But whatever may be the opportunities and capabilities of infantine
gymnastics, there is always one way in which fathers may indirectly,
but very powerfully, influence their children, and that is through the
mother. When her little children are around her, she needs above all
earthly things the strength, support, society, and sympathy of her
husband. It is wellnigh impossible to conceive the demand which a
little child makes upon its mother's vitality. In Nature's plan, I
believe, the supply is always equal to the demand. The new, fresh life
gives back through a thousand channels all the life it draws. But if
the mother is left alone, in such a solitude as is never found outside
of marriage, but often and often within it; if she is left to seek in
her baby her chief solace, unhappy is her fate. The little one
exhausts her physical strength, and the inattentive and
abstracted--alas! that one may not seldom say, the unkind and
overbearing husband fails to supply her with moral strength, and her
weary feet go on with ever-diminishing joy. All this is unnecessary.
All this is contrary to the Divine economy. Every child ought to be a
new spring of life, an El Dorado, fountain of immortal youth. Whether
it shall be or not lies, if you look at it from one point, wholly with
the husband, or if you look at it from another, wholly with the wife.
On the one hand, each is all-powerful. On the other, each is
powerless. But the husband has always the advantage of strength,
out-door activities, and continual commerce with the world, and
consequent variety. The wife, surrounded by her children, is in danger
of giving herself up to them entirely. She will incessantly dispense
her life without being careful to furnish herself for such demands by
opening her soul to new accessions. Here is where her husband should
stand by her continually to encourage and stimulate. If she is not
strong enough to go out into the world, let him bring the world home
to her. He should by all means see to it that her heart and soul do
not contract. Every child, every added experience, should have the
effect of expanding her horizon, deepening and enlarging her
sympathies, and enabling her to gather the whole earth into her
motherly love. Her little world ought to be a type of the great world.
The wisdom which she gathers in the one, she ought to turn to the good
of the other,--a good that will surely come back again in other shapes
to her family world. So, every family should be both a missionary
centre and the medium through which, in never-ending flow, all good
and gracious influences shall pour. Every family should rise and fall
with the pulse of humanity, and not be a mere knob of organic matter,
without dependencies or connections. But the father should see to
this. He should gently lure the mother out of her nursery into such
broad fresh air as she needs for healthy growth. What that shall be is
a question of character and culture. A lyceum lecture, a
sewing-society, an evening party, a concert, a county fair, may be
elevation, amusement, improvement to her. Or he may do her most good
by helping her to be interested in reading, either in the current or
in classic literature. Or, best of all, he may charm her with his own
companionship, beguile her with pleasant drives, or walks and talks,
keeping her heart open on the husband side, and so continually alive,
while maintaining also the oneness which marriage in theory creates.
It is this respect in which husbands are perhaps most generally
deficient. They do not talk with their wives. If a neighbor is
married, they tell of it. If a battle is fought, or a village burnt
down, they communicate the fact; but for any interchange of thought or
sentiment or emotion, for any conversation that is invigorating,
inspiring, that causes a thrill or leaves a glow, how often does such
a thing occur between husband and wife? What intellectual meeting is
there,--what shock of electricities? When a definite domestic question
is to be decided, the wife's judgment may be sought, and that is
better than a solitary stumbling on, regardless of her views or
feelings; but this sort of bread-and-butter discussion of ways and
means is not the gentle, animated play of conversation, not that
pleasant sparkle which enlivens the hours, that trustful confidence
which lightens the heart, that wielding of weapons which strengthens
the arm, that sweet, instinctive half unveiling which increases
respect and deepens love and fills the heart with inexpressible
tenderness. Yet there is nobody in the world with whom it is so
important for a man to be intimately acquainted as his own wife, while
such intimate acquaintance is the exception rather than the rule. Ever
one sees them going on each in his own path, each with his own inner
world of opinions and hopes and memories, one in name, miserably two
in all else.
