modern and classical civilization lies in the contrast between the
value attached by each to private morals. The virtue of the individual
was of old treated as altogether subordinate in importance to the
interests of the State. In our time, we have almost come to recognize
that states and churches--nay, society itself--exist for the sake of
building up individual souls to their perfection; and there is every
reason to expect that this sense of the supreme importance of morals
over every other human concern will rather increase than dwindle
through all time to come.
Now, it would certainly appear that this _Hebraism_, as Mr. Arnold
calls it, is rather characteristic of the higher sort of women.
The moment a woman rises above the passion for personal admiration
and the struggle for petty social ambition or sordid matrimonial
scheming, to which so large a number of unhappy ones are trained and
consigned from girlhood, on the principle of “keeping women in their
proper sphere,”--the moment, I say, that a woman has been lifted by
education or her natural force of character above all this frivolity
and baseness, we almost invariably find in her a degree of earnestness
about ethical and ethico-religious questions which is far more rarely
traceable among men. It is true that her exclusion from a great many
fields of masculine interest naturally centres her thoughts more
on such subjects, and that, when those exclusions are more or less
removed, we must expect to see more frequently women absorbed in the
same worldly interests as men, and perhaps some who now think night
and day of a ball will be equally eager about a bill in Parliament.
Still, I believe that, independently of circumstances, women have a
special tendency (as Renan avers of the Celtic race) to “long after the
infinite,” and to yearn to bring an element of sacredness and nobleness
into the transactions of daily life such as their moral aspect alone
affords. I believe that nine women out of ten (of the better sort, of
whom I have spoken) would, if they had the choice, oftener speak of
duty and religion than of any other themes.[35] If this be so, it would
follow that, as time goes on, instead of women falling behind in the
progress of humanity, that progress will constantly tend to bring women
more to the front as students and expounders of morality.
There is another aspect of this matter also, which fairly deserves
consideration. Many good Christians have remarked that, while they
would fain take Jesus Christ as their “Great Exemplar,” they find
nothing in his life indicating what his example would have been in
the very closest and most important of human relations of husband or
father. Surely there is no less reason for women to be conscious of a
lacune in their moral instructions, when they are received exclusively
either from mothers and governesses who may be utterly unfit for such
an office, and who often merely pass on traditional moral heresies, or
else from masculine pastors whose whole moral parallax is necessarily
different from that of a woman, and who practically know next to
nothing of the trials, temptations, and duties of her lot. We have had
of recent years in many of our churches, and notably in St. Paul’s
Cathedral, courses of sermons addressed by various clergymen to men
alone, from which women have been rigidly excluded. Would it be too
much to hope that some time or other, in some humble chapel (since
no one would dream of devoting the national religious edifices to
the exclusive use of women for a single hour), women may enjoy the
privilege of being especially addressed by pastors of their own sex,
who may talk to them at once with cultured minds and experienced hearts?
And, lastly, besides the Intellectual and the Moral classes of thoughts
to be offered from the pulpit, there is a third,--of which, alas! we
know far too little,--the Spiritual. The store of this latter class
of thoughts is probably extremely small even in minds of richest
experience. They seem rather to distil slowly in precious drops from
the wounds in the tree of life than to be capable of manufacture by the
help of culture and reflection. They are the thoughts which concern the
baseness, the loathsomeness, the misery of sin (felt and considered as
_Sin_, not as Error or Vice), the glory and beauty and joy of Holiness,
felt as _Holiness_, not as Prudence or Virtue. They teach the laws of
our spiritual existence; the hygienics of the soul; the “Way toward
the Blessed Life.” In some sense, sermons which contain thoughts like
these may be called Moral Discourses; for they touch the very springs
of our moral nature, and send us forth heart-smitten for the past,
heart-strengthened with resolutions for the future. They are the most
powerful moral levers which human agency ever applies to our souls. But
they are the reverse of didactic, ethical disquisitions, or expositions
of the detailed code of virtue. They lie in another region of feeling
and appeal to another class of our faculties than the ratiocinative.
We do not sit and judge them, but they come from above and judge us.
