keep himself faithful to his future wife, so that when he meets the
woman he can love and make his wife, he may have no shameful secrets to
confess, or, worse still, to conceal from her, no base tendencies to
hand down to his unborn children after him? Thank God! how many an
American and English wife and mother can speak here from personal
experience of the perfect love and perfect trust which have been bred of
a pure life before marriage, and a knowledge that the sacraments of love
and life had never been desecrated or defiled, so that no shadow of
distrust or suspicion can ever darken the path of her married happiness.
How powerful the pleading of such a mother may become with her son, to
give his future wife the same perfect trust and unclouded happiness in
her husband's love!
I remember in a series of allegorical pictures by an old master in the
Baptistery at Florence, how, with the divine instinct of poets and
artists, in the beautiful symbolic figure of Hope, the painter has
placed a lily in her hands. Cannot we teach our sons that if they are to
realize their dearest hope in life, that divine hope must ever bear a
lily in her hand as the only wand that can open to them the paradise of
the ideal, the divine vision which is "the master light of all our
seeing," the deepest and most sacred joys of our life?
He safely walks in darkest ways
Whose youth is lighted from above,
Where, through the senses' silvery haze,
Dawns the veiled moon of nuptial love.
"Who is the happy husband? He
Who, scanning his unwedded life,
Thanks God, with all his conscience free,
'Twas faithful to his future wife."[26]
Again, could we not give our boys a little more teaching about the true
nature and sacredness of fatherhood? It always strikes me that the true
ethics of fatherhood are not yet born. Were the true nature, the
sacredness, and the immense responsibilities of fatherhood really and
duly recognized, men could not look with the appalling lightness with
which they do on providing some substitute for marriage, when they have
not the means to marry in early life, and are under the very prevalent
illusion that continent men who marry late run the risk of a childless
marriage--a notion which so great an authority as Acton pronounces to be
absolutely false physiologically, and without foundation in fact. To
bring a child into the world to whom he can perform no one of the duties
of a father, and to whom he deliberately gives a mother with a tarnished
name--a mother who, from the initial wrong done to her and the stigma
which deprives her of the society of women, will only too probably not
stay her feet at the first wrong step, but be drawn down that dread
winding stair which ends in the despair of a lost soul--this, I urge,
would be utterly abhorrent to every even fairly right-thinking man,
instead of the very common thing it is. Did we see it truly, it would be
a not venial sin, but an unpardonable crime.
Now, surely mothers can supply some teaching here which must be wanting
for public opinion to be what it is. A quiet talk about the high nature,
the duties and responsibilities of fatherhood cannot present any great
difficulties.
I remember many years ago hearing Canon Knox Little preach a sermon in
York Cathedral to a large mixed congregation, in which he touched on
this subject. At this distance of time I can only give the freest
rendering of his words, the more so as I have so often used them in my
own meetings that I may have unconsciously moulded them after my own
fashion. "Look," he said, "at that dying father--dying in the faith,
having fought the good fight, and all heaven now opening before his
dying gaze. Yet he withdraws his thoughts from that great hereafter to
centre them upon the little lad who stands at his bedside. His hands
wander over the golden head with
"'The vast sad tenderness of dying men.'
He triumphs over pain and weakness that he may plot and plan every
detail of the young life which he can no longer live to guide and
direct. And when at length he seems to have passed into the last
darkness, and they hold up the child to see if he will yet recognize
him, suddenly the spirit seems to sweep back again over the dark river
which it has almost crossed, and an ineffable light illumines the dying
face as his lips meet the lips of his little son in one last supreme
kiss--the father's love for one moment vanquishing death itself. And
what, I ask," said the preacher, in tones that thrilled that vast
audience, "must be the sin of desecrating and defiling such a function
as this, this function of fatherhood in which man seems to touch upon
God Himself and become the representative of the Father in heaven--what
must be the guilt of turning it into a subject of filthy jests and a
source of unclean actions?"
The friend with whom I was staying had brought with her her Bible class
of Industrial School lads, and when the next day she asked what had
struck them most in the sermon, they answered promptly, "What he said
about fathers," Let us go and teach likewise.
