THE DYNAMIC ASPECT OF EVIL[40]
There remains yet one other way in which I earnestly desire to help you
if I can. I would fain afford you some light on this difficult problem
and give you a spring of hope within by enabling you to see what it is
working out in the world without. Some, I know, do not need this help.
Some wholesome souls seem to gaze on all evil with sun-dazzled
eyes--eyes that see Him in whom they walk, and not it, and in His light
they see light. They are the "naturally Christian" souls who lead
melodious days amid all the jars and discords of the world around them.
Others there are who seem to look upon these great social evils as
especially provided to afford a sphere for their beneficent activities;
and who if, by some sudden rise in public opinion, some passionate sense
of the wrong done to women, the degraded class should almost cease to
exist, would in their heart of hearts secretly regret so many empty beds
in their little Rescue Home and the possibility that it might have to be
shut up, when "the girls did turn out so well." Others, again, there are
who never trouble their heads or hearts about the misery and sin of the
world, or any social problem, however dark, as long as their own house
is comfortable, their own bed soft, and their own children healthy and
well cared for, never dreaming how those social evils may press upon
those children in their after-life. These are in no need of this kind of
help. But there are many thoughtful mothers, possibly an increasing
number with the increase of knowledge that is coming to all women, from
whose heart there is going up a bitter cry, "Why, oh why is all this
evil permitted?" Why is there this nameless moral difficulty at the very
heart of our life which our whole soul revolts from contemplating? Why
has Nature made these passions so strong that she seems wholly
regardless of all considerations of morality?[41]
Some there are who feel that all infidel books are mere curl-paper in
comparison with the terrible facts of life, some who are in danger of
having all faith crushed out of them--
"Beneath the weary and the heavy weight
Of all this unintelligible world."
It is these who need, like myself, as a first step to strong action, to
see something of what God is working out by the evil and suffering of
the world, to see it as a part of a vast redemptive whole, not as a
great exception in our life, but working under the same law by which, in
the words of the ancient collect, "things which are cast down are being
raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and all
things are returning to perfection through Him from whom they had their
origin."
Now, do not think that I am going to indulge in a dissertation on the
origin of evil or why the world is so full of sin and misery. This is
insoluble. You cannot solve a problem which has only one term. Your
unknown quantity must have some known factor or factors related to it,
or you cannot resolve it into the known. In this great claim of cause
and effect, where all things are related and interdependent, you can
only know a related thing through its relations. Try to account for a
bit of chalk, for instance, and consider all you must know in order to
enable you to do so. To account for its weight you must know something
about the motion of the whole planetary system and the law of gravity
that controls that system; to account for the weather-stains upon it,
you must know something about chemical reaction; to account for its
being chalk and not flint, you must know something of the geological
ages of the earth, and how it comes to be built up of little sea-shells;
to account for its hardness, you must know something of the intricacies
of molecular physics. All this you must know to account for a mere bit
of chalk. How, then, can we expect to understand the problem of the
world when we know absolutely nothing of its relations with the great
moral and spiritual whole to which it belongs, and without the knowledge
of which it must for ever remain an insoluble problem, presenting one
term only, an enigma of which we do not possess the key?
But though we cannot understand the origin of evil and why the world is
as it is, we can understand something of the processes which are at work
for good or ill. We can in a measure trace whether these processes are
making slowly but surely for righteousness, or whether all the sin and
the suffering are aimless and purposeless, a voice that cries "believe
no more,"
"An ever breaking shore
That tumbles in a godless deep."
Now, I contend that the only ground of despair, the only thing that
might-shut us up to pessimism and to "a philosophy only just above
suicide mark," would be not the presence but the absence of these great
world evils. If this world presented a dead-level of comfortable
selfishness that on the whole answered fairly well all round, an economy
of petty self-interests in stable equilibrium, a world generally wrong,
but working out no evil in particular to set it right, a society in
which every man was for himself, and not the devil, as at present, but
God for us all--then indeed we might despair. But who can contemplate
humanity as it is, that broken stair of the Divinity, whose top is in
the unapproachable light of heaven and whose lowest step rests not on
earth but in hell, without feeling that it is destined for an infinite
progress, destined for the ascending feet of angels? Who that gazes on
this world, with its infinite depths of pain, its heavy weight of evil,
its abysmal falls, its stupendous pressures of wrong and misery, but
feels that here, if anywhere, we are in the presence of kinetic
energies, of immense moral and spiritual forces, capable of raising the
whole of fallen humanity to the heights of the Divine. For let us
remember that in the moral and spiritual world, as well as in the
physical, no fall but carries with it the force that can be converted
into a rise; no dread resistance of wrong to the right but creates an
accumulated force which once let loose can transform an empire; no
weight of evil but, in pulling it down, can be made to raise the whole
bent of our life.
"Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be."
He is "no finite and finished clod." Progress, as Browning says, is his
distinctive mark, and these deep evils are the gigantic steps by which
he rises as he treads them under foot. Once recognize the fact that he
is a fallen being--and by that I mean no theological dogma, but a truth
of life, which, whatever our creed may be, must stare us in the
face--the fact that he is a being knowing good but choosing evil,
capable of an ideal but habitually falling below it, no mere automaton,
but possessed of a spiritual will and an accusing conscience--I ask how
else can he be educated, in the true sense of the word, and raised from
death unto life except by being made to educe his own results and work
out his evil premiss to the bitter end, till he is forced to go back
upon himself, and recognize the right principle which he has violated?
The very law of his being, of every being who is being raised from death
unto life, is, that he can only know life through death, only grasp good
by grappling with evil, only gain knowledge by knowing ignorance; his
highest must be sown in weakness before it can be raised in power, must
be sown in dishonor before it can be raised in glory.
Look back over the past and see if it is not in conflict with these
great world evils, themselves the results of man's moral blindness and
sin, that we have worked out the true principles of our life, the higher
possibilities of our humanity.
Take the most elementary case first, man's disobedience to the physical
laws under which he must live to have a sound mind in a sound body. Man
in his primitive stages is emphatically not a clean animal. On the
contrary, he is a very dirty one. He has none of the cat's dainty
neatness and cleanliness, none of her instinctive recognition of the
deodorizing and purifying power of the earth, that makes the foulest
thing once buried spring up in fresh grass and fragrant flowers. He has
nothing of the imperative impulse of the little ant which he treads
under his lordly feet to shampoo his brother, let alone himself. It has
needed the discipline and the suffering of the ages to evolve that great
banner of progress, the clean shirt. From what great world pestilences
has he not had to suffer as the consequences of his own uncleanliness!
Cholera has been rightly called the beneficent sanitary inspector of the
world. With what foul diseases, the very details of which would sicken,
has he not had to be scourged withal to get him to recognize and obey
the one Divine injunction, "Wash and be clean"! Truly his knowledge and
recognition of sanitary law, his "physical righteousness," has had to be
sown in the weakness and corruption of disease before it could be raised
to the power of a recognized law of life, insuring that cleanliness
which is next to godliness.
Again, take the great principle of national freedom,--that a nation has
a right to govern its own destinies. With what world tyrannies and
oppressions, the outcome of man's selfish lust of power and wealth, have
not the peoples had to fight and struggle in order at length to win and
get recognized that principle of freedom without which a nation can be
neither strong nor holy, neither a citadel nor a temple! The Iron Duke
used to say, "There is but one thing worse than a battle gained, and
that is a battle lost." Yet what battles lost and what battles gained,
with all their sickening sights and sounds--
"Oaths, insults, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,
Sweat, writhings, anguish, laboring of lungs,
In that close mist, and cryings for the light,
Moans of the dying and voices of the dead";
what bloody conflicts through the long ages have not had to be fought
out to gain this freedom! Truly we might apostrophize Freedom in the
words of the Hebrew prophet: "Who is this that cometh with her garments
dyed in blood?" Through what long centuries did not what Sir John Seeley
called the "mechanical theory of government" survive, the theory which
recognized no vital bond of blood and historical tradition between a
people and its government, but looked upon nations as royal appanages,
to be banded about with royal alliances and passed under an alien sway
without consent on its own part! Did it not require a Napoleon to work
out this false premiss to its bitter end, drenching Europe in blood to
gratify his own greed of power, and reducing nation after nation to his
alien and despotic rule, till it was felt to be intolerable, and with a
convulsive struggle Europe threw off the yoke? Truly a struggle which
was the birth-throes of national sentiment and the recognition that the
tie between the governed and the governing must be an organic one, a tie
of blood from within, not a force from without--in one word, the
recognition of the great principle of national freedom which, when the
nation is sufficiently developed and self-disciplined to be fit for it,
is the great mother of progress. Sown in the corruption of those mangled
and decaying corpses on many an awful battle-field, freedom is raised to
the glory of an incorruptible truth of national life.
