churches are not silent as the tomb on week-days. Their worshippers do
not do up all their religion on Sunday. It may be only for a few
moments they step in through that open church-door, on a week-day, to
kneel and lay down burdens too heavy else to be borne. I like the
custom. I should rather say, I like the reminder, and the opportunity
thus afforded them; and I heartily wish that all our Protestant
churches could be thus opened. If rich Christians object to the
promiscuous use of their velvet cushions and gilded prayer-books, at
least let the aisles and altar be free for those who need God on the
week-days; for the poor, the tried, the tempted; for those who shrink,
in their shabby habiliments, from the Sunday exhibition of fine
toilettes and superfine Christianity. Were I a minister, and obliged
to preach to paniers and diamonds and satins, on Sunday, I think I
should _have_ to ease my heart in some such way as this, to make my
pastoral life endurable, else my office would seem to me the most
hollow of all mockeries. "The rich and the poor meet together, and
the Lord is the Maker of them all," should be inscribed outside my
church door, had I one. I could not preach to those paniers and their
owners. My tongue would be paralyzed at those kneeling distortions of
womanhood, bearing such a resemblance to organ-grinders' monkeys. I am
not sure that I should not grow hysterical over it, and laugh and cry
in the same breath, instead of preaching. I can never tell what vent
my disgust would take; but I am sure it must have some escape-valve.
You may say that such worshippers (Heaven save the mark!) _need_
preaching to. I tell you that women, so given over to "the devil and
all his works," are past praying for; "having eyes, they see not;
having ears, they hear not." They are ossified, impervious; they are
Dead-Sea apples, full of ashes. There! now I feel better.
Having alluded to our Roman Catholic friends, allow me to ask leave of
them to have the cross surmount all our _Protestant_ churches, unless
they have taken out a patent for the same. It is lovely to me, this
symbol, as I pass along our streets. It rests my heart to look at it,
amid the turmoil, and din, and hurry, and anxious faces, and sorrowful
faces, and, worse than all, empty faces, that I meet. I say to myself,
there is truth _there_; there is hope and comfort there, and this
tangle of life is _not_ the end. When I am a Protestant minister, the
dear cross shall be on my church, and nobody shall stay away from it
because they are ragged or poor, or because the cushions are too nice.
Oh, I like Catholicism for _that_. They are nearer heaven than
Protestants on this point.
I am very glad for the Protestant noonday prayer-meetings, wheresoever
held. One may have a great spiritual need on other days than Sunday.
One may happen in here--if such things ever _happen_, which I
doubt--and _there_ learn that need, and the way to satisfy it. The
devil is cunningly and wisely busy _every day_ and every night in the
week. Why should good Christians think to circumvent this skilful
diplomatist in one?--on _Sunday_ only? The devil makes _easy_ all the
paths leading to perdition. Christians make hard and difficult the
road to heaven, with their fine churches, and fine worshippers, and
empty preaching once a week. And all around us pitiful hands are
outstretched, and hungry hearts are waiting for the loving Christian
word of help, temporal and spiritual; and men and women go down into
the maelstrom of despair, folly, and sin; and we open our churches and
let _well-dressed_ Christians in to pray for them on Sunday. Sunday!
the word has no meaning. Call it Monday or Tuesday, or Fourth of July,
or anything you will, but not "Sunday." _That_ once meant something.
Let me give you a postscript to a sermon I once heard. "Middle age is
inevitable routine, but keep your _souls_ above it," I heard a
clergyman remark the other night. He "knew that it was difficult," he
said, "not to merge one's self at that crisis in the shop, in the
store, in the office; difficult _not_ to become a mere drudge and a
machine; but still, avoiding it was the only hope for this life." Oh,
how my heart echoed these words--not for men, but for my own sex, of
whose routine life the clergyman said nothing. I wanted to get up and
say to him, "My dear sir, your address is eloquent, and true,
scholarly, and sound, so far as it goes. It _is_ the only hope for
this life that these men of business should not become mere tools."
But I wanted to ask him if men, with their freedom of action--men who,
out in the world, inevitably come into collision with _stirring_, not
_stagnant_ life--find this difficult, what of their wives? With twenty
nerves where men have one to be jarred and agonized, with the pin and
needle fret, of every minute, which they may never hope to escape or
get away from; tied hand and foot, day and night, week after week,
with the ten thousand cords, invisible often to the dull eye of
husband and father, who accepts at evening the neat and pleasant
result, without a thought of how it was accomplished--without a
thought of the weariness of that inexorable grind of detail necessary
to it--without a thought that a change of scene is either necessary or
desirable for the wife and mother who is surely under its benumbing
influence, merging _her_ "soul" till she is a mere machine.