When they strike us most forcibly, we never feel the temptation (as we
are so often inclined to do at the best bits in the critical or the
moral discourse) to express our approbation by the familiar tokens of
public applause. On the contrary, it is our own breasts we are fain
to beat; while, if our lips move, it is to murmur the prayer of the
publican.
Will women preach sermons of this order and filled with thoughts like
these? It is impossible to foretell with certainty; yet here, if
anywhere, may we expect to find the special gifts of women brought
out at last from their hidden treasuries. It has been said of almost
every great spiritual teacher that there has been something feminine in
his nature, something more of tenderness and purity, more of insight
into and sympathy with others, than belongs to lesser men. In Jesus
Christ, the ideal characters of both sexes seem almost equally blended.
Of course there are other qualities besides the characteristically
feminine ones needed to form the highest kind of religious teacher;
but the sterner qualities are no more invariably deficient in women
than are the softer ones always lacking in men, and it seems the
reverse of improbable that women may arise uniting both in hitherto
almost unexampled degree. Let us remember that, after all, the one
great Force of the spiritual world--its correlated Gravitation, Light,
Electricity, Magnetism, and Vital Force, all in one--is pure Divine
LOVE. This alone, radiating from the Sun of Love in the heavens, moves
and vivifies the soul; and to it alone it responds as the flower to
the orb of day--we know not how. The human spirit which receives from
on high the largest influx of this divine light and warmth thereby
becomes a focus of reflected power and fervor for all those who can be
brought into spiritual contact with it. It is the “love of God shed
abroad” in the heart,--the love of that goodness which God is, and
for which man is made, whose germs even now the illumined eye of love
discerns deep-latent in every human soul,--in a word, the love of God
and love of man, in whose might all spiritual miracles are done, all
leprous souls cleansed, all demon passions cast out, all blind eyes
opened, all maimed and crippled faculties made whole. If we could but
find the most profoundly-loving, the most unselfishly, nobly, purely
loving of men or women now living upon earth, and set him or her in the
midst of us to be our teacher, our friend, our guide into the ways of
peace and blessedness, we should have gained a help better than all the
philosophers and theologians, the monks and the hermits, could ever
give. I will not take on myself to affirm that such most loving heart
beats in a woman’s breast. It may well be that there are men as tender
in feeling as any mother whose spirit ever yearned over her infant’s
cradle. But there is at least an equal chance of a woman’s supremacy,
and almost a certainty that, on a secondary level of loving-kindness
and unselfishness, we should find many more women than men. It is quite
impossible, I think, that this difference should not make itself felt,
and a new impulse be made to flow through all the channels of spiritual
life whenever the influence of women may be brought to bear directly
and largely on the religious feelings of the community.
Lastly, and chiefly. It is a truism to say that the character of our
religion depends on our idea of God; but who has taken note of this
familiar fact sufficiently to recognize that all the _traditional_
part of that solemn idea has come to us uniformly in a way deplorably
one-sided, and that side the least lovable? I do not overestimate
the importance of _any_ idea of God which comes to us through our
fellow-men. It seems to me that, from the first dawn of the religious
life, the child has a dim sense (apart from his teacher’s lessons)
of some beneficent and righteous Power around and within him; and
that when the Sun rises on any soul in the awful hour which saints
have likened to a new birth, there is obtained, even through all the
mists of earth, a direct vision of the ineffable glory, which evermore
causes the words of other mortals, and even the man’s own attempt to
render in language his sense of that great Love and Holiness, to seem
unreal and worse than inadequate. When _that_ stage is reached, it is
probably of little consequence what a man’s pastor may tell him about
God’s character. All he says is only like a book which describes a
person we ourselves have known or a place we have visited. Nobody can
make the man believe (at least so long as his own living faith and
open vision endure) that the Being whom he meets in the hour of prayer
is less than All-good, unutterably Holy, even though the dogmas he
accepts practically attribute to him a totally different character.