Once again, was it not in his age-long conflict with the great world
evil of slavery that man worked out the true nature of a moral
personality? Man started at the outset with the evil premiss of the
right of the strong to possess himself of the weak and the conquered,
and enslave him for his own use, shunting the toil and burden of life
upon his bowed shoulders. Through long ages he had to work out this
wrong premiss in disaster to empires through the laziness and
worthlessness of their ruling classes engendered by slave labor, in the
dumb suffering and bitter wrongs of millions of enslaved men and women.
Through centuries the Church protested against these wrongs in vain,
since the evil root, in the face of all protests, will go on bearing
the evil fruit. England, herself the mother of free peoples, was stained
with the guilt of being one of the first to originate the worst form of
slavery that the world has ever seen, the African slave-trade, her great
Queen Elizabeth not scorning to enrich her royal coffers out of the
profits of slave-raiding expeditions conducted by her sea-captains. It
needed the horrors of this latest development of the principle of
slavery, the horrors of the middle passage, of whole regions of Africa
decimated to supply the slave market, of mothers torn from their
children, or, worse still, compelled to bear them to their slave
masters, only to see them in their turn sold to some far-off station; of
the degradation of men and women brought up in heathen ignorance lest
they should use their knowledge to rebel--it needed all this weight of
evil and disaster at last to rouse the conscience of Europe to recognize
that slavery was wrong in itself and to cast out the evil premiss on
which it rested. By the mere force of moral revulsion in England, by the
throes of a great civil war engendered by slavery in America, at last
the true nature of a moral personality got itself recognized,--the
inviolability of personal responsibility, the sanctity of the
individual, the sacredness of freedom,--those great principles on which
the whole of our public and political life are founded. And I make bold
to say that these principles were gained as a heritage for all time, not
by the preaching of abstract justice, not by any consideration of the
moral beauty of liberty, but mainly by a remorseful passion over the
wrongs and the degradation of the slave. These great principles were
sown in weakness and dishonor, to be raised in honor and in the power of
an endless life.
When, therefore, the Church of the living God awakes, as she is just
beginning to do, and closes in a life and death struggle with this far
deeper and more pervasive evil of the degradation of women and children,
which she has too long accepted as a melancholy necessity of human
nature, may we not find in the course of that conflict that wholly new
powers and new principles are being evolved, and that the apparent
impossibilities of our nature are only its divine possibilities in
disguise? May we not work out the true principles, not now of our public
and political life, but of the home, of the family, of personal conduct
and character--all those great moral bases on which the whole social
structure rests for its stability? Granted that this is the deepest and
strongest of all our world evils, that which is the most firmly based on
the original forces of our nature, and of that part of our nature which
has shown the deepest disorder--does not all this point to some great
issue? That which has been sown in such deep dishonor, will it not be
raised in some glory that excelleth?
If God has suffered mighty empires and whole kingdoms to be wrecked on
this one evil; if He has made it throughout the Old Scriptures the
symbol of departure from Himself, and closely associated monogamic love
with monotheistic worship, teaching us by the history of all ancient
idolatries that the race which is impure spawns unclean idols and
Phrygian rites; if Nature attaches such preciousness to purity in man
that the statistics of insurance offices value a young man's life at
twenty-five, the very prime of well-regulated manhood, at exactly
one-half of what it is worth at fourteen, owing, Dr. Carpenter does not
hesitate to say, to the indulgence of the passions of youth; if the
tender Father, "who sits by the death-bed of the little sparrow," has
not thought it too great a price to pay that countless women and
children should be sunk to hell without a chance in this life, in a
degradation that has no name, but which, in its very depth, measures the
height of the sanctity of womanhood; do we think that all these
stupendous issues are for no end and to work out no purpose? Do we not
feel at once that we stand here at the very centre of the mighty forces
that are moulding men to nobler shape and higher use?