I wanted to hear this clergyman say something about that. I wanted to
know of him whether these women were doing God and their husbands
service, by so sinking the spiritual part of them that one could
hardly tell that it had existence. I wanted to ask him whether, if
their husbands, through indifference or selfishness, or both, gave no
thought to this matter, if he--set in a high place to teach the
people--had no word of advice to such men, that they look as well to
the spiritual deterioration of the _mothers_ of their children as to
their own--the fathers. Nay, I insist that for the mother it is of
_more_ consequence, as having infinitely more to do with the forming
years of these children. And what time, pray, have many of these
"routine" mothers for "thought," properly so called? What time for
reading even the daily papers, to keep up intelligently with the great
issues of the day, of which it is a shame and disgrace for any
American wife and mother to be ignorant? How can they in this way be
fit companions for their children's future? How can they answer their
questions, on this subject and on that, while their vision is for ever
bounded by the horizon of the physical wants of the household? You may
preach "woman's duty" to me till you are hoarse; and I will preach to
you the lust and the selfishness, which is ever repeating the dilemma
of "the old woman in the shoe," till she has not an interval to think
whether she or her brood _have_ souls. "Routine life" of _men_! Men
can and do get out of it--"business takes them away from home on
journeys." "Business" takes him out pleasant evenings; on rainy ones,
he never has "business;" then he goes early to bed, to prepare for a
long evening of "business" when the sky clears.
His wife--well, "she don't seem to need it; or if she does, she don't
say so;" and I might add, in the language of Dickens's nurse, Sary
Gamp, "it is little she needs, and that little she don't get," at
least from him.
Routine men! Oh, bah! "Routine men" have a result to show for their
"routine." They have clerks--not from Intelligence-offices either--who
have to do as they bid them. They also lock up shop at dark. They also
walk or ride home in the fresh air, and talk with their male friends
while doing it. They also are not dependent on the whim or caprice of
any man to take them out for a breath of fresh air at night, after an
exhaustive day of indoor stifling detail. And so, though the sermon to
which I listened was excellent _from a man to men_, I made up my mind
to add this little Appendix to women, from a woman, on the
routine-woman's side of the question. You may talk of the selfishness
of women till your head is white; there never lived that selfish woman
so execrably selfish as a selfish man can be. I don't say _you_ are
so, sir: though at this distance, I venture to inquire whether, were
you in your wife's place, you wouldn't occasionally like to climb up
on the edge of the peck-measure in which she daily revolves, and look
about outside, even if it should tip over on the whole brood of young
ones in the process?
_JUSTICE FOR CLERGYMEN._
Can anybody tell why clergymen should not receive fees for attending
funerals? They receive fees, and generous ones often, for performing
the marriage-ceremony, which is very unnecessary in comparison; a
wedding being a joyful, happy, inspiriting occasion, with its bright
faces, sweet flowers, and happy congratulations of friends; the
exceptions to which are so few as not to need enumerating; and it must
needs rest a man instead of wearying him, cobwebbed all over with
theological tangles as he is, to witness all this; for no matter what
vicissitudes fate and the future have in store for the two he has made
one, at least for _that_ hour they are supremely blessed, and he has
made them so. But a _funeral_! with all its present unnecessary and
dreadful accumulation of horrors; with its closed blinds, its piling
up of sable garments, its pale dead face, which needs no such
auxiliaries of gloom. Imagine a clergyman, already worn out, mentally
and physically, entering such a room, filled with mourning friends, to
whom even the Saviour's own sweet words would seem cold, who must each
for himself tread the wine-press _alone_, till such time as they can
find _Him_. Imagine this minister trying, by prayer and exhortation,
to lift that heavy load of sorrow which all who have grieved know,
that time and faith alone can lighten. Then he goes and looks into the
face of the dead--oh! how many dead faces has he looked at, through
the eyes of others, in the same way!--then he offers a friendly hand
to the widow, or the orphan, as the case may be, and then with this
immense draft on his sympathies, with those heart-rending sobs still
sounding in his ears, perhaps within that very hour, he is called to a
repetition of the sad scene. I am very sure that any clergymen of
experience and sensibility will say, that I have not overstated this
wear and tear of feeling in the delicate endeavor to say just the
right thing, to the differing faiths of the craving, sorrowing hearts
present.
Now why, I ask, should clergymen, in addition to their other
exhaustive duties, be expected to go through this most exhaustive
service of all, without remuneration? More especially, when one
considers the often danger of contagious atmospheric influences, at
such times and places, upon his tired frame.
I have often pondered, without yet being able to find a shadow of a
reason for this unjust demand upon clerical strength. If you say it is
the custom, I only say it is time that, with other bad customs, it
were reformed; and more--since clergymen themselves have their lips
delicately closed on this especial subject, while on others they might
be considered at liberty to speak. That's why _I_ have spoken for
them.