Men often have too much confidence in their measuring-lines. They
fancy they have fathomed a soul's depths when they have but sounded
its shallows. They think they have circumnavigated the globe when they
have only paddled in a cove. They trim their sails for other seas,
leaving the priceless gems of their own undiscovered. To many a man no
voyage of exploration would bring such rich returns as a persevering
and affectionate search into the resources of the heart which he calls
his own. Many and many a man would be amazed at learning that in the
tame household drudge, in the meek, timid, apologetic recipient of his
caprices, in the worn and fretful invalid, in the commonplace, insipid
domestic weakling he scorns an angel unawares. Many a wife is wearied
and neglected into moral shabbiness, who, rightly entreated, would
have walked sister and wife of the gods. Human nature in certain
directions is as infinite as the Divine nature, and when a man turns
away from his wife, under the impression that he has exhausted her
capabilities, and must seek elsewhere the sympathy and companionship
he craves or go without it altogether, let him reflect that the
chances are at least even that he has but exhausted himself, and that
the soil which seems to him fallow might in other hands or with a
wiser culture yield most plenteous harvests.
There is another point which should be kept in solemn consideration.
The deportment of children to their parents is very largely influenced
by the deportment of parents to each other. It is of small service
that a child be taught to repeat the formula, "Honor thy father and
thy mother," if, by his bearing, the father continually dishonors the
mother. The Monday courtesy has more effect than the Sunday
commandment. Every conjugal impoliteness is a lesson in filial
disrespect. If a son sees that his father is regardless of his
mother's taste, does not respect her opinions, or heed her
sensitiveness or care for her happiness; or if, on the other hand, he
sees that she is held in ever-watchful love, he will be very likely to
follow in the same path. There are of course exceptions. A gross and
brutal abuse may work an opposite effect by the law of contrarieties,
but in ordinary cases this is the ordinary course of events. In common
Christian families a boy will appraise his mother at his father's
valuation. If the husband takes the liberty of speaking to her
sharply, the son when irritated will not think it worth while to
repress his inclination to do the same. If the husband is not careful
to pay her outward respect, let it not be supposed that his son will
set him the example. But if the husband cherishes her with delight, if
his behavior always assumes that the best is to be reserved for her,
the best will be her incense from the whole family, and no son will
any more allow himself to indulge any evil propensity in her presence
than he would pluck out his right eye. And in the delicacy, the
refinement, the gentleness and warmth and consecration of her presence
all this courtesy and consideration will come back to them a
hundred-fold in constant dews of blessing.
As with habits so with principles. The mother's influence is strong,
but the stories told of its strength are often hurtful in their
tendency. It is not the strength of the mother's, but of the father's
influence, that needs to be held up to prominence. By Divine
sufferance, mothers can do much to abrogate the evil consequences of
paternal misdoing,--but paternal misdoing is not for that any the less
evil. If the husband laughs at his wife's temperance notions, and
thinks wine-sipping to be elegant and harmless, his boy will sip wine
elegantly and fancy his mother old-fashioned; and with his father's
appetite, but without his father's strength, and with more than his
father's temptations,--in the great city, homeless, bewildered, and
dazzled,--he will rush on to a bitter end. If the husband thinks
religion a thing beautiful and becoming to woman, but unnecessary to
manly character, his son will not long go to church and to Sunday
school when he feels in his veins the thrill of approaching manhood. I
know a community where not a man can be found to superintend the Sabbath
school, and a woman, noble and whole-souled, takes its charge upon
herself. The fathers do not disbelieve in Sunday schools, or they
would not suffer their wives and children to go. They do not believe in
them, or they would go themselves. They are simply indifferent,--and
indifferent in a matter so important, that indifference is guilt. Will
the young men of that community be likely to fear God and keep his
commandments? Will they be likely to acknowledge the claims of a
religion which their fathers despise? If they grow up hardened,
selfish, headstrong, unfortified against assault, will it be the fault
of the mothers who are struggling against wind and tide, or of the
fathers who are lazily lounging at oar and rudder?
