WOMAN AND EDUCATION.
Progress, man's distinctive mark alone;
Not God's and not the beasts'; God is, they are;
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.--Browning.
The partialness of man's life, the low level on which the race has been
content to dwell, is attributable, in no small measure, to the
injustice done to woman. It was assumed she was inferior, and to make
the assumption true, she was kept in ignorance, dwarfed and treated as
a means rather than as an end.
The right to grow is the primal right; it is the right to live, to
unfold our being on every side in the ceaseless striving for truth and
love and beauty. In comparison with this, purely political and civil
rights are unimportant. And in a free state this fundamental right
must not only be acknowledged and defended, but a public opinion must
be created which shall declare it to be the most sacred and inviolable.
The principle is universal, and is as applicable to woman as to man.
There is not a religion, a philosophy, a science, an art for man and
another for woman. Consequently there is not, in its essential
elements at least, an education for man and another for woman. In
souls, in minds, in consciences, in hearts, there is no sex. What is
the best education for woman? That which will best help her to become
a perfect human being, wise, loving, and strong. What is her work?
Whatever may help her to become herself. What is forbidden her?
Nothing but what degrades or narrows or warps. What has she the right
to do? Any good and beautiful and useful thing she is able to do
without hurt to her dignity and worth as a human being.
Between her and man the real question is not of more and less, of
inferiority and superiority, but of unlikeness. Chastity is woman's
great virtue; truthfulness, which is the highest form of courage, is
man's; yet men and women are equally bound to be chaste and truthful.
Mildness and sweet reasonableness are woman's subtlest charms; wisdom
and valor, man's; yet women should be wise and brave, and men should be
mild and reasonable. The spiritual endowment of the sexes is much the
same, but they are not equally interested in the same things. Man
prefers thought; woman, sentiment; he reaches his conclusions through
analysis and argument; she, through feeling and intuition. He has
greater power of self-control; she, of self-sacrifice. He is guided by
law and principle; she, by insight and tact; he demands justice; she,
equity. He wishes to be honored for wealth and position; she, for
herself. For him what he possesses is a means; for her, something to
which she holds and is attached. He asks for power; she, for
affection. He derives his idea of duty from reason; she, from faith
and love. He prefers science and philosophy; she, literature and art.
His religion is a code of morality; hers, faith and hope and love and
imagination. For her, things easily become persons; for him, persons
are little more than things. She has greater power of self-effacement,
forgetting herself wholly in her love. Whether she marry or become a
nun, she abandons her name, the symbol of her identity, in proof that
she is dedicate to the race and to God. The arguments of infidels have
less weight with her than with man, for her sense of religion is more
genuine, her faith more inevitable. She passes over objections as a
chaste mind passes over what is coarse or impure. She more easily
finds complacency in her appearance and surroundings, but she has less
pride and conceit than man. She is more grateful, too, because she
loves more, and the heart makes memory true. If her greater fondness
for jewelry and showy adornment proves her to be more barbarous, her
greater refinement and chastity prove her to be more civilized than
man. And does not her delight in dress come of her care for beauty,
which in a world of coarse and ugly creatures is a virtue as fair as
the face of spring? Why should the flowers and the fields, the hills
and the heavens, be beautiful, and man hideous, and the cities where he
abides dismal? Are we but cattle to be stalled and fed? Are corn and
beef and iron the only good and useful things? Are we not human
because we think and admire, and are exalted in the presence of what is
infinitely true and divinely fair?
Faith, hope, and love are larger and more enduring powers for woman
than for man. She feeds the sacred fire which never dies on the altars
of home and religion and country. She lives a more interior life, and
more easily retains consciousness of the soul's reality and of God's
presence. If she speaks less of patriotism in peaceful times, in the
hour of danger the white light flashes from her soul. It is this that
makes brave men think of their mothers and wives and sisters when they
march to battle. They know that those sweet hearts, however keen the
pangs they suffer, would rather have them dead than craven. When woman
shall grow to the full measure of her endowments, a purer flame will
glow upon the hearth, and love of country will be a more genuine
passion.