Here, at least, is a force, if we will only use it, so weighted with
public disaster, with national decay, with private misery, that it
insists on making itself felt if there be a spark of life left and the
nation has not become mere dead carcase for the vultures of God's
judgments to prey upon. Here alone is a power strong enough to compel us
to simplify our life and restore its old divine order of marriage and
hard work, of "plain living and high thinking," which luxury and
self-ease are fast undermining. Here, in the slain of the daughters of
our people, is a stinging wrong that will goad us into seeing that the
people are so housed that a human life is possible to them. Here, if
anywhere, is a passion of conscience, and pity, and duty, and interest
combined, strong enough, a heaped-up weight of evil heavy enough, to
raise us to a self-giving manhood and a self-reverencing womanhood.
And from this secret place of thunder is not God now calling His chosen
ones to come forward and be fellow-workers with Him? And when that call
is obeyed, when, to summarize what I have already said, the wrongs and
degradation of women and hapless children take hold of men, as, thank
God, they are beginning to take hold, with a remorseful passion, that
passion for the weak, the wronged, and the defenceless, which surely is
the divine in flower in a human soul; when women rise up in a wild
revolt against
"The law that now is paramount,
The common law by which the poor and weak
Are trampled under foot of vicious men,
And loathed forever after by the good";
when the Christian Church at length hears the persistent interrogation
of her Lord, "Seest thou this woman?" and makes answer, "Yea, Lord, I
see that she is young, and poor, and outcast, and degraded," and speaks
to young men with something of the passion of the true Man--"It were
better for you that a millstone were hanged about your neck and you cast
into the depths of the sea, than that you should cause one of these
little ones to stumble"; when the fact that a foolish, giddy girl's feet
have slipped and fallen is no longer the signal for every man to look
upon her as fair game, and to trample her deeper into the mire, but the
signal to every man calling himself a man to hasten to her side, to
raise her up again and restore her to her lost womanhood; when boys are
taught from their earliest years that if they would have a clear brain,
a firm nerve, and a strong muscle, they must be pure, and purity is
looked upon as manly, at least, as much as truth and courage; when women
are no longer so lost to the dignity of their own womanhood as to make
companions of the very men who insult and degrade it; when the woman
requires the man to come to her in holy marriage in the glory of his
unfallen manhood, as he requires her to come to him in the beauty of her
spotless maidenhood; then, when these things begin to be, will not God's
order slowly evolve itself out of our disorder, and the man will become
the head of the woman, to guard her from all that makes her unfit to be
the mother of the race, and the woman will be the heart of the man, to
inspire him with all noble purpose? As we stand by this great
world-sepulchre of corruption our unbelieving heart can only exclaim:
"It stinketh." But the Christ meets us with the words, "Said I not unto
thee that if thou wouldst believe, thou shouldst see the glory of God?"
That which has been sown in human weakness must be raised in divine
power; that which has been sown in deep dishonor must be raised in
glory. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, even the
self-giving manhood of Him who is the Prince of Passion and the Lord of
Love, the manhood lifted into God.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 40: In this chapter I have quoted some passages from an
article of mine, "The Apocalypse of Evil," which appeared in the
_Contemporary Review_, and received the strong commendation of Dr.
Lightfoot, then Bishop of Durham. Many of the thoughts I owe to my
friend, James Hinton, to whom my obligations on this subject are
absolute.]
[Footnote 41: We must be careful, however, in urging this difficulty, to
remember Dr. Martineau's teaching, which I have given in the third
chapter, and bear in mind that the evil here is due to man's disorder,
and not to Nature's order. In the animal world the reproductive
instincts work out as orderly results as all other natural instincts,
and are no stronger than is necessary for the preservation of the race.]
CONCLUSION
And it is this great upward movement, lifting man to a higher level,
which is given into the hands of us women, touching, as it does, all the
great trusts of our womanhood. What are we women going to do in the face
of such vast issues for good or evil?