I like ministers. I was brought up with them. My father's house was a
minister's tavern, lacking the sign swinging before the door. I was a
wild slip in those days; that's why they always "wanted a little
conversation with Sarah." It was philanthropic, but thrown away. I had
been told so often that I was "a child of wrath," that I had it at my
fingers' ends--I might have said, at my toes' ends, for it was they
who helped me out the nearest door after meals, lest I should hear the
stale announcement again. I persisted I "loved God," when I was asked.
Why shouldn't I? for no bugaboo of anybody's raising could have made
me believe I was born by him to be tormented. The flowers, the clouds,
the ocean, the sun, moon, and stars--what priceless gifts were they!
No "doctrine" or "creed" could rob me of them; and didn't _he_ make
them, and give me a soul to enjoy them? It was of no use telling me I
was a "child of wrath" under circumstances like these! One soft sweet
breath from my flower-garden knocked that idea "all to smithereens."
Now I didn't hate those ministers for trying to darken what should
have been, and what _was_, in spite of them, youth's festival hour. I
knew they _thought_ they were right, and I believe them to be truly
good, though mistaken, men. They didn't know that, child as I was, if
_I_ ever went to Heaven, it would be taking hold of my Heavenly
Father's hand, not cowering before him through fear of "hell." So
they fired over my curls, when they got me in a corner, and talked to
me that way. They didn't make me hate "meetin'" either; though I was
driven there to hear so many "seventeenth-lies" at the point of the
bayonet; and when skewered up on the seat between rows of big folks, I
felt as if little ants were creeping out from under my finger-nails,
so fidgety did I get for the blessed outdoors.
But I have not outgrown "meetin'" yet, and I count no Sunday a Sunday
when I don't go there some part of the day. Oh, had they only known
_how_ to talk to me, instead of driving me within myself, and making
me put my worst religious foot foremost. But clergymen have found a
better way since, thank God! Still I often smile at the bits of the
old leaven in the ministerial make up. How they will wonder at it all,
when eternity's light shines down on their life-path, and shows them
these mistakes. For I make no apology here for boldly asserting that a
minister can, and does, and always will, make an occasional mistake;
although I was once pounced down upon by an evangelical critic, who
talked to me about "wounding the Lord in the house of his friends,"
when I said so. It is just such stuff as that, that drives everybody
_from_ the "Lord." Better face the music, and own up, that even
ministers are _human_. For my part, were I a minister, and fenced in,
and badgered about, and cross-questioned and interfered with, and
expected to be a sound, rounded, well-disposed human being, morally,
mentally, and physically, all the same as if a coroner's inquest
wasn't squatting on my free-agency every hour in the day, I'll warrant
you I should make a great many more mistakes than they do. Old Adam in
me, would soon see that they didn't want material for a verdict to
suit their narrowness.
And now I hope I have shown you that I am a friend to ministers. So
that without getting a boxed ear, I must tell you here, what a laugh I
got out of a lot of them yesterday. You see, I was in an omnibus
alone, save one lady, when a meeting of some sort in one of our
churches "bust up,"--excuse the expression--"bust up." Five ministers
emerging from the church porch, hailed the omnibus and got in, and
decorously seated themselves. Now, some ministers look jolly, and as
if they were alive. These were thin, cavernous, and had the ten
commandments written all over them. They had heard of New York
Delilahs evidently, for they wouldn't see the _fare_ of the lady or
myself between our gloved fingers waiting for the driver--not a bit of
it! Catch them at it! They looked straight past us both, safely out
the window at an innocent brick wall. Oh, heavens! how I laughed! It
carried me back to the days I was a curly-headed little sinner,
rebelling at being called "a child of wrath." I wanted to say,
"Brethren, I too am a Christian"--and I will persist that I am; so
don't be afraid of my innocent female pennies, nor "cross" yourselves
because your foot accidentally touched the hem of my robe when you got
in; for though I believe in ministers, I _don't_ like to have the
devil laugh in his sleeve at their queer, poky, solemn ways, and say
to himself, "Aha! so would I have it."