If she gain a wider and more varied interest in life, she will become
happier, more willing and more able to help the progress of the race.
Like man, she exists for herself and God, and in her relations to
others, her duties are not to the home alone, but to the whole social
body, religious and civil. Whether man or woman, is a minor thing; to
be wise and worthy and loving is all in all. Our deeper consciousness
and practical recognition of the equality of the sexes is better
evidence that we are becoming Christian and civilized than popular
government and all our mechanical devices. We, however, still have
prejudices as ridiculous and harmful as that which made it unbecoming
in a woman to know anything or in a man of birth to engage in business.
If we hold that every human being has the right to do whatever is fair
or noble or useful, we must also hold that it is wrong to throw
hindrance in the way of the complete education of any human being. We
at last, however slowly, are approaching the standpoint of Christ, who,
with his divine eye upon the sexless soul, overlooks distinctions of
sex, and placing the good of life in knowing and loving, in being and
doing, makes it the privilege and duty of all to help all to know and
love, to become and do. Is it true? Is it right? These are the
immortal questions, springing from what within us is most like God, and
they who deal deceitfully with them have no claim upon attention. They
are jugglers and liars.
What is developed is not really changed, but made more fully itself,
and by giving to woman a truer education, the beauty and charm of her
nature will be brought more effectively into play. None of us love "a
woman impudent and mannish grown;" but knowledge and culture and
strength of mind and heart and body have no tendency to produce such a
caricature. Whether there is question of man or woman, the aim and end
of education is to bring forth in the individual the divine image of
humanity as it exists in the thought of God, as it is revealed in the
life of Christ.
"Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she more of man:
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care;
More as the double-natured poet each."
The apothegm, man is born to do, woman to endure, no longer commends
itself to our judgment. Both are born to do and to endure; and in
educating girls, we now understand that it is our business to
strengthen them and to stimulate them to self-activity. We strive to
give them self-control, sanity, breadth of view, wide sympathies, and
an abiding sense of justice. One might, indeed, be tempted to think it
were well woman should retain a touch of folly, that she still may be
able to believe the man she loves is half divine; but to think so one
must be a man, with his genius for self-conceit. To train a girl
chiefly with a view to success in society is to pervert, is to hinder
from attaining to the power of free, rich, and varied life. It is to
neglect education for accomplishments; it is to prefer form to
substance, manner to conduct, graceful carriage and dress to thought
and love. We degrade her when we consider her as little else than a
candidate for matrimony. A man may remain single and become the
noblest of his kind, and so may a woman. Marriage is first of all for
the race; the individual may stand alone and grow to the full measure
of human strength and worth. The popular contempt for single women who
have reached a certain age, is but a survival of the contempt for all
women which is found among savages and barbarians. In the education of
woman, as of man, the end is increase of power,--of the might there is
in intelligence and love, of the strength there is in gentleness and
sweetness and light, of the vigor there is in health, in the rhythmic
pulse and in deep breathing, of the sustaining joy there is in pure
affection and in devotion to high purposes. Whether there is question
of boys or of girls, the safe way is to strive to make them all it is
possible for them to become, putting our trust for the rest in human
nature and in God; for talent, like genius, is a divine gift, and to
prevent its development is to sin against religion and humanity. For
girls as for boys, the aim should be not knowledge, but power; not
accomplishments, but faculty. Nine-tenths of what we learn in school
is quickly forgotten, and is valueless unless it issue in increase of
moral and intellectual strength. "In whatever direction I turn my
thoughts," says Schleiermacher, "it seems to me that woman's nature is
nobler and her life happier than man's; and if ever I play with an idle
wish it is that I might be a woman." Hardly any man, I imagine, would
rather be a woman, and many women doubtless would rather be men; and
yet there is much in Schleiermacher's thought, if we believe, as the
wise do believe, that love is the best, and that they who love most are
the highest and, therefore, the happiest, since the noblest mind the
best contentment has.