The only injury he can suffer is a negative one: he is denied the help
and sympathy which he needs, and which it is the proper office of his
minister to supply to him. But at an earlier stage, when all religious
experience is yet vague and dim, when faith must of necessity be
provisional and taken on trust at second hand,--at that period there
can be no question of the misfortune of receiving cold, hard, narrow
notions about God, instilled by teachers who themselves have little
love or no direct spiritual knowledge, and have chiefly borrowed their
ideas from the confessedly imperfect rendering, age after age, of
other men’s experience. How is a young soul ever to turn to God, when
God is represented to it as One from whom it would far more naturally
turn away? And let it be remembered that the attributes of God which
call out the spontaneous love and adoration of the heart are precisely
those whose meaning is most completely lost and evaporated in the dry
formularies of the intellect, and can never be truly conveyed except
by one whose own heart responds to them through all its depths. Power,
Wisdom, Justice, are divine characteristics, of which the meaning may
be indicated by any teacher with a clear head and command of language.
But I disbelieve that any one who is not himself full of love and
tenderness has ever, since the world began, yet transmitted to another
soul the truth that God is Love.
There is little to wonder at, after all, in the mournful fact that the
religion which as it rose from the heart of Christ was supremely the
religion of Divine Love became, as the centuries went by, colder and
harder and more cruel, till the irony was complete, and the doctrine
of the Mount of Galilee was illustrated by the fires of the Spanish
Inquisition. _Who_, we may ask, were the teachers of Christianity
during the intervening ages? Who were they through whose lips and
writings the lessons gathered from the lilies and the sparrows, and the
story of the Prodigal, were transmitted to each new-born generation?
They were _men_, exclusively men; nay, men who, in taking their office,
renounced those ties of natural affection through which the Author of
Nature has caused the human heart to grow tender, and to be taught the
practice of unselfishness. To fit themselves to convey to the hearts
of their brethren the gospel of the Fatherhood of God, they began by
renouncing the experience of human fatherhood for themselves. The
Apostolic Succession, of which the great Churches still boast, was
for fifteen centuries a school for the transmission of ideas about a
Divine Parent down a long chain of childless celibates. We Protestants
have corrected this mistake, and the men who tell to _us_ the story of
the Prodigal are at least able to speak out of the abundance of their
hearts when they say that, “like as a father pitieth his children,
so the Lord hath mercy on them that fear Him.” But is there not one
step even further to be taken? Is not the compassion of “a mother
for the son of her womb” a still profounder image of the Divine Love
than the father’s pity? Ought it not also to be brought home to our
comprehensions (if in any measure human words may so bring it) through
the lips of mothers and motherly-hearted women?
The loss out of our religion of all those ideas which may be classed
as the doctrine of the motherhood of God has been attended with evils
innumerable. The Church of Rome, in obedience to a vehement popular
instinct, has sought to make up for the defect by Mariolatry. The
orthodox Protestant Churches, by sternly adhering to their masculine
Trinity, have indeed preserved the awe and moral reverence which the
Divine Kingship and Fatherhood demand, and which the paganism of virgin
worship has obliterated. But how much have they not lost by excluding
those sentiments which can only be given to One in whom we recognize
not only justice, holiness, and beneficence, but also tenderness,
sympathy, love? The truth is we are so constituted that great benefits
received,--if we think of them as bestowed merely because it is right
and good to give them, and not from love for ourselves,--so far
from awakening in us spontaneous emotions of gratitude, have rather
an opposite tendency, and seem to lay on us an obligation to be
grateful, which is a sort of burden, and from which all minds save the
most generous have a proclivity to escape. To hundreds of us, large
donations from just and well-meaning but unaffectionate fathers have
failed to waken the smallest throb of genuine gratefulness; while some
mere trifle given by a loving mother--a flower from a well-remembered
rose-tree, a scrap of her needlework--has filled our eyes with tears.
In excluding, then, in a great degree from view that which I may
presume to call the maternal side of religion, the Churches, so far as
they have done it, have dropped the golden chain whereby human hearts
may be drawn, and have kept in their hands the iron one which can only
control the reason and the conscience. Is it possible to estimate the
amount of loss to religion which this signifies, or how many thousands
of souls might have been won by _love_ to a life of piety and holiness
who have refused to obey the bit and bridle of sterner motives, and
have wandered off and been lost in the wilderness of practical atheism?