But perhaps the most precious sphere of influence is that which comes to
a mother last and latest of all--too late, unless the moral training of
all preceding years has been made one long disciplinary preparation in
self-mastery and pureness of living, for the higher and more difficult
self-control, the far sterner discipline, of true marriage pure and
undefiled. But if through her training and influence "the white flower
of a blameless life" has been worn
"Through all the years of passion in the blood,"
then this is the time when her long patient sowing comes to its golden
fruitage. It is to his mother that a young man turns as his confidant in
his engagement; it is to her that he necessarily turns for counsel and
advice with regard to his young wife in the early years of his marriage.
A young man in love is a man who can receive divine truth even of the
hardest, for love is of God, and its very nature is self-giving.
"Love took up the harp of life, and smote upon its chords with might--
Smote the chord of self, that trembling passed in music out of sight."
A pure affection is an almost awful revelation in itself to a young man
of the true nature of sensual sin. He would gladly die for the woman he
loves. And we look, therefore, to you mothers to bring into the world
that Christian ideal of marriage which at present is practically shut up
between the covers of our Bibles, that the man is to love the woman, the
husband the wife,[27] "as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for
it"; not our ideal of the self-sacrificing woman--our patient Griseldas
and Enids and all the rest of it--but the self-sacrificing man, who is
but poorly represented in our literature at all,--the man who loves the
woman and gives himself for her, holding all the strongest forces and
passions of his nature for her good, to crown her with perfect wifehood
and perfect motherhood.
This Christian ideal was doubtless intended to fulfil those restrictions
of the Levitical Law which were to safeguard the health of the wife and
secure the best conditions for the unborn child; laws and regulations to
the observance of which the Jew doubtless owes his splendid physique and
his still more splendid mental endowments, which, though he is the
fewest of all peoples, bring him everywhere to the forefront,--in
finance, in literature, in music, in general capacity,--and to which, I
should be inclined to add, he owes his comparatively slow rate of
increase, else it is difficult to understand the small numerical
strength of this extraordinary race; but I know that this is a disputed
point. No jot or tittle of these laws and regulations can pass away
until they are fulfilled in some larger truth; for ignore them or not,
they are founded on physiological laws; and it is on mothers'
recognizing this larger truth in the advice they give, and on their
bringing in the Christian ideal, that the future of marriage mainly
depends, and its being made more consonant with the higher and more
independent position of women than it at present is.
Whilst the sight is so familiar of wives with health broken down and
life made a burden, possibly even premature death incurred, by their
being given no rest from the sacred duties of motherhood, to say nothing
of the health of the hapless child born under such circumstances, can we
wonder that the modern woman often shows a marked distaste to marriage
and looks upon it as something low and sensual? Or can we wonder that
married men, with so sensual an ideal of so holy a state, should, alas!
so largely minister to the existence of an outcast class of women?
On the other hand, the remedy resorted to is often worse than the
disease. I confess I have stood aghast at the advice given by Christian
mothers, often backed up by a doctor whom they affirm to be a Christian
man, in order to save the health of the wife or limit the increase of
the family. The heads of the profession, in England, I believe, are
sound on this point, a conference having been held some years ago by our
leading medical men to denounce all such "fruits of philosophy" as
physically injurious and morally lowering.
But if we want to know what their practical results are, the moral
gangrene they are to the national life when once they have firmly taken
hold of a nation, we have only to look across the channel at
France--France with her immense wealth, but rapidly declining
population, which in less than a century will reduce her from a
first-rate to a second-or third-rate power, so that her statesmen have
actually debated the expediency of offering a premium on illegitimacy in
the shape of free nurture to all illegitimate children,--illegitimate
citizens being better in their estimation than no citizens at all.
Would we have the Anglo-Saxon race enter on this downward grade? If not,
then let us women silently band together to preserve the sanctity of the
family, of the home, and sternly to bar out the entrance of all that
defileth--all that sensualizes her men and enfeebles their self-mastery,
all that renders the heart of her women too craven to encounter the
burdens of being the mothers of a mighty race, flowing out into all the
lands to civilize and Christianize, and "bear the white man's burthen."
One word more, a sad and painful one, but one which comes from my inmost
heart. Do not pass by the sadder aspects of this great moral question
and refuse "to open thy mouth for the dumb," for those "who are
appointed unto destruction."