What fountains to the desert are,
What flowers to the fresh young spring,
What heaven's breast is to the star,
That woman's love to earth doth bring.
Whether mid deserts she is found,
Or girt about by happy home,
Where'er she treads is holy ground
Above which rises love's high dome.
Or be she mother called or wife,
Or sister or the soul's twin mate,
She still is each man's best of life,
His crown of joy, his high estate.
What is our Christian faith but the revelation of the supreme and
infinite worth of love, as being of the essence of God himself? Is it
not easy to believe that to a loving soul in an all-chaste body the
unseen world may lie open to view? That Joan of Arc saw heavenly
visions and heard whisperings from higher worlds, who can doubt that
has considered how her most pure womanly soul redeemed a whole people,
and, by them forsaken, from midst fierce flames took its flight to God?
Should women vote? The rule of the people is good only when it is the
rule of the good and wise among the people, and of these, women, in
great numbers, are part. The leadership of the best comes near to
being the leadership of God. But the question of the suffrage for
women is grave; it is one on which an enlightened mind will long hold
judgment in suspense. Does not political life, as it exists in our
democracy, tend to corrupt both voters and office-seekers? Is it not
largely a life of cant, pretence, and hypocrisy, of venality,
corruption, and selfishness, of lying, abuse, and vulgarity? Do not
public men, like public women, sell themselves, though in a different
way? Is the professional politician, the professional
caucus-manipulator, the professional voter, the type of man we can
admire or respect even? The objection so frequently raised, that
political life would corrupt women, has, at least, the merit of a
certain grim humorousness. Could it by any chance make them as bad as
it makes men? To tell them they are the queens of the home, to whom
the mingling with plebeians is degrading, is an insult to their
intelligence. We have forsworn kings and queens, both in private and
in public life, and at home women are, for the most part, drudges.
What need is there of a hollow phrase when the appeal to truth is
obvious?
"A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine;
Who sweeps a room as for thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine."
Active participation in political life is not a refining, an ennobling,
a purifying influence. Is it desirable that the half of the people to
which the interests of the home, of the heart, of the religious and
moral education of the young are especially committed, should be hurled
into the maelstrom of selfish passion and coarse excitement?
The smartness and self-assertiveness of American women are already
excessive; they lack repose, serenity, and self-restraint. If they
rush into the arena of noisy and vulgar strife, will not the evil be
increased? Will not the political woman lose something of the sacred
power of the wife and mother? Are not the primal virtues, those which
make life good and fair and which are a woman's glory,--are they not
humble and quiet and unobtrusive? The suffrage has not emancipated the
masses of men, who are still held captive in the chains of poverty and
dehumanizing toil.
Do women themselves, those, at least, in whom the woman soul, which
draws us on and upward, is most itself, desire that the vote be given
them?
But whatever our opinions on the subject may be, let us not lose
composure. "If a great change is to be made," says Edmund Burke, "the
minds of men will be fitted to it, the general opinions and feelings
will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then
they who persist in opposing the mighty current will appear rather to
resist the decrees of Providence itself than the mere designs of men.
They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate."
Whether or not woman shall become a politician, there is no doubt that
she is becoming a worker in a constantly widening field. The
elementary education of the country is already intrusted to her. She
is taking her position in the higher institutions of learning. She has
gained admission to professional life. In the business world, her
competition with man is more and more felt. In literature, in our
country at least, her appreciativeness is greater than man's, and her
performance not inferior to his. There is a larger number of serious
students among women than among men. In the divinely imposed task of
self-education, they are fast becoming the chief workers. They are the
great readers of books, especially of poetry. The muse was the first
school-mistress, and the love of genuine poetry is still the finest
educational influence. The vulgar passions and coarse appetites which
rob young men of faith in the higher life and of the power to labor
perseveringly for ideal ends, have little hold upon the soul of woman.
Her betrayers are frivolity and vanity, and a too confiding heart; and
the more she is educated the less will she take delight in what is
merely external, and the greater will become her ability to bring
sentiment under the control of reason and conscience.
