XIV.

Doubtless there are many men who will say: To what purpose is all

this? What new development has arisen to necessitate a new outcry?

The world is getting on very well. People marry and are given in

marriage; buy, sell, and get gain. There is a good deal of wickedness

and suffering, but less of both than formerly, and both are evidently

diminishing. Earth is not heaven, and in the world we shall always

have tribulation, men and women both, but neither men nor women make

any particular complaint, and on the whole it may reasonably be

inferred that they are getting on comfortably. Pray let well enough

alone.

But your well enough cannot be let alone, because it is not well

enough. Nothing is well enough so long as it can be bettered. The

world is not getting on comfortably, however comfortable you may be.

Mounted in your car of Juggernaut, you may find the prospect pleasing,

the motion exhilarating, and the journey agreeable, but your _Io

triumphe_ has but a discordant twang to those whom you are so

pleasantly crushing under your chariot-wheels. Your vision is not

trustworthy. Through I know not what process a judicial blindness

seems to come upon people, so that those ways seem good whose end is

death. True, the world is advancing, but with a motion which, compared

with that which it might attain, is retrogression. Whose fiat has

decreed, "Thus fast shalt thou go, and no faster"? Why is it that we

only creep, when we might run and not be weary, might mount up with

wings as eagles? Why do we dwell, with toil and tears, in the Valley

of the Shadow of Death, when the voice from heaven centuries ago bade

us come up higher? We have for our inheritance the elements of all

things good and great and to be desired; but we lack the clear vision

and the cunning hand to construct from them the Paradise that every

family might be, in spite of the sin that despoiled the first; so we

continue to dwell without Paradise, and very far off. Men and women

are at variance with themselves and with one another. Power and

passion run to waste. Positions are inverted, relations confused, and

light obscured. The sanctuary of the Lord is built up with untempered

mortar, and jewels of gold are degraded to a swine's snout.

Underneath all wars and convulsions, underneath all forms of

government and all social institutions, it seems to me that the

relations between man and woman are the granite formation upon which

the whole world rests. Society will be elevated only just so fast and

so far as these relations become what God intended them to be.

Monarchies, republics, democracies, may have their benefits and their

partisans, but the family is the foundation of country. I said "it

seems to me" so. I have been charged with being sometimes too positive

in my opinions. It may have been a youthful fault, but I long since

corrected it. I should now suggest rather than affirm the equality

between the angles of a triangle and two right angles. I am open to

conviction on the subject of the multiplication-table; but on this

point my feet are fixed, and, as my Puritan ancestors were wont to

sing, somewhat nasally perhaps, but with hand on sword,--

"Let mountains from their seats be hurled

Down to the deep, and buried there,

Convulsions shake the solid world,

My faith shall never yield to fear."

All other influences are fitful and fragmentary: the home influence

alone is steady and sufficient, and the home influence depends upon

the relations between father and mother. Unless there is on both sides

respect first, and then love, such love as brings an all-embracing

sympathy, and so an outer and inner harmony,--harmony between life and

its laws and harmony between heart and heart,--the child's head will

be pillowed upon discord, his cradle will be rocked by restlessness,

and his character can hardly fail to be unsymmetrical. We have all

seen the wickedness of man, that it is great in the earth; but why

should it not be, when he is conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity;