People in general are not half married. Half? If one would
mathematically approximate the truth, he must multiply his denominator
far beyond reach of the digits; and, what is still worse the fraction
that is married is, in a vast majority of cases, not only the least,
but the lowest. It is not the intellect, the spirit, the immortality,
that is married, but that alone which is of the earth, earthy.
Xenophon, in his _Memorabilia Socratis_, presents to us Ischomacus, an
Athenian of great riches and reputation, repairing to Socrates for
help in extricating him from domestic entanglements. In laying the
case before the philosopher, Ischomacus informs him that he told his
wife that his main object in marrying her was to have a person in
whose discretion he could confide, who would take proper care of his
servants, and expend his money with economy,--which was certainly very
frank.
But that was twenty-three hundred years ago, and people have grown
less material and more spiritual since then. No man now would hold out
to a woman such inducement to marriage. Certainly not. Men now wait
till the Rubicon is passed, and then lay down their pleasant little
programmes in the newspapers,--general principles for private
consumption. The popular voice, speaking in your everywhere
circulating newspaper, says: "A man gets a wife to look after his
affairs, and to assist him in his journey through life; to educate and
prepare their children for a proper station in life, and not to
dissipate his property. The husband's interest should be the wife's
care, and her greatest ambition to carry her no farther than his
welfare or happiness, together with that of her children. This should
be her sole aim, and the theatre of her exploits in the bosom of her
family, where she may do as much toward making a fortune as he can in
the counting-room or the workshop."
Is this very much more commanding than the attitude of Ischomacus?
Does Anno Domini loom with immeasurable grandeur above Anno Mundi?
Ischomacus wanted his wife to manage his fortune. Young America wants
his to help make one. Is it a very great stride in advance,
considering we have been twenty-three centuries about it? This extract
I take from a religious newspaper, and it is pagan to the heart's
core; yes, and in these matters the Church is as pagan as the World.
Because a man is folded in the Church, one has no more expectation of
finding in him spiritual views concerning marriage than if he belonged
to the World. Unmitigated selfishness, worldliness, greed, and
evil-seeking are the roots and fruits of such a "religious" paragraph.
Church and World are both gone aside and altogether become filthy. The
holy sacrament is profaned alike by churchman and worldling. It is
tossed on the spear-point of levity, it is clutched under the
muck-rake of materialism, it is degraded and defiled till its pristine
purity is wellnigh lost, and only a marred and defaced image rears its
foul features from the mire. That it does not always cause disgust, is
because the goddess is so chiefly hidden that women do not recognize
the lineaments of the demon which has usurped her place. Miasma has
polluted the atmosphere so long that people do not know the feeling of
untainted air. O, it is good to speak your mind, be it only once in a
lifetime! Now I wish I had walked softly all my days, that, with all
the force of a rare indignation, I might just this once crush down
that hateful, that debasing, that vile and leprous thing which flaunts
the name of marriage, but does not even put on the white garments of
its sanctity to hide its own shame. Leer and laugh, coarse jest,
advice, insinuation, interpretation, and conjecture beslime the
surface of our social life and work abomination. Nature and
unconsciousness become impossible, and one is swallowed up in stagnant
depths, or borne above them only with an inward, raging tempest of
irrepressible loathing. A blessing rest upon this pen-point that
stamps black and heavy into receptive paper the wrath which it is not
lawful otherwise to express. Sentiments the most repulsive, the most
insulting to womanhood and to a woman, may be coolly, carelessly,
unconsciously tossed at you by and in society, and you must smile and
parry with equal nonchalance. Thank Heaven for Gutenberg and Dr.
Faustus, that whatsoever has been spoken in darkness may be heard to
its shame in the light, and that which has been spoken in the ear may
be proclaimed upon the house-tops with the detestation it deserves!