There are not two educations, then, one for man, and another for woman,
but both alike we bid contend to the uttermost for completeness of
life; bid both trust in human educableness, which makes possible the
hope of attaining all divine things. True faith in education is ever
associated with genuine humility. Only they strive infinitely who feel
that their lack is infinite.
The power of education is as many sided and as manifold as life. There
is no finest seed or flower or fruit, no most serviceable animal, which
has not been brought to perfection by human thought and labor, or
which, were this help withdrawn, would not degenerate; and if the
highest thought and the most intelligent labor were made to bear
ceaselessly upon the improvement of the race of man, we should have a
new world.
When we consider all the beauty, knowledge, and love which are within
man's reach, how is it possible not to believe that infinitely more and
higher lie beyond? Call to mind whatever quality of life, physical,
intellectual, or moral, and you will have little difficulty in seeing
that it is a result of education. We are born, indeed, with unequal
endowments; but strength of limb, ease and swiftness of motion, grace
and fluency of speech, modulation of voice, distinctness of
articulation, correctness of pronunciation, power of attention,
fineness of ear, clearness of vision, control of hand and certainty of
touch in drawing, writing, painting, playing upon instruments and
operating with the knife, truth and vividness of imagination, force of
will, refinement of manner, perfection of taste, skill in argument,
purity of desire, rectitude of purpose, power of sympathy and love,
together with whatever else goes to the making of a perfect man or
woman, are all acquired through educational processes.
Education is the training of a human being with a view to make him all
he may become; and hence it is possible to educate one's self in many
ways and on many sides.
Refinement, grace, and cleanliness are aims and ends, as truly as are
vigor and suppleness of mind and strength and purity of heart. Like
sunshine and flowers and the songs of birds, they help to make life
pleasant and beautiful. Even the fishes are not clean, but the only
clean animal is here and there a man or a woman who has forsworn dirt
visible and invisible. We can educate ourselves in every direction, to
sleep well even, and neither physicians nor poets have told half the
good there is in sleep. The bare thought of it always brings to me the
memory of lulling showers, and grazing sheep, and murmuring streams,
and bees at work, and the breath of flowers and cooing doves and
children lying on the sward, and lazy clouds slumbering in azure skies.
It is pleasant as the approach of evening, fresh and fair as the rising
sun which sets all the world singing, sacred and pure as babes smiling
in their dreams on the breasts of gentle mothers. If thou canst not
see the divine worth in nature and in works of genius, it is because
thou art what thou art. Can the worm at thy feet recognize thy
superiority? The blind and the heedless see nothing, O foolish maid.
What I know and love is of my very being, is, in fact, my knowing and
loving self. Quality of knowledge and love determines quality of life,
and when I know and love God I am divine. As trees are enrooted in
earth, as fishes are immersed in water, and our bodies in air, that
they may live, so the soul has its being in God that it may have life,
that it may know and love. I become self-conscious only in becoming
conscious of what is not myself; and when the not-myself is the
Eternal, is God, my self-consciousness is divine. The marvel and the
mystery of our being is that self-consciousness should exist at all,
not that it should continue to exist forever. But words cannot
strengthen or explain or destroy our belief in God, in the immortality
of the soul, and in the freedom of the will. The antagonism supposed
to exist between scientific facts or theories and religious faith would
cease to be recognized as real, were it not for the eagerness with
which those who are incapable of profound and comprehensive views,
catch up certain shibboleths and hurl them like firebrands upon the
combustible imaginations of the unthinking.