when his plastic soul is moulded amid jarring elements, and the voices

that fall upon his infant ear--voices that should be modulated only to

tenderness and love, and all the sweet and endearing qualities--are

sharpened by coldness, embittered by disappointment, shrill through

unremitting toil and rough with sordid ambitions? I only wonder that

children bred up in such uncongenial homes come to be so much men and

women as they are. No outbreak of treachery or turpitude astonishes

me, when I remember the discordant circumstances into the midst of

which the baby-soul was born. The only astonishment is, that every

soul tends so strongly towards its original type as to have even an

outer seeming of virtue. I wonder that, when the twig is so ruthlessly

and persistently bent, the tree should reach up ever so crookedly

towards heaven. Kind Nature takes her poor warped little ones, and

with gentle, imperceptible hand touches them to a grace and softness

which we have no right to expect, but to never that divine grace, that

ineffable sweetness, of which the human soul is capable, and to which

in its highest moods it ever yearns. O, if this one truth could be

imprinted upon this age,--the one truth that the regeneration of the

world is to come through love,--what hope could one not see for the

future! God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, and

henceforth there is no more offering for sin. It only remains for us

to enter into the holiest by this new and living way which he hath

consecrated for us. The offering of Divine love is complete. Let human

love come in to do its part, and the human soul shall be sanctified

from its birth. When clamor and wrath and evil-speaking and

evil-feeling are banished from the household hearth, murder and

plunder and lust will fly from the public ways. When the child is the

child of mutual love and trust and reverence and wisdom, he will never

belie his parentage.

We give to the dead their honors,--meet homage for the dust that

shrined a soul. All passion is hushed, all pettiness vanishes in the

presence of the dread mystery. But there is a mystery more dread, a

mystery to which death is but as the sunshine for clearness,--the only

sunshine which lights up its hidden labyrinths. It is the inexplicable

secret of life. Fear not before the power which kills the body, but is

not able to kill the soul. Stand in awe before that Power which can

evoke both soul and body from nothingness into everlasting life. Death

does but mark the accomplishment of one stage in a journey, with whose

inception we had nothing to do. It is but a necessary change of

carriage at some relay-house,--an involuntary and inevitable event in

which we are but interested spectators or passive participants. But

whether the Spirit shall set out on its journey at all, and what shall

be the manner of its going, what its sustenance by the way, and what

the light upon its path,--these are matters for concern; for these

involve the weightiest responsibilities which man can bear. To fashion

an infinite soul and send it forth upon an infinite career,--infinite

susceptibilities laid open to the touch of infinite sorrow,--oh! to

him who has ever faced the facts of being,--not death, not death, but

this irrevocable gift of life, is the one solemnity, the awful

sacrament!

You will say that you believe all this now, but you do not believe it.

You agree to it in a certain sentimental Pickwickian sense, but you do

not hold it as a living truth. You will assent to all that is said of

the importance of the family, and then go straightway and give your

chief time, thought, ingenuity, to your farms and your merchandise.

What men really believe in is making money, not making true men and

women. They believe that the greatness of a nation consists in its much

land and gold and machinery and ability to browbeat another nation,

not in the incorruptibility of its citizens. Wealth and fame, purple

and fine linen and sumptuous fare, brute force of intellect, position,

and power, one or another or all forms of self-indulgence,--these, not

purity, love, content, aspiration, and hearty good-will, they take to

constitute blessedness. What a man gives his life to, what he will

attend to with his own eyes and mind, and will not trust to any other

person, that he believes in. Any amount of fulsome adulation may be

poured out upon the womanly in nature, but one particle of true

reverence, one single award of rightful freedom, is worth it all.

Surely, if you could but see how the land is as the garden of Eden

before you, and around you a desolate wilderness, you would suffer

yourselves to be charmed into its ways of pleasantness and its paths

of peace. You do not know the beautiful capacities which this earth,

this very sin-stained, death-struck earth, bears in its redeemed

bosom. Where sin abounds to sorrow, grace may much more abound to

peace. Through the wonder of the Divine redemption there is possible

for us a new heaven and a new earth, wherein righteousness shall

dwell, and always and everywhere righteousness and peace kiss each

other. You sing the praises of woman, but you do not begin to dream of

the loveliness, the blessedness, the beneficence of which she is

capable. You extol her in song and story, but with your life you will

not suffer women to be womanly. You are so evil, and you decree so

much evil, that, alas! a woman wakes to conscious life, and is not

free to follow the bent of her nature; she must expend all her

energies in clearing a breathing-space. O, you do a fearful wrong in

this, and you endure a fearful wrong. For do you think the work is for

woman alone? Do you think there is any such thing as a "woman

question" that is not also a man question? Do you not know, that

"Laws of changeless justice bind

Oppressor with oppressed,

And, close as sin and suffering joined,

We march to fate abreast"?