You cannot keep your son in ignorance of the facts; the state of our
miserable streets, every time he walks out in the evening in any of our
large towns, absolutely forbids that possibility. But you can place him
in the right attitude to meet those facts whether in the streets or
among his own companions. It is by fighting the evils without that we
can best fight the evils within. It is in dragging them down that we are
lifted up. A noble passion for the wronged, the weak, the sinful, and
the lost is the best means for casting out the ignoble passions which
would destroy another in order to have a good time one's self. At
present the stock phrase of a virtuous young man is, "I know how to take
care of myself." You have to put into his lips and heart a stronger and
a nobler utterance than that: "I know how to take care of the weakest
woman that comes in my path." Surely it is requiring no impossible moral
attitude in our sons, rather mere common manliness, to expect that when
spoken to by some poor wanderer, he should make answer in his heart if
not with his lips, "My girl, I have got a sister, and it would break my
heart to see her in your place, and I would rather die than have any
part in your degradation." One mother I know, who had been much engaged
in rescue work, and into whose heart the misery and degradation of our
outcast girls had entered like iron, taught her young son always to
take off his hat before passsing on, whenever he was accosted. He told a
friend of mine that he had scarcely ever known it to fail. Either the
poor girl would say, "Sir, I am very sorry I spoke to you"; or more
frequently still that little mark of human respect would prove too much,
and she would silently turn away and burst into tears. If our sons
cannot bare their heads before that bowed and ignoble object on whom the
sins of us all seem to have met--the wild passions of men, as well as
the self-righteousness of the Church--then our young men are not what I
take them to be,--nay, thank God! what I know them to be, sound of head
and sound of heart. They get hold of facts by the wrong end; they cut
into the middle of a chain, and look upon the woman as the aggressor,
and contemplate her as an unclean bird of prey. They do not in the least
realize the slight and morally trivial things that cast too many of our
working-class girls down into the pit of hell that skirts their daily
path--often as mere children who know not what they do, often from
hunger and desperation, often tricked and drugged, and always heavily
bribed. But let them know the facts, let them read a little paper such
as the _Black Anchor_, the _Ride of Death_, or _My Little Sister_,[28]
and they will feel the whole thing to be, in their own rough but
expressive words, "a beastly shame," and fight it both in themselves
and in others, for our sakes as well as their own. For the misery as
things are is this:--that men divide us into two classes--we pure women
for whom nothing is too good; and those others, whom they never
associate with us, for whom nothing is too bad. And what we have to
teach them is this--that our womanhood is ONE that a sin against them is
a sin against us, and so to link the thought of us to them that for the
sake of their own mothers, for the sake of their own sisters, above all,
for the sake of the future wife, they cannot wrong or degrade a woman or
keep up a degraded class of women.
I am aware that, besides the suggestions I have made, young men require
a plain, emphatic warning as to the physical dangers of licentiousness
and of the possibility of contracting a taint which medical science is
now pronouncing to be ineradicable and which they will transmit in some
form or other to their children after them. We want a strong cord made
up of every strand we can lay hold of, and one of these strands is
doubtless self-preservation, though in impulsive youth I do not think it
the strongest. But to give these warnings is manifestly the father's
duty, and not the mother's; and I hope and believe that the number of
fathers who are beginning to recognize their duty in this matter, as
moral teachers of their boys, is steadily increasing. In the case of
widowed mothers, or where the father absolutely refuses to say anything,
perhaps the paper I have already mentioned, _Medical Testimony_,[29]
would be the best substitute for the father's living voice.
And now let me conclude this chapter, as I concluded the last, with a
few scattered practical suggestions which may prove of use. My
experience has been that the vast majority of our young men go wrong not
from any vicious tendencies, but from want of thought, want of
knowledge, and a consequent yielding to the low moral tone of so-called
men of the world, and the fear of being chaffed as "an innocent." See
that your boy is guarded from this want of thought and want of
knowledge. When your son is a Sixth Form boy--it is impossible to give
the age more definitely, as it must depend upon the character of the
boy--place in his hands the White Cross paper, _True Manliness_ which
will give him the facts about his own manhood. This paper was carefully
revised by the late Bishop of Durham, Dr. Lightfoot, whose specialty was
young men; and upwards of a million copies have been sold, which in
itself guarantees it as a safe paper. Nor need you as a mother of sons
fear to read over any of the White Cross papers, since they concern
themselves, as their name denotes, with purity and a high ideal of
life--not with the sewer, but with the fountain of sweet waters.