To prove, means, in the proper sense of the word, to test, to bring
ideas, opinions, and beliefs to the ordeal of reason, of accepted
standards of judgment. It is a criticism of the mind and its
operations, and hence it may easily happen that to prove is to weaken
and unsettle. In what is most vital, in belief in God, immortality,
and freedom of the will, in religion and morality, our faith is
stronger than any proof that may be brought in its defence; and this is
not less true of our faith in the reality of nature and the laws of
science; and when this is made plain by criticism, those whose mental
grasp is weak or partial, are confused and tempted to doubt. They are
not helped, but harmed, and our ceaseless discussions and provings, in
press and pulpit, are the source of much of the unrest, religious
doubt, and moral weakness of the age. The people need to be taught by
those who know and believe, not by those whose skill is chiefly
syllogistic and critical. Philosophic speculation is like a vast
mountain into which men, generation after generation, have sunk shafts
in search of some priceless treasure, and have left in the materials
they have thrown out the mark and evidence of failure. But the noblest
minds will still be haunted by the infinite mystery which they will
seek in vain to explain. Their faith in reason, like that of the
vulgar, cannot be shaken, nor can defeat, running through thousands of
years, enfeeble their courage or dampen their ardor. Let our
increasing insight into Nature's laws fill us with thankfulness and
joy. It is good, and makes for good. Let us bow with respect and
reverence before the army of patient investigators who bring highly
disciplined faculties to bear upon the most useful researches. Let
knowledge grow. A nearer and truer view of the boundless fact will not
make the world less wonderful, or the soul less divine, or God less
adorable. If one should declare that it is contrary to the teachings
of faith to hold that conversation may be carried on by persons a
thousand miles apart, it would be sufficient to reply that such
conversation takes place, and that to attempt to annul fact by doctrine
is absurd. There is no excuse for the controversial conflict between
science and religion; for science is ascertained fact, not theory about
fact, and when fact is rightly ascertained it is accepted of all men.
The most certain fact, for each one, is that he knows and loves, and
that this power comes to him through communion with what is higher and
deeper and wider than himself,--with God.
There was a time when collisions among the masses of the sidereal
system were frequent, shocks of unimaginable force by which the
celestial bodies were shivered into atoms, so that what now remains is
but a survival of worlds which escaped destruction in the chaotic
struggle when suns madly rushed on one another and rose in star-dust
about the face of God, who was, and is, and shall be, eternal and
forever the same. Where there is no thinker, there is no thing. It is
in, and through, and with Him that we know ourselves and our
environment; and recognize that our particular life is, in its
implications, universal and divine. He is the principle of unity which
is present in whatever is an object of thought, and which gives the
mind the power to co-ordinate the manifold of sensation into the
harmony of truth; He is the principle of goodness and beauty, which
makes the universe fair, and thrills the heart of man with hope and
love. Amid endless change, He alone is permanent, and He is power and
wisdom and love, and they only are good and wise and strong who cleave
to His eternal and absolute being. But since here and now the real
world of matter as distinguished from the apparent is hidden behind the
veil of sense, it is vain to hope that the world of eternal life shall
be made plain to the pure reason. Religion, like life, is faith, hope,
and love, striving and doing, not intellectual intuition and beatific
vision. We find it impossible to separate our thought of God from that
of infinite goodness and love; but when we look away from our own souls
to Nature's pitiless and fatal laws, we realize that this faith in
all-embracing and all-conquering love is opposed by seemingly
insurmountable difficulties. It is a mystery we believe, not a truth
we comprehend. Systems of philosophy, morality, and religion, however
cunningly devised, cannot make men philosophers, sages, or saints.
This they can become only through the communion which faith, hope, and
love have power to establish with the living fountain-head of truth,
wisdom, and goodness.
The pursuit of knowledge, like the struggle for wealth and place, ends
in disillusion, in the disappointment which results from the contrast
between what we hope for and what we attain. The greater the success,
the more complete the disenchantment. As the rich and famous best see
the unsatisfactoriness of wealth and honor, so they who know much best
understand how knowledge avails not, how it is but a cloud-built
citadel, whose foundations rest upon the uncertain air, whose walls and
turrets lose in substance what they gain in height. When we imagine we
know all things, we awake as from a dream to find that we know nothing,
that our knowing is but a believing, our science but a faith. We are
little children who wander in a father's wide domain, seeing many
things and understanding not anything, who imagine we are in a real and
abiding world, while in truth we are but passing through the
picture-gallery of the senses.