The first shock of penalty for transgression falls upon woman, but

sure and swift as the lightning it passes on to man. Every measure

that keeps woman down keeps man down. Every jot taken from woman's joy

is so much taken from man. All his wrong-thinking and wrong-doing that

bears so heavily upon her bears down upon himself with equal weight.

Action and reaction are not only inevitable, but constant. Every small

or great improvement in woman's condition elevates society, and

society is only men and women. If men persist in alternate or in

combined scorn and flattery, and will not do justly, the sorrow as

well as the shame is theirs, and both are instantaneous.

We are told of the Persian bird Juftak, which has only one wing. On

the wingless side the male has a hook and the female a ring, and when

fastened together, and only when fastened together, can they fly. The

human race is that Persian, bird, the Juftak. When man and woman

unite, they may soar skyward, scorners of the ground, but so long as

man refuses God's help proffered in woman, he and she must alike grub

on the earth. If he will have her minister only to the wants of his

lower nature, his higher nature as well as hers shall be forever

pinioned.

You may possibly suspect that I have sometimes insinuated a greater

moral obliquity on the part of man than on that of woman; and, indeed,

I believe you are right. But the greater obliquity which I attribute

to him is the result of his training, not an attribute of his nature.

I once held the contrary opinion, but it is not tenable. Man is made

in the image of God, and one part of God cannot be better than

another. If men were not capable of being nobler than their ordinary

life exhibits them, I should think this war an especial providence of

God in other respects than are usually mentioned. But look at the

developments which this very war has made. Is fortitude in pain, as

many have asserted, a womanly attribute? But what fortitude under pain

has been shown by our soldiers on the battle-field and in hospital!

Torn with ghastly wounds, tortured with thirst, weak from loss of

blood and lack of food, untended and unconsoled; or wasting away in

the crowded hospital week after week and month after month, longing

for home while dying for country; or scarred, maimed, and disabled for

life; yet uttering no word of complaint, breathing no murmur of

impatience, making a sport of pain, grateful for every word and touch

and look and thought of tenderness, when a nation's tenderness is

their just due, and glad all through that they have been able to fight

for the beloved land,--is fortitude indeed only a womanly virtue? Or

is it that gentleness and self-sacrifice are pure womanly, as is so

often maintained? Look through the same battle-fields and hospitals;

see men waiting upon men with the indescribable gentleness of

compassion and pure sympathy; see them risking life to save a wounded

comrade; see them passing day and night from cot to cot, to bathe the

fevered brow, to moisten the parched lip, to soothe the restless mind,

to receive the last message of love, and speed the parting soul. See

the wounded man bidding the surgeon pass him by to heal the sorer

hurts of his neighbor, or putting the canteen from his own lips to the

paler lips beside him, till you shall take every soldier to be a

Sidney. Rough men they may be or polished, rudely or delicately

nurtured, trained to every accomplishment or only born into the world,

but everywhere you shall look on such high heroic gentleness and

thoughtfulness and patience and self-abnegation as make the courage of

onset seem in comparison but a low, brute virtue. O blood-red blossoms

of war, with your heart of fire, deeper than glow and crimson you

unfold the white lilies of Christ!

Who shall show us any good that cannot be predicated of the nature

which, stunted and twisted from the beginning, can yet bring forth

such heavenly fruit? If God can work in man so to will and to do, is

it for woman to stand aside and say, "I am holier than thou"?

But though the exigencies of war make more obvious the fine

possibilities of men, it does not need a continent in deadly strife to

indicate their existence. There are sacred hours in every life when

that which is of the earth is held in abeyance and celestial

influences reign. No man, perhaps, has ever lived who has not had his

better moments,--moments when the spirit of God moved upon the turbid

waters of his soul and brought light out of darkness and beauty from

chaos: silent moments it may be, and solitary, or hallowed with a

companionship dearer even than solitude; moments when helplessness,

loveliness, innocence, or suffering thrilled him to the depths with

pity and tenderness, with indignation or with adoration. Have you

never seen the sweetest ties existing between father and daughter, or

brother and younger sister, when the wife has been removed by death,

or, through some fatal fault, is no mother to her child? What love,

what devotion, what watchful care, what sympathy, what strength of

attachment! The little unmothered daughter calls out all the

motherhood in the great, brawny man, and they walk hand in hand, blest

with a great content. "'Tis the old sweet mythos,"--the infant

nourished at the father's breast.