Undoubtedly we stand at the parting of the ways. In England undoubtedly
the old high traditions of English society have, at least in what is
called the "Upper Ten," been lowered and vulgarized. Our literature is
no longer as clean and wholesome as it was. The greater freedom that
women enjoy has not always been put to high uses. And all around us in
both countries the old order is changing, and the new order is not yet
born. Old positions are becoming untenable, with the higher position and
culture of women. It is becoming an impossibility for intelligent women
with a knowledge of physiology and an added sense of their own dignity
to accept the lower moral standard for men, which exposes them to the
risk of exchanging monogamy for a peculiarly vile polygamy--polygamy
with its sensuality, but without its duties--bringing physical risks to
their children and the terrible likelihood of an inherited moral taint
to their sons. It is an impossibility, now that mothers know, that they
should remain indifferent as to what sort of manhood they send out into
the world--the so-called manhood that either makes and maintains the
miserable sinner of our streets or is content to give a tainted name to
the mother of his child, or the true manhood lifted into God, whose
marriage is the type of the eternal union of God and the soul, of Christ
and the Church, and whose fatherhood claims kinship with the Father of
lights. It is impossible for women who are agitating for the
enfranchisement of their sex to accept as a necessary class in the midst
of a democratical society a class of citizens who, in Dr. Welldon's[42]
words, addressed to the University of Cambridge, "have lost once for all
time the rights of citizenship--who are nobody's wives, nobody's
sisters, nobody's friends, who live a living death in the world of men.
There are one hundred and fifty thousand such citizens,--perhaps far
more, in England and Wales--_and all are women_."
These old positions are simply impossible, each a moral _reductio ad
absurdam_. We must institute a new and higher order. To do so we women
must unite in a great silent movement, a temple slowly rising up beneath
our hands without sound of axe or hammer. It will not make itself heard
on platforms; its cry will not be heard in our streets. It will go on
beneath the surface of our life, probably unheeded and unnoticed of
men. Women must educate women; those who know must teach those who are
in ignorance. Let mothers who have been roused to the greatness of the
issues at stake take as their field of labor the young mothers whom they
may know--possibly their own married daughters or nieces, possibly those
who are only bound to them by ties of friendship. Use this book, if you
will. If there are things in it which you don't approve of--and oh, how
much of the divine patience of our Lord do we need with one another in
dealing with this difficult question--cut out those pages, erase that
passage, but do not deny those young mothers the necessary knowledge to
guard the nursery or save their boys at school. And then try and follow
it up by quietly talking over the difficulties and the best method of
encountering them. Let us deny ourselves in order to give to
associations or institutions for the elevation of women, as well as to
that excellent society for men, the White Cross, which is spreading its
purifying work through both countries.[43] Let us do what we can to help
in organizing women's labor, so that a living wage may be secured and
no woman be driven by starvation into selling herself for a morsel of
bread. Let us endeavor to secure the franchise that we may have the
power of legislating for the protection of women on the one point on
which we stand in sharp opposition to all but good men; especially such
measures as raising the age of consent, so deplorably low in some of
your States, that your children are almost without legal protection;
resisting State regulation of vice in the army; cleansing the streets by
an Act pressing equally on men and women, and many others which will
suggest themselves to you. But let us, at the same time, clearly
recognize that the remedy must lie deeper than any external agency--must
be as deep as life itself, and must be worked out in the silence of our
own hearts and of our own homes. We must restore the law of God, quietly
but firmly insisting on the equal moral standard for men and women
alike; and we must maintain the sanctity and permanence of the marriage
bond as ordained by Christ himself.
I say again I do not think, I simply _know_, by my own experience, that
men will rise to any standard which women choose to set them. Ruskin's
noble words are the simple truth:
"Their whole course and character are in your hands; what you would
have them be they shall be, if you not only desire to have them so,
but deserve to have them so, for they are but mirrors in which you
will see yourselves imaged.... You fancy, perhaps, as you have been
told so often, that a wife's rule should only be over her husband's
house, not over his mind. Ah no! the true rule is just the reverse
of that: a true wife, in her husband's house, is his servant; it is
in his heart that she is queen. Whatever of best he can conceive,
it is her part to be; whatever of highest he can hope, it is hers
to promise. All that is dark in him she must purge into purity; all
that is failing in him she must strengthen into truth; from her,
through all the world's clamor, he must win his praise; in her,
through all the world's warfare, he must find his peace."
Last, but not least, we must set ourselves to make our lives simpler and
plainer, and oppose the ever-increasing luxury and love of pleasure,
with its sure and certain result, a relaxed moral fibre, which, to a
race called to such high destinies and difficult tasks as our
Anglo-Saxon race, is simply fatal. It can, and it must be done. As
Philip Hammerton remarks:
"It is entirely within the power of public opinion to relieve the
world from the weariness of this burthen of expensive living; it
has actually been done to a great extent with regard to the
costliness of funerals, a matter in which public opinion has always
been very authoritative. If it will now permit a man to be buried
simply when he is dead, why cannot it allow him to exist simply
whilst he is living?"