Should your boys be so inclined, you might suggest their joining that
band of modern knights, the White Cross Society.[30] It is a great thing
to give a young man a high ideal to act up to, and the White Cross would
certainly give him this, as well as save him, with its definite
obligations, from evil that is incurred from sheer thoughtlessness and
animal spirits, enforcing a respectful and chivalrous treatment of
women, even when by their fast ways those women show that they have no
respect for themselves. But more especially is this the case with regard
to the second obligation, to discountenance coarse jests and allusions
and the by no means nice sort of talk that often goes on in
smoking-rooms, and by which, I am convinced, more than by any other
agency the mind and conscience of young men is gradually deadened and
defiled, but in which they are apt to join from sheer thoughtlessness
and sense of fun. Their White Cross obligation might screw up their
moral courage to utter some such pointed rebuke as Dr. Jowett's to a
lot of young men in a smoking-room, "I don't want to make myself out
better than you are, but is there not more dirt than wit in that story?"
or that other still more public rebuke which he administered at his own
dinner-table when, the gentlemen having been left to their wine, a
well-known diplomat began telling some very unsavory stories, till the
still, small, high-pitched voice of the Master made itself heard,
saying, "Had we not better adjourn this conversation till we join the
ladies in the drawing-room?" At least they can keep silence and a grave
face; and silence and a grave face are often the best damper to coarse
wit. Why, I ask, should men when they get together be one whit coarser
than women? It is simply an evil fashion, and as an evil fashion can and
will be put down as "bad form."
I think also that joining the White Cross will make young men more
active in trying to influence other young men and to guard and help
their younger brothers, with all the other priceless work that they can,
if they will, do for our womanhood among men, but which, from shyness
and reserve and the dread of being looked upon as moral prigs, they are
apt to let go by default.
But whether you agree with me or not with regard to your sons' joining
an organization, see that they assume their rightful attitude of
guardians of the purity of the home. We women cannot know anything about
the inner secrets of men's lives, or know whom to exclude and whom to
admit to the society of our girls. This ought to be the part of the
brothers. God knows we do not want to make a pariah class of men on the
same lines as are meted out to women. The young man who wants to do
better we are bound to help, and no better work can be done in our large
cities than to open our homes to young men in business or in Government
offices, etc. But men who are deliberately leading a fast life and who
are deeply stained with the degradation of our own womanhood, with no
wish to rise out of their moral slough, these must be to us as moral
lepers, to be gilded by no wealth, to be cloaked by no insignia of noble
birth, or we stand betrayed as hypocrites and charlatans in our own
cause. If our position in society is such as obliges us to receive such
men, we all know the moral uses of ice, and under the guise of the most
frigid politeness we can make them feel their absolute exclusion from
the inner circle of our friends and intimates. There need be no
discussion between you and your son--just the hint: "Oh, mother, I would
not ask that fellow if I were you," and you will know what is meant.
Much may also be done by keeping up the general high tone of the home.
One mother of eight sons, who all turned out men of high, pure life, if
ever they used in her presence such expressions as "a well-groomed
woman," or commended their last partner at a ball as "a pretty little
filly," would instantly interrupt them and ask incisively, "Are you
talking of a horse or a woman? If you are talking of a woman, you will
be pleased to remember that you are speaking in the presence of your
mother and your sisters." And if any scandal about a woman was mooted,
the conversation was at once quietly turned into another and more
profitable channel.
A word of homely advice from you to your sons with regard to our streets
at night: never to loiter, but to trudge on quickly, when they would be
rarely molested, may be advisable and useful.
As to absolute watchfulness with regard to the young maid-servants in
your house, this is so obvious a point that it scarcely needs
mentioning; though at the same time I have known the most culpably
careless arrangements made when the family are away for their summer
holidays, young maid-servants being left alone in the house while the
young men are still going backwards and forwards to their business; or
the whole family going out and no older woman being left in charge of
the young domestics. What can one expect but that, having sown moral
carelessness, we shall reap corruption?