Every-day occurrences reveal in men traits of disinterestedness,

consideration, all Christian virtues and graces. My heart misgives me

when I think of it all,--their loving-kindness, their forbearance,

their unstinted service, their integrity; and of the not sufficiently

unfrequent instances in which women, by fretfulness, folly, or

selfishness, irritate and alienate the noble heart which they ought to

prize above rubies. I have not hitherto made a single irrelevant

remark, and I will therefore indulge in the luxury of one now. It is

this: Considering how few good husbands there are in the world, and

how many good women there are who would have been to them a crown of

glory and a royal diadem, had the coronation but been effected, but

who, instead, are losing all their pure gems down the dark, unfathomed

caves of some bad man's heart,--considering this, I account that woman

to whom has been allotted a good husband, and who can do no better

than spoil him and his happiness by her own misbehavior, guilty, if

not of the unpardonable sin, at least of the unpardonable stupidity.

If it were relevant, I could easily make out a long list of charges

against women, and of excellences to be set down to the credit of men.

But women have been stoned to death, or at least to coma, with charges

already; and when you would extricate a wagon from a slough, you put

your shoulder first and heaviest to the wheel that is deepest in the

mud,--especially if the other wheel would hardly be in at all, unless

this one had pulled it in! I can understand and have great

consideration towards those men who, gentle, faithful, and true

themselves, possibly disheartened by long companionship with a

capricious, tyrannical woman, should fail to acquiesce with any

heartiness in the truth of the views which I have advanced. Their

experience is of long-suffering men and long-afflicting women, and

they can hardly be expected to entertain with enthusiasm a statement

which has perhaps no bearing upon their position. Still, when facts

meet facts, the argument is always on the side of the heaviest

battalions. It is the rule that generalizes, exceptions only modify.

There is another circumstance which makes strongly against any

assertion of man's necessary moral inferiority to woman. The manly

ideal is often one to which no woman takes exception. In poetry and

romance, men, as well as women, paint heroes; and I hold that no one

can project from his imagination a better character than he is himself

capable of attaining. He can be all that he can portray. The stream

through his pen can rise no higher than the fountain in his heart, and

out of the heart are the issues of life which he may keep as pure and

clear as poesy. It was no woman's hand which limned the grand, sad

face of that "good king," who

"Was first of all the kings who drew

The knighthood-errant of this realm and all

The realms together under me, their Head,

In that fair order of my Table Round,

A glorious company, the flower of men,

To serve as model for the mighty world,

And be the fair beginning of a time.

I made them lay their hands in mine and swear

To reverence the King, as if he were

Their conscience, and their conscience as their King,

To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,

To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,

To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,

To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,

To love one maiden only, cleave to her,

And worship her by years of noble deeds,

Until they won her; for indeed I knew

Of no more subtle master under heaven

Than is the maiden passion for a maid,

Not only to keep down the base in man,

But teach high thought, and amiable words

And courtliness, and the desire of fame,

And love of truth, and all that makes a man."

Another fact must also be allowed. Individual men are often better

than their principles. Men who will, in cold blood, avow sentiments

really atrocious, will, in the presence of a commanding female

influence, straighten up to its requirements and carry themselves

tolerably well; but with their lips they will all the while deny the

power which their lives obey. Many a man who rails at strong-minded

women, female education, and petticoat government, who professes to

believe only in stocking-mending, love, and cookery, will be utterly,

though unconsciously, plastic to the hand of a truly strong-minded,

educated, and controlling woman. He does not know it; power in its

highest action works ever imperceptibly. Nevertheless, it is there,

and he follows it. His wrong opinions help to strengthen the citadel

of evil, but himself is less bad than he seems. This ought to be

remembered when inquisition is made.

