I should not do my whole duty if I did not make some reference to the
“holy kiss,” nor yet contribute what I can to enlighten the mothers who
honor me by reading my book concerning the universal but almost
unspeakable questions that are always coming into the minds of young
people about this sacred form of salute. _You_ may know as much about
these questions as I do, perhaps more; but there is many a mother who
never dreamed that they could infest any brain but her own, and she
never dared speak of such a thing.
One girl came to me, her face suffused with blushes, but with a
determined expression about her mouth, and said:—
“I am going to ask you something right out plain, because I think you
will not laugh. I’ve never dared ask anybody yet, because everybody
always laughs in such a mean way if you try to find out anything about
such things; and I’d like to know how girls are going to know just what
to do. Now it’s just this way: I am going with Charley, and he is a nice
boy; he wants to do what is right, I know he does, but all the boys have
such queer ideas about their ‘rights.’ When he takes me home from church
or any place—and I’ve just got so I dread to have him; and sometimes I
think I won’t go with another boy as long as I live, because, you see,
when I go to say ‘Good night,’ he—he thinks I am so queer because I
won’t let him kiss me. But I won’t; I never let anybody but my own
folks. I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s nice to do that way unless
it’s somebody you’re sure of, and love very much. He says I’m queer; and
he gets provoked, and says it’s his right, if he goes with me. Now I
want to know—is it?”
“No; it is not,” I said, positively, and perhaps with a little flavor of
indignation. “And no properly instructed young man would make such a
claim. He is not to blame, of course,” I added more mildly, “for he is
young, too; but your instincts are all right; they are true; they are of
God who made the kiss, and gave it its own place in common human
language. It belongs to the home, and to the purest Christian fellowship
between man and man, woman and woman; _to society, never_.”
“Oh, I am so glad I asked you!” she said; “for I was sure my feeling
about it was right. But you know one doesn’t like to offend one’s
friend, and one doesn’t like to be called queer. But what does make boys
act so,—good boys, too, for Charley _is_ a good boy?”
I can not bring into the compass of these pages all that followed in our
talk, but I would like to give the points of truth to the young mothers
for whom I write.
The answer to my young questioner is found in the fact that boys, as
well as girls, have been left in ignorance of the principle, as it is in
God, of which the kiss is one form of expression, and have been left to
catch up its perversion as Satan has undertaken to work it into custom
and habit, in the world. Anything which Satan can not wholly spoil, he
will counterfeit; or, better yet for his purpose, make so common, if
possible, that it shall become worthless, as was the case with silver in
the days of Solomon, when it became as the stones of the street, and
“was nothing accounted of.”
The kiss, made common, is ridiculous. To be worth anything, it must
speak exclusively the language of a pure, changeless affection, such as
is represented in the love of God for his children. It belongs more to
the parent and child, brother and sister, than to friend and companion.
It is, as before intimated, fraternal, not social. As soon as any
attempt is made to drag it into society, it becomes disgusting, and is
always soon driven out by storms of ridicule. Therefore good form has
taken it in hand, and has determined its sphere and office with the most
arbitrary insistence. And again the voice of society is but an echo of
the voice of truth and purity. Good form has decreed that the kiss,
public and indiscriminate, is either an indication of unmitigated
rusticity, of shameless immorality, or is to be understood as a
joke,—very funny on its first spontaneous utterance, but very flat if
repeated. Indulged in private, outside the sacred boundaries of the
family, between men and women, it is unpardonable,—unatonable, at least
as far as the woman is concerned. Good form requires that every young
lady shall be so well trained that she will keep her lips absolutely
untouched for her husband, _after_ the words have been spoken that make
him her husband.
The “betrothal kiss” of the romancer has been brought under suspicion in
real life by the fact that betrothal is, in our day, not by any means
equivalent to marriage; and the young man who knows the world, and yet
sufficiently regards truth and purity to seek them in a wife, would
vastly prefer to find his lady friend rigidly determined to keep her
lips to herself as long as they two are yet twain, rather than to find
them always at even his command.
In the correspondence that has come to me as a result of “Studies in
Home and Child Life,” is to be found pitiful evidence of the ignorance
in which young people are allowed to grow up, even in a matter which may
seem, like this one, trivial and bordering on the ridiculous.
The habit among children of kissing everybody is little short of
vicious. Kissing games of every description are considered vulgar,
anywhere outside the immediate family circle, and even then, because of
the trend of habit, they are not good form.
There is great possibility of infection in the kiss. The remains of old
teeth, the breath and lips of those who are in any wise diseased, make
kissing dangerous. It is well-nigh impossible to find a clean, sweet
mouth in these days of human degeneracy; and because of these facts the
little children are exposed to every malignant disorder that is afloat,
and many that are hidden deep in the foul cisterns of the broken-down
body of grandparents, father, mother, and the strangers who straggle in
and use their “rights” on the freely rendered lips of the little
innocents.
The warnings of science, of which so many make light, are timely, and
should be religiously regarded as the authority of God by every one who
does not know within himself that he has so faithfully brought his whole
being into conformity with every law of life and health that he is clean
through and through, so that the sensitive lips of his babe can come to
his with the same certainty of a blessing in the caress that the bee has
when he goes to the white clover of the meadow.
He, and he only, who has brought himself fully into harmony with both
the letter and the spirit of Isaiah fifty-eight may freely give his lips
to his child, out of which to drink his fill of love. And the home that
is brought into this beautiful accord with Christ may be as the garden
of the Lord, from which all lips shall, with every caress, gather that
word of life that is sweeter than honey.