To lessen the expense of dress, which has risen twenty per cent, within
the last thirty years; to restore amusements to their proper place, as
recreation after hard work for the good of others; to resist the
ever-increasing restlessness of our day, leading to such constant
absences from home as seriously to threaten all steady work for the
amelioration of the stay-at-home classes, and use up the funds which are
needed for that work; to keep a simple table, so that the future Sir
Andrew Clark may no longer have to say that more than half of our
diseases come from over-eating; to resist the vulgar tendency to compete
with our richer or more fashionable neighbors in their style of
living--surely these sacrifices are not beyond us, to attain a great
end, both for ourselves and our empire. If indeed we think we can meet
this evil without making sacrifices amounting to a silent revolution in
our life; if we think, as I have sometimes thought some women do think,
that we can quench this pit of perdition in our midst by, as it were,
emptying our scent-bottles upon it,--shedding a few empty tears, heaving
a few sentimental sighs: "It is very sad! of course I can't do anything,
but I am sure I wish all success to your noble work"--possibly even
giving a very little money, say a guinea a year, to a penitentiary--all
I can say is, _God is not mocked_. I know but one thing in heaven or
earth that will quench it, and that is life-blood. Sometimes I have
asked in anguish of spirit: "Will women give it?" I believe they will.
But, whether we give it or not, what Matthew Arnold called "the noblest
of religious utterances" holds good here: "Without shedding of blood
there is no remission of this sin."
And it is because I know that mothers will spend their heart's blood in
saving their sons, and because I believe that women, with their new-born
position and dignity, will not go on accepting as a matter of course
that their womanhood should be fashioned like the Egyptian sphinx, half
pure woman, crowned with intellectual and moral beauty, dowered with the
homage of men; and half unclean beast of prey, seeking whom it may slay,
outcast and abandoned and forced to snare or starve--it is because of
this, my rooted faith in women, that I have hope.
As long ago as 1880 Professor Max Müller, ever anxious for the interests
of his Indian fellow-subjects, when Mr. Malabari came to ask him how he
could rouse English public opinion with regard to the injuries inflicted
on young girls by Hindu child-marriages, answered him at once, "Write a
short pamphlet and send it to the women of England. They begin to be a
power, and they have one splendid quality, they are never beaten."[44]
And if this can be said of English women, still more may it be said of
the women of America.
But, further, to strengthen us in this splendid quality, have we
sufficiently recognized the new moral forces that are coming into the
world? Have our eyes been opened to see "the horses and chariots of
fire" which are silently taking up their position around us, to guard
us and fight for us, that we may not be beaten; the deepened sense of
moral obligation, the added power of conscience, the altogether new
altruistic sense which makes the misery and degradation of others cling
to us like a garment we cannot shake off, a sense of others' woes for
which we have had to invent a new word? Lord Shaftesbury's legislation
does not date so very far back; and yet when his Bill for delivering
women and children from working in our mines was hanging in the balance,
and the loss of a single vote might wreck it--women, be it remembered,
who were working naked to the waist in the coal-mines, and little
children of eight or nine who were carrying half a sack of coals twelve
times a day the height of St. Paul's Cathedral--the Archbishop of
Canterbury and the Bishop of London left the House of Lords without
voting, as the subject did not interest them; while in the lower House
Bright and Gladstone both voted against the Bill, Gladstone being the
only member who, when the Bill was passed by a bare majority, endeavored
to delay its coming into operation! I ask, Would such a state of things
be possible in these days? Am I not right in saying that new moral
forces and sensibilities have been born within us which make such a
state of things not only impossible, but simply incomprehensible?