It would be easy to multiply evidence, but it is not necessary. Enough

has been produced to show that men have evinced the highest not only

of those qualities which belong to their own sex, but those which are

usually considered the prerogative of the other. And what men have

done man may do. Life can be as lovely as its best moods. _In vino

veritas_, said Roman philosophy, and builded better than it knew. In

the wine of love is the truth of life. As pure, as thoughtful, as

disinterested, as helpful, as manly as is the lover can the husband

be. What the poet sings, that the man should live. A race that has

attained a temporary exaltation can attain a permanent exaltation. If

one man has bent to the stern decree of duty, knowing

"All

Life needs for life is possible to will,"

all men can compass self-control. I am filled with indignation when I

see the low standard accepted for man's due measurement. Well may he

exclaim, in sad, despairing reproach,--

"Men have burnt my house,

Maligned my motives,--but not one, I swear,

Has wronged my soul as this Aurora has,"

or this Romney or Sir Blaise, who forbids me access to the holy place,

denies me power to lead a saintly life. Why, it is because men can be

good that we reproach them. It is because we do see in them hints of

dormant excellences that we consider it worth while to keep them in a

state of agitation. If they must be as bad as their badnesses, there

is only one verdict: He is joined to idols; let him alone. But,

beloved, I am persuaded better things of you, and things that

accompany salvation, though I thus speak. What has been is of no fatal

import. What has been only shows the track of error; now we may follow

the footsteps of truth. The old world is a world masculinized; a world

of rugged, brawny, male muscularity, but slightly and partially

softened by feminine touch. Man was satisfied that woman in the

beginning should be taken out of him, and he has ever since been

trying to grope his way alone,--with what success ages of blunder and

blood bear terrible witness. Now, seeing that his _defeminization_ has

failed, let him compass the spiritual restoration of her who was

physically separated from him, that the twain may become one perfect

being, and reassume supreme dominion. The power lies ready to his

hand. Eve was never wholly torn away. Deep within every heart lies the

slumbering Princess still. A hundred years and many another hundred

have gone by, and round her palace-wall, round her star-broidered

coverlet, her gold-fringed pillow, and her jet-black hair, the hedge

has woven its ivies and woodbine, thorns and mistletoes. Burr and

brake and brier, close-matted, seem to refuse approach, and even to

deny existence, but ever and anon above their surly barricade gleams

in some evening sun the topmost palace spires, and we know that the

fated Fairy Prince shall come, and, guided by the magic music in his

heart, shall find that quiet chamber; reverently, on bended knee,

shall touch the tranced lips, and--lo! thought and time are born

again, and it is a new world which was the old.

Men, notwithstanding their high privilege, remain in their low

estate,--partly because they are not enlightened out of it. They do

evil, not knowing what they do. Like all despots, they have dealt more

in adulation than in truth. They have heard from women the voice of

flattery, the cry of entreaty, the wail of helpless pain, the impotent

watchword of insurrection; but they have had small opportunity to

benefit by the careful analysis of character, the accurate delineation

and just rebuke of faults, and the calm, judicious, affectionate

counsel which comes from a wise and faithful friend--like me! Women

may stand before them, sweet, trusting creatures, "just as high as

their hearts," to be schooled into devotion and amiable submission.

They may float demi-goddesses in some incomprehensible ether above the

clouds, and receive incense and adoration. But for the ministering

angel to turn into an accusing angel, for the lectured to rise and lay

down the law to lecturers, is a thing which was never dreamt of in

Horatio's philosophy.

"A man

May call a white-browed girl Dian,

But likes not to be turned upon

And nicknamed young Endymion."

Nor, indeed, is it any more grateful to Dian than to Endymion. To

confront man on his throne with the stern, dispassionate charge, "Thou

art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art, that judgest; for wherein

thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; and thinkest thou this,

O man, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God?" seems to woman so

formidable a thing, that very few have had the courage to attempt it.

Many are so overborne with toil, disappointment, and faintness, that

they have no heart for it. It is easier to suffer than to attempt

remedy. They feel, in the lowest depths of their consciousness,

"What all their weeping will not let them say,

And yet what women cannot say at all

But weeping bitterly."