Faith, Hope, and Love:--these three
Are life's deep root;
They reach into infinity,
Whence life doth shoot.
But Faith and Hope have not attained
The Eternal best;
While Love, sweet Love, the end has gained,--
In God to rest.
So long as these life-begetting, life-sustaining, and life-developing
powers hold mightier sway over the soul of woman than over that of man,
so long will woman's heel crush the serpent's head and woman's arms
bear salvation to the world. She will not worship the rising sun, or
become the idolatress of success, but within her heart will cherish
fallen heroes and lost causes and the memory of all the sorrows by
which God humanizes the world.
If we consider mankind merely as a phenomenon, the extinction of the
race need give us little more concern than the disappearance of
Pterodactyls and Ichthyosauri. What repels from such contemplation is
not man's physical, but his spiritual being,--that which makes him
capable of thought and love, of faith and hope. The universe is
anthropomorphized, for whithersoever man looks he sees the reflection
of his own countenance. What he calls things are stamped with the
impress and likeness of himself, as he himself is an image of the
eternal mind, in which all things are mirrored.
An atheist or a materialist, an agnostic or a pessimist, may have
greater knowledge, greater intellectual force than the most devout
believer in God; but is it possible for him to feel so thoroughly at
home in the world, to feel so deeply that, whatever happens, it is and
will be well with him? In an atheistic world the spirit of man is ill
at ease. He who has no God makes himself the centre of all things,
and, like a spoiled child, loses the power to admire, to enjoy, and to
love. Genuine faith in God is such an infinite force that one may be
tempted to doubt whether it is found.
Undisciplined minds become victims of the formulas they receive, and if
what they have accepted as truth is shown to be false or incomplete,
they grow discouraged and lose faith; but the wise know that the verbal
vesture of truth is a symbol which has but a proximate and relative
value. The spirit is alive, and ceaselessly outgrows or transmutes the
body with which it is clothed. What we can do with anything,--with
money, knowledge, wealth,--depends on what we are. Ruskin prefers holy
work to holy worship; but the antithesis is mistaken, for if worship is
holy it impels to work, if work is holy it impels to worship. God's
most sacred visible temple is a human body, and its profanation is the
worst sacrilege.
All true belief, when we come to the last analysis, is belief in God,
and the teacher of religion must keep this fact always in view.
The law of the struggle for life applies to opinions, beliefs, hopes,
aims, ideals, just as it applies to individuals and species. Whatever
survives, survives through conflict, because it is fit to survive. It
does not follow, however, that the best survives, though we must think
that in the end this is so, since we believe in God. When serious
minds grapple with problems so remote from vulgar opinion that they
seem to be meaningless or insoluble, the multitude, ever ready, like a
crowd of boys, to mock and jeer, break forth into insult. These men,
they cry are wicked, or they are fools.
In a society where it is assumed that all are equal, those who are
really superior incur suspicion as though it were criminal to be
different from the multitude; and hence they rarely win the favor of
the crowd. The life-current of those who stir up a noise about them,
runs shallow. The champion of the prize-ring or the race-course is
hailed with shouts, for the crowd understand the achievement; but what
can they know of the worth of a sage or a saint? The noblest struggles
are of the mind and heart wrestling with unseen powers, with spirits,
as St. Paul says, that they may compel them to give up the secret of
truth and holiness. A glimpse of truth, a thrill of love, is better
than the applause of a whole city. In striving steadfastly for thy own
perfection and the happiness of others thou walkest and workest with
God. Thy progress will help others to labor for their own, and the
happiness thou givest will return to thee and become thine; and what is
the will of God, if it is not the perfection and happiness of his
children? To have merely enough strength to bear life's burden, to do
the daily task, to face the cares which return with the sun and follow
us into the night, is to be weak, is to lack the strong spirit for
which work is light as play, and whose secret is heard in whispers by
the hero and the saint. To be able to give joy and help to others we
must have more life, wisdom, virtue, and happiness than we need for
ourselves; and it is in giving joy and help to others that we ourselves
receive increase of life, wisdom, virtue, and happiness. Be persuaded
within thy deepest soul, that moral evil can never be good, and that
sin can never be gain. So act that if all men acted as thou, all would
be well. If to be like others is thy aim, thou art predestined to
remain inferior. To be followed and applauded is to be diverted from
one's work. Better alone with it in a garret than a guest in a banquet
hall.