If there be, then, as I humbly believe and trust, in the nature of
our great Parent above, certain characters of tenderness and sympathy
with His creatures which are more perfectly shadowed, more vividly
reflected, in the love of human mothers for their children than by
aught else on earth; if there be, in short, a real meaning in the old
lesson that God created woman as well as man in His own image,--the
image being only complete in the complete humanity,--then I think it
follows that there is urgent need that woman’s idea of God should have
its due place in all our teaching of religion. I think that there must
be truths in this direction which only a woman’s heart will conceive
and only a woman’s lips can teach,--truths, perchance, which have come
to her when baby-fingers have clung round her neck in the dark while
infant trust overcame infant terror, and she has asked herself was
there anything in heaven or earth which could make her cast down to
destruction, or even let slip from her clasp of care and guardianship,
the helpless little child thus lying in her arms,--a living parable of
all our race in the everlasting arms of God.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] It will be seen that I differ _toto caelo_ on this point from Mr.
Mahaffy in his interesting recent essay on the _Decay of Preaching_.
He seems to me only to recognize the _moral and intellectual_ forces
which move men, and these compared with the spiritual are only what
mechanical ones are to the electric.
[28] Ingoldsby’s rendering of this world-famous story, the favorite
theme of so many eminent painters, is probably no very exaggerated
reading of the general impression of the monastic mind respecting the
fair sex:--
“There are many devils which walk this world,
Devils great and devils small,
Devils short and devils tall;
Bold devils which go with their tails unfurled,
Sly devils which carry them quite upcurled;
* * * * *
But a laughing woman with two bright eyes
Is the worsest devil of all!”
[29] I know not on what authority the familiar jovial couplet has been
attributed to the great Reformer:--
“Wer liebt nicht Wein, Weib, und Gesang
Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang.”
The ascetic spirit had very far departed, at all events, from the
author who composed it.
[30] I. Cor. xiv., 26. If this graphic description had applied to a
_female_ assembly, should we have ever been allowed to forget the
circumstance?
[31] “The Hebrew Woman,” by Constance de Rothschild (Mrs. Cyril Flower).
[32] A sermon by this lady on “The Sacrament of Life,” preached and
printed at Melbourne, would amply justify, I think, to every reader the
above remark.
[33] In the case of the M.P., this would need to be a majority of
_men_, seeing that the whole female contingent of qualified voters will
only (if admitted) add about a fifth or sixth to the register.
[34] This at least is the impression left on me by the female speakers
(some twenty perhaps) whom I have chanced to hear. I never knew one
of them “hum” or “haw,” or stammer, or break down, even when (as in
one very remarkable case) the gentle and learned speaker had never
addressed an audience till the occasion, when she had already passed
middle life. Among the most remarkable phenomena of the present day,
I reckon the preaching of Mrs. Booth, the wife of the General of the
Salvation Army. The combination of fervent zeal with practical good
sense in her extempore discourses must be admired even by those who
differ most widely from her views.
[35] A curious illustration of this is to be found in a passage in the
first series of Mrs. Kemble’s charming autobiography published three
years ago. She describes the late Lady Byron as often expressing envy
of her (Mrs. Kemble’s) public readings, and her longing to have similar
crowds in sympathy with her own impressions. “I made her laugh,” says
Mrs. Kemble, “by telling her that more than once, when looking from
my reading-desk over the sea of faces uplifted toward me, a sudden
feeling had seized me that I must say something _from myself_ to all
those human beings whose attention I felt at that moment entirely at
my command, and between whom and myself a sense of sympathy thrilled
powerfully and strangely through my heart as I looked steadfastly at
them before opening my lips; but that on wondering afterwards what I
might, could, would, or should have said to them from myself, I never
could think of anything but two words--‘_Be good!_’” (Page 317.)
THE HOUSE ON THE SHORE OF ETERNITY.
AN ALLEGORY.