But they remain silent, and the case goes by default. There is,

besides, a dread of personal consequences. Popular judgment is very

much given to attributing general statements to private experience. If

a woman is married, her adverse opinions are likely to be charged with

implying conjugal discontent. If she is not married, they spring from

failure and envy, and, shrinking from such opprobrium, the few women

who see talk the matter over among themselves, and that is the end of

it. There is also a natural reluctance to suggest that which men

should do or be spontaneously, and there is a deeper reluctance,

instinctive, indefinite, inexplicable.

The result is, that men go on in sin, seemingly unconscious that it is

sin. They have been pursuing one course all their life, meeting

obstacles, enduring fatigue, losing patience, but incapable of

perceiving that they are in the wrong path until the fact is pointed

out to them. They do not even understand the nomenclature of the

science of right living. Speak of cherishing a departed friend, and

they will descant on the absurdity of going about moaning and weeping

all your days. They attach no meaning to life-long tenderness but

life-long namby-pambyism, something excusable in youth and "courting,"

but savoring strongly of weakness of character after the honeymoon has

waned. Put before them the general allegation of selfishness,

indifference, cruelty, and they will deny it with vehemence. Of

course. Without such denial they could have no excuse. Moral ignorance

alone saves them from utter condemnation. If they sinned

wittingly,--if they said, "Yes, I am cold and hard and hateful to my

wife, neglectful of my children, I give grudgingly money barely

sufficient for the necessities of life, or I provide for my wife every

luxury, but have no sympathy or companionship for her,"--if men said

or could say this, even to themselves, they would be--not men, but

demons. They are not demons, but men, capable of generosity, devotion,

and self-sacrifice. If they knew that they were cruel, outrageous,

intolerable in their most intimate relations, they would at once cease

to be so, and begin to become everything that could be desired. More

than this, I have so great faith in the noble possibilities of men, I

believe they have so strong an inward bias towards holiness, that they

will welcome the friendly hand which sets their iniquities before

them. They will hear the sad story with amazement, and say one to

another: "Who can understand his errors? A brutish man knoweth not;

neither doth a fool understand this. We have sinned with our fathers,

we have committed iniquity, we have done wickedly. So foolish was I

and ignorant; I was as a beast. But now I will behave myself wisely in

a perfect way. I will walk within my house with a perfect heart." And,

when men shall have grown good, there will be no further complaint of

women. To Lavater's list of impossible good women, Blake, the "mad

painter," appends, "Let the men do their duty, and the women will be

such wonders: the female life lives from the life of the male." There

are exceptions, but in the mass women are not independent of received

opinions, nor strong enough to front prejudice and mould society, or

where they cannot mould it, to guide their own lives in its very

spite. Therefore opinion needs to be right, prejudice removed, and

society renovated; and men must do it. Women are generally said to

make society. It is not so. Men make women, and men and women together

make society. Men are the rocky stratum, women the soil which covers

it. Men determine the outline, the level, the general character; women

give the curves, the bloom, the grace. Rear your hills and lay your

valleys, and the land shall speedily flow with milk and honey; but if

you will upheave mountains and spread deserts, you may expect scant

herbage on the one and but scattered oases on the other.

I cannot, of course, pronounce that it is absolutely impossible for

woman to attain a truer life without man's co-operation. The Most High

ruleth in the kingdom of men and giveth it to whomsoever he will. What

revolution may await us in the future no one knows. Fired by what

impulse woman may throw off the stupor which has enthralled her so

long, array herself in her beautiful garments and mount upward to the

heavenly heights, whose air alone her spirit pants to breathe, whose

paths alone her feet are framed to tread, I do not know. Yet blessed

as is that day, come when and how it will, I would it were ushered in

by a peaceful dawn. Better that woman should take her place alone,

moved by an ineffable disdain, than that she should remain forever in

her low estate. Better still that man and woman should go together, he

bringing his sturdy strength to shorten, she lending her manifold

grace to lighten, the path that leads up thither; and both, following

the still, small voice of love, shall find no roughness, shall feel no

grief, shall fear no evil, but shall walk softly till the end come,

and shall rest in the peace of the beloved.