Let thy prayer be work and work thy prayer,
As God's truth and love are everywhere,
And whether by word or deed thou strive
In Him alone thou canst be alive.
If thou hast done thy best, God will give it worth.
If thou carest not for truth and love, for thee they are nothing worth;
but it is because thou thyself art worthless. Wisdom and virtue is all
thou lackest; of other things thou hast enough. When the passion for
self-improvement is strong within us, all our relations to our
fellow-men and nature receive new meaning and power, as opportunities
to make ourselves what it is possible for us to become; and as we grow
accustomed to take this view of whatever happens, we are made aware
that disagreeable things are worth as much as the pleasant, that foes
are as useful as friends. The obstacle arrests attention, provokes
effort, and educates. It throws the light back upon the eye, and
reveals the world of color and form; from it all sounds reverberate.
We grow by overcoming; the force we conquer becomes our own. We rise
on difficulties we surmount. What opposes, arouses, strengthens, and
disciplines the will, discloses to the mind its power, and implants
faith in the efficacy of patient, persevering labor. They who shrink
from the combat are already defeated. To make everything easy is to
smooth the way whereby we descend. To surround the young with what
they ought themselves to achieve is to enfeeble and corrupt them.
Happy is the poor man's son, who whithersoever he turns, sees the
obstacle rise to challenge him to become a man; miserable the children
of the rich, whose cursed-blessed fortune is an ever-present invitation
to idleness and conceit. O mothers, you whose love is the best any of
us have known, harden your sons, and urge them on, not in the race for
wealth, but in the steep and narrow way wherein, through self-conquest
and self-knowledge, they rise toward God and all high things. Nothing
that has ever been said of your power tells the whole truth, and the
only argument against you is the men who are your children. Education
is always the result of personal influence. A mother, a father in the
home, a pure and loving heart at the altar, a true man or woman in the
school, a noble mind uttering itself in literature, which is personal
thought and expression,--these are the forces which educate. Life
proceeds from life, and religion, which is the highest power of life,
can proceed only from God and religious souls. Not by preaching and
teaching, but by living the life, can we make ourselves centres of
spiritual influence.
Be like others, walk in the broad way, one of a herd, content to graze
in a common pasture, believing equality man's highest law, though its
meaning be equality with the brute. Is this our ideal? It is an
atheistic creed. There is no God, there is nothing but matter, but
atoms, and atoms are alike and equal,--let men be so too. To struggle
with infinite faith and hope for some divine good is idolatry, is to
believe in God; to be one's self is the unpardonable sin. It is thy
aim to rise, to distinguish thyself; this means thou wouldst have
higher place, more money, a greater house than thy neighbor's. It is a
foolish ambition. Instead of trying to distinguish thyself, strive to
become thyself, to make thyself worthy of the approval of God and wise
men. "I am not to be pitied, my lord," said Bayard; "I die doing my
duty." God has not given His world into thy keeping, but he has given
thee to thyself to fashion and complete. If thou art busy seeking
money or pleasure or praise, little time will remain wherein to seek
and find thyself. They who are interesting to themselves, are
interesting to themselves alone. The self-absorbed are the victims of
mental and moral disease. The life which flows out to others, bearing
light and warmth and fragrance, feels itself in the blessings it gives;
that which is self-centred, stagnates like a pool, and becomes the
habitation of doleful creatures.
There is a popularity which is born of the worship of noble deeds,--it
is the best. There is another, which comes of the crowd's passion for
what is noisy and spectacular,--it is the worst. The one is the
popularity of heroes, the other that of charlatans.