But even with no such culpable neglect of our responsibilities, I do
wish we would cultivate more human relations with our servants, and so
get them to work more consciously with us in maintaining a high
Christian tone in our homes. If we would but take a more individual
interest in them and their belongings, as we should do with those we
count our friends; getting a good situation for the younger sister who
is just coming on, possibly giving her a few weeks of good training in
our own household; giving the delicate child of the family change of air
and good food, even taking in a baby to enable a sick mother to go for a
short time into a hospital. All these things I have found possible in my
own household. And surely such thought and care for those they hold dear
would form a living bond between mistress and servant. If we would take
the same thought and care for pleasant breaks in the monotony of our
young servants' lives as we do for our own girls, would the servant
difficulty press upon us to the same degree? Nay, if we could set going
a weekly or fortnightly working party with our own servants in some
cause which would interest us both, reading out some interesting
narrative in connection with it, could we not even in this small way
establish a bond of common service and make us feel that we were all
working together for the same Master, so that our servants might become
our helpers, and not, as they sometimes are, our hinderers, in bringing
up our children in a high and pure moral atmosphere?
But when all things are said and done, I know that with every mother
worthy the name there must be moments of deep discouragement and sense
of failure--a sense of mistakes made with some difficult nature to
which her own gives her but little clue; a sense of difficulties in
vain grappled with, of shortcomings in vain striven against. Which of us
have not had such moments of despondency in the face of a great task? In
such moments I have often called to mind one of those parables of Nature
which are everywhere around us, unseen and unheeded, like those
exquisite fresco angels of the old masters, in dim corners of ancient
churches, blowing silent trumpets of praise and adoration and touching
mute viols into mystic melodies which are lost to us. So thin has the
material veil grown under the touch of modern science that everywhere
the spiritual breaks through. Often in that nameless discouragement
before unfinished tasks, unfulfilled aims, and broken efforts, I have
thought of how the creative Word has fashioned the opal, made it of the
same stuff as desert sands, mere silica--not a crystallized stone like a
diamond, but rather a stone with a broken heart, traversed by hundreds
of small fissures which let in the air, the breath, as the Spirit is
called in the Greek of our New Testament; and through these two
transparent mediums of such different density it is enabled to refract
the light and reflect every lovely hue of heaven, while at its heart
burns a mysterious spot of fire. When we feel, therefore, as I have
often done, nothing but cracks and desert dust, we can say, "So God
maketh his precious opal." Our very sense of brokenness and failure
makes room for the Spirit to enter in, and through His strength made
perfect in human weakness we are made able to reflect every tender hue
of the eternal Loveliness and break up the white light of His truth into
those rays which are fittest for different natures; while that hidden
lamp of the sanctuary will burn in your heart of hearts for ever a guide
to your boy's feet in the devious ways of life.
In conclusion, I should like to record an incident full of encouragement
to mothers. A young fellow of eighteen or nineteen, whom his widowed
mother had brought up on the principles which I have been advocating,
said to her one day, "Mother, you know that men don't always think like
you about poor girls." "Alas!" she replied, "I know that but too well;
but what makes you say so?" "Well, mother, I was with a lot of college
fellows yesterday, and they were giving one another the best addresses
in the West End to go to." "But didn't you say anything?" "No, I only
kept silence. Had I said anything, they would only have called me a
confounded prig. There were three other fellows who kept silence, and I
could see they did not approve, but we none of us spoke up." "Oh, my
son," exclaimed his mother in great distress, "how are we to help you
young fellows? Do you think if the clergy were more faithful, they could
help you more than they do?" "I don't think they would listen to what a
parson says." "Then if doctors were to warn you more plainly than they
do?" "I don't think it would be of much use; they would not heed; and
then a fellow generally goes to a doctor too late." "Then what can we
do, what can we do?" "Well, I think there is only one person who can
really help, and that's a fellow's mother--she can save him, if she
would only try."
Doubt not, but earnestly believe. "In every man's breast is to be found
a lotus-blossom," says the pretty old Indian saying, and, watered by
your prayers and your tears, be sure it will blossom into "the white
flower of a blameless life."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 26: Coventry Patmore.]
[Footnote 27: The word in Greek is the same for woman and wife.]
[Footnote 28: White Cross Publications, E.P. Dutton & Co., 31 West
Twenty Third Street, New York.]
[Footnote 29: Office of White Cross league, 7 Dean's Yard, Westminster
Abbey, London.]
[Footnote 30: THE WHITE CROSS OBLIGATIONS. I. To treat all women with
respect, and endeavor to protect them from wrong and degradation.
II. To endeavor to put down all indecent language and coarse jests.
III. To maintain the law of purity as equally binding upon men and
women.
IV. To endeavor to spread these principles among my companions, and to
try and help my younger brothers.
V. To use every possible means to fulfil the command,
"Keep thyself pure."]