Two simple-minded men, who had dwelt all their lives in a country far
inland, at last undertook a long journey together. This happened many
ages ago, when there were no such things as printed books or village
schools, and when the people in isolated districts saw no travellers,
and knew nothing of the great world beyond the hills which closed their
horizon.
Wolfgang and Athelstane, so our pilgrims were called, walked on over
downs and heaths, and through the vast forests of oak which then
overspread the land, till at last, after a night’s toilsome march, they
came, in the early dawn, to a spot which seemed to them the strangest
they had ever visited. Walls of rock shut out any distant view; but
immediately before them on a gentle declivity there stood a structure,
much larger than the humble cottages which Wolfgang and Athelstane had
inhabited, and of a singularly different form. Instead of a pointed
roof of thatch or tiles, there was, on the top, a flat floor of boards;
while beneath, where there should have been a solid square foundation,
there was a long thin wedge, almost like a roof which had been reversed
and turned downward. Also, through the floor rose up two long, slender,
tree-like erections, with all the branches carefully smoothed away.
Crossbars were slung on these poles, and ropes connected them together;
while a great roll of coarse woven stuff, like sackcloth, lay folded
up beside them. At one end, and outside of the wooden structure, hung
a huge beam, standing, as it seemed, in some unaccountable relation
to the rest of the fabric, and connected with it by machinery passing
into the interior. All these singular things were slowly and carefully
noted by our two humble travellers, as they walked round the wooden
building in the morning twilight. No one was near who could afford them
an explanation of the use or purpose of what they saw; and their doubts
and wonder grew every moment.
“What can it mean?” said Wolfgang. “What did the builder--whoever he
can have been--intend by such a mansion as this?”
“It is clear enough,” answered Athelstane, thoughtfully, “that it is
the work of some very ingenious hands. How soundly and skilfully it is
all fitted together!”
“True,” replied his comrade; “and yet ought we to say it is well made
before we can tell for what purpose it is constructed? To me it seems
that our own old huts of wattled willow and turf were, after all, of a
better shape for a house to stand on the ground.”
“Do you think this is a house, _only_ a house?” said Athelstane,
suddenly looking up.
“Well, if it be not a house, what else can it be?” said Wolfgang. “Let
us try to look inside of it, and examine it more closely.”
The two men soon contrived to enter the edifice which so puzzled them;
and presently Wolfgang exclaimed triumphantly:--
“See! there can be no question more on the matter. This is only a
house. Here are seats and tables for men to sit at, and beds for them
to sleep in; and here is a fire-place and a great iron pot to cook
food. Now, you can have no hesitation. It is just a wooden house, and
rather stupidly planned.”
“I have no doubt,” said Athelstane, “that it is intended for a
habitation; but is it not inexplicable that a builder who can work so
cleverly should construct it so unsuitably for a common house? Why is
it not made to stand squarely and steadily on the ground? What is the
sense of these long soaring poles standing up through the middle, with
the coils of ropes and bales of sacking? And this? This is the most
mysterious thing of all,” said Athelstane, placing his hand on a wheel,
which instantly stirred the great beam at the back.
“They are strange certainly,” replied Wolfgang,--“very strange and
useless things, I should say, about a house which would be much more
comfortable and answer its purpose better without them. I cannot agree
with you that the builder was really a clever man, or knew what he
was about, else he would never have erected those poles or made that
senseless, upside-down roof, instead of a foundation; or, above all,
have constructed that totally unmeaning apparatus behind the whole
structure.”
“I differ from you,” said Athelstane, after some moments more of
reflection. “I think it is we who are not clever or ingenious, and who
cannot find out what the carpenter who made this building intends to
do with it. I do not believe that singular form beneath (so little fit
for a building only intended for a house), nor those poles and ropes
and vast sheets of woven stuff, nor yet that mysterious great beam,
were all added to a mere house for nothing,--for no purpose whatever.
I think, Wolfgang,” and Athelstane laid his hand on his friend’s arm
earnestly,--“I think what we are looking at is something _more than a
house_. I think _it is not intended to stand always where we see it_.”