Whatever thy chosen work, it is thy business to make thyself a man or a
woman, and not a mere specialist; yet in following a specialty with
enthusiasm, thou shalt go farther towards perfection and completeness
of life than the multitude of pretenders, who are not in earnest about
anything. Every harsh and unjust sentiment, every narrow and unworthy
thought consented to and entertained, remains like a stain upon
character. Whoever speaks or writes against freedom or knowledge or
faith in God, or love of man or reverence of woman, but makes himself
ridiculous; for men feel and believe that their true world is a world
of high thoughts and noble sentiments, and they can neither respect nor
trust those who strive to weaken their hold upon this world. Become
thyself; do thy work. For this, all thy days are not too many or too
long. If thou and it are worthy to be known, the presentation can be
made in briefest time; and it matters little though it be deferred
until after thy death.
Besides whatever other conditions, time is necessary to bring the best
things to maturity, and to imagine that excellence demands less than
lifelong work, is to mistake. It is by the patient observation of the
infinitesimal that science has done its best work; and it is only by
unwearying attention to the thousand little things of life that we may
hope to make some approach to moral and intellectual perfection. He
who works with joy and cheerfulness in the field which himself has
found and chosen, will acquire knowledge and skill, and his labor will
be transformed into increase and newness of life.
We gain a clear view of things only when we set them apart from
ourselves, and contemplate them simply as objects of thought. To see
them aright we must be free from emotion and behold them in the cold
air of the intellect. To look on them as in some way bound up with our
personal good or evil, is to have the vision blurred. Study in the
spirit of an investigator, who has no other than a scientific interest
in what he sets himself to examine. The wise physician is wholly
intent upon making a correct diagnosis, though the patient be his
mother. What gain would self-delusion bring him or her he loves?
Things are what they are, and it is our business to know them. Observe
and hold thy judgment in suspense until patient looking shall have made
truth so plain that to pass judgment is superfluous.
The aim of mental training is clearness and accuracy of view, together
with the strength to keep steadfastly looking into the world of
intelligible things. What rouses desire tends to enslave; what gives
delight tends to liberate; the one appeals to the senses, the other to
the soul. Hence, intellectual and moral pleasures alone are associated
with the sense of freedom and pure joy. The lovers of freedom are as
rare as the lovers of truth and of God. For most, liberty is but a
trader's commodity, to be parted with for price, as their obedience is
a slave's service. The chief good consists in acting justly and nobly,
rather than in thinking acutely and profoundly. The free play of the
mind is delightful, but the law of moral obligation is the deepest
thing in us. Honor, place, and wealth, which are won at the price of
self-improvement, the wise will not desire. Great opportunities seldom
present themselves, but every moment of every hour of thy conscious
life is an opportunity to improve thyself, which for thee is the best
and most necessary thing. Since our power over others is small, but
over ourselves large, let us devote our energies to self-improvement.
"Nor let any man say," writes Locke, "he cannot govern his passions,
nor hinder them from breaking out and carrying him into action; for
what he can do before a prince or great man he can do alone or in the
presence of God, if he will."
The sure way to happiness is to yield ourselves wholly to God, knowing
that he has care of us, and at the same time to seek to draw from life
whatever joy and delight it may bestow upon a high mind and a pure
heart, receiving the blessing gladly, conscious all the while that what
is external cannot really be ours, and is not, therefore, necessary to
our contentment.
That many are wiser and stronger than thou, is not a motive for
discouragement; the depressing thought is, that so few are wise and
strong. He who gives his whole life to what he believes he is most
capable of doing, succeeds, whatever be the worth of his work. There
are many who are busy with many things; but one who has a high purpose,
and who devotes all his energies to its fulfillment, is not easily
found; and great and interesting characters are, therefore, rare.
To what better use can we put life than to employ it in ameliorating
life? It is to this every wise and good man devotes himself, whether
he be priest or teacher, physician or lawyer, philosopher or poet,
captain of industry or statesman.