Why then should we despair? What! Has God built up His everlasting
marble of broken shells, and will He not build up his temple of the
future out of these broken efforts of ours? Has He made His pure and
splendid diamond out of mere soot, and shall we refuse to see in the
blackest and foulest moral problem the possibilities of the diamond, of
a higher life worked out in the process of its solution, reflecting His
light and His love? Has He made His precious sapphire of the mere mud
that we tread under our feet, and, when we insist on our little sisters'
being no longer trodden like mud "under foot of vicious men," may they
not in the course of their redemption bring an added hue of heaven to
our life, an added purity to home and family, and behold, instead of the
old mud, a sapphire throne, and above it the likeness as of a divine
man?[45]
But to those who still hang back with a feeling of almost angry
repulsion from the whole subject which makes them refuse even to face
the perils and temptations of their own boys, I would address no hard
words, remembering but too well the terrible struggle it cost me to make
this my life work. Only I would remind them of that greatest act in all
history, by which the world was redeemed. The Cross to us is so
associated with the adoration of the ages, so glorified by art, and
music, and lofty thought, that we have ceased to realize what it was in
actual fact such as no painter has ever dared to portray it; the Cross,
not elevated as in sacred pictures, but huddled up with the jeering
crowd; the Cross with its ribald blasphemies, its shameful nakedness,
its coarse mockeries, its brutal long-drawn torture. Do you think it
cost the women of that day nothing to bear all this on their tender
hearts? Yet what was it that made men draw nearer and nearer, till the
women who at first "stood afar off, beholding these things," we are
told, at last "stood by the cross of Jesus"; and, when all men forsook
Him and fled, placed themselves heart to heart with the Divine Love
bearing the sins of the world and casting them into the abysmal depths
of its own being, deeper even than the depths of man's sin? What was it
but their faithfulness to the Highest that they had known which made
them endure the Cross, despising the shame?
And now, when at the end of the ages He once again calls us women to
stand heart to heart with Him in a great redemptive purpose, shall we
hang back? Shall we not rather obey the Divine call, enduring the Cross,
despising the shame, and, like those women of old, winning for
ourselves, by faithfulness unto death, the joy of being made the
messengers of a higher and risen life to the world?
God grant that the power of the Holy Ghost may overshadow us and enable
us to make answer with her whom all generations have called blessed:
"Behold the hand-maiden of the Lord!"
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 42: Late Head-Master of Harrow; now Metropolitan of India.]
[Footnote 43: I would especially commend this modern order of knighthood
to the prayers and support of women. It is bravely fighting our battle
for us and doing the public work among men. As it attacks what is
especially the sin of the moneyed classes, it is unpopular, men
resenting its interference with what they call their private life, and
it is always in peril for want of funds. The White Cross league admits
women associates for intercessory prayer--and what mother will not be
thankful for that?--for any work where women's aid is needed, and for
raising funds for what is so emphatically our own cause. I would
earnestly suggest to women who have incomes of their own that they
should leave the White Cross a small legacy, so as to place it on a
firmer basis. I hope myself to leave the English branch £2000.]
[Footnote 44: From an article in the _Nineteenth Century_ on "Meddling
with Hindu Marriages."]
[Footnote 45: Ezek. i., 26.]
APPENDIX
In Mr. Edward Thring's address to the Church Congress at Carlisle in
1841, he said:
"Curiosity, ignorance, and lies form a very hot-bed of impurity. We pay
heavily for our civilized habits in false shame and the mystery in which
sex is wrapped.
"I confess that for curiosity I have no remedy to propose. Ignorance and
lies are on a different footing. I suppose everyone is acquainted with
some of the current lies about the impossibility of being pure. The only
answer to this is a flat denial from experience. I know it is possible,
and, when once attained, easy. The means, under God, in my own case, was
a letter from my father. A quiet, simple statement of the sinfulness of
the sin and a few of the plain texts from St. Paul saved me. A film fell
from my eyes at my father's letter. My first statement is that all
fathers ought to write such a letter to their sons. It is not difficult
if done in a common-sense way. Following out this plan at Uppingham in
the morning Bible lessons, I have always spoken as occasion arose with
perfect plainness on lust and its devil-worship, particularly noting its
deadly effect on human life and its early and dishonored graves.
Ignorance is deadly, because perfect ignorance in a boy is impossible. I
consider the half-ignorance so deadly that once a year, at the time of
confirmation, I speak openly to the whole school, divided into three
different sets. First I take the confirmees, then the communicants and
older boys, then the younger boys, on three following nights after
evening prayers. The first two sets I speak very plainly to, the last
only warn against all indecency in thought, word, or deed, whether alone
or with companions. Thus no boy who has been at school a whole year can
sin in ignorance, and a boy who despises this warning is justly turned
out of the school on conviction."
Finally, he dwelt upon the necessity of school life having joined
to it a home life. The purifying influence of a good woman and a
fuller recognition of woman's work and place in the world he looked
upon as that which promised most for lifting mankind into a higher
atmosphere of pure life.
THE END.
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