May clergymen sneeze? Well--not exactly that; but a question quite as
foolish, I saw gravely propounded and treated, the other day, in a
religious paper. The debate was upon this highly important point:
"Whether it was right for ministers to play croquet." Now I really
_had_ hoped that the day had gone by when the only amusement allowed
to ministers was counting the scores of little heads that surrounded
their table. I did hope that they might wash their faces on a towel,
though it had not a funereal urn embroidered in the corners. And that
they need not of necessity plant a cypress, or weeping willow, at
their front door, to designate their raven-like calling; or banish
every plant from their garden save the funereal rue and rosemary. It
seems I was mistaken; more's the pity. Now if there is anything the
devil likes, it is fine-spun, wire-drawn distinctions, on unimportant
questions like these. If there is anything he likes, it is this
ascetic rendering of religious things, to disgust the young, and throw
a pall over that which _should_ attract them by a wise recognition of
their human needs. When we place a young plant down cellar and shut
out light and sunshine, though it may put out shoots, we all know that
they are white, sickly, and destined early to perish; just so with
this misnamed "godliness" which the well-meaning but over-zealous
religionist would thrust upon us and persuade us was doing
God-service. I tell you it is _not_. I tell you that a minister, above
all others, needs innocent and proper recreation, like croquet. Every
summer, in my travels to and fro, I meet "ministers" enjoying their
brief respite of a summer-vacation; most of them bearing unmistakable
evidence in their pale faces and narrow chests, of their great
necessity for it. I have watched them, sympathetically, as they sat on
the piazzas of the hotels and boarding-houses where we were thrown
together. I have seen them commit this unpardonable sin of "playing
croquet" on a nice green lawn, while the fresh mountain air tinged
their pale cheeks, and their eyes grew brighter, and their tones grew
cheerful, and I blessed God for the sight. I said to myself, _that's_
the way to foil the devil, when the young people found, day after day,
that even a "_minister_" could be cheerful himself and promote
cheerfulness; and that religion, after all, was not death to innocent
happiness. I have been with ministers to the ten-pin alley, in company
with their wives, children, and friends; I have climbed mountains with
them, when I had a better frolic than I ever had with any of the
laymen; and after a three-hours climb, and we all sat upon the top and
enjoyed the view of the surrounding country, and, seated upon the
grass, ate our luncheon, I never perceived that religion suffered by
it. I _have_ often, on the contrary, heard young people of the party
say, "Well, this is the first time I ever _really_ liked a minister. I
thought they were all stiff and solemn, and--to use a juvenile but
expressive epithet--'poky'"! Nor when the following Sunday, sweet as
Sunday always dawns on the hills and valleys, dawned on us, in some
such lovely spot, and these same clergymen were requested to preach,
sometimes in the parlor of the hotel, sometimes, which was better, in
a grove near the house, did _I_ for one perceive anything incongruous
in his doing so, though the audience was the very same merry party of
the day before. And when they have joined in the sweet hymn under the
trees, where he stood with uncovered head, as in God's best temple, I
confess to much more devotion than I am apt to feel, when surrounded
and hedged in, and, allow me to say, sometimes _stifled_ with all the
clerical city paraphernalia, whose husk often seems to me so to shut
in and compress the kernel, that one almost doubts if it has
existence.
Ministers play croquet? I wish every minister had a violin and a brisk
saddle-horse. Away with this bogus sanctity. Take a lesson from our
Roman Catholic friends in the virtue of cheerfulness. Drive not _from_
you, but draw soothingly, caressingly to you the lambs of the flock.
Terror never yet made a true Christian. Frigidity never yet glorified
God. The world is not a charnel-house. Else the blue sky would have
been as black as some of these ascetics fain would make it. No! It is
full of perfume and song and color, and you can never shut the eyes
of young people to it with your distorted views of life. Oh, be wiser,
lest the sad rebound of the atheist come, and they find only at the
end of a life misspent, that in their zeal to prove your detested
"religion" a sham, they had overlooked the fact that the counterfeit
presupposes the _true coin_.
* * * * *
How seldom, in judging of those who excite our anger or contempt, do
we judge them, as the Almighty does, by the extenuating circumstances
of birth and education, and the lack of spiritual light! "Nobody ever
told me;" "I did not know it was wrong;" "Nobody cared whether I was
good or bad." What pitiful words are these! The Saviour recognized
these facts when he said, "Neither do I condemn thee; go and sin no
more."
_THE OLD MAID OF THE PERIOD._
She don't shuffle round in "skimpt" raiment, and awkward shoes, and
cotton gloves, with horn side-combs fastening six hairs to her
temples; nor has she a sharp nose, and angular jaw, and hollow cheeks,
and only two front teeth. She don't read "Law's Serious Call," or keep
a cat, or a snuff-box, or go to bed at dark, save on vestry-meeting
nights, nor scowl at little children, or gather catnip, or apply a
broomstick to astonished dogs.
Not a bit of it. The modern "old maid" is round and jolly, and has her
full complement of hair and teeth, and two dimples in her cheek, and
has a laugh as musical as a bobolink's song. She wears pretty, nicely
fitting dresses too, and cunning little ornaments around her plump
throat, and becoming bits of color in her hair, and at her breast, in
the shape of little knots and bows; and her waist is shapely, and her
hands have sparkling rings, and no knuckles; and her foot is cunning,
and is prisoned in a bewildering boot; and she goes to concerts and
parties and suppers and lectures and matinees, and she don't go alone
either; and she lives in a nice house, earned by herself, and gives
jolly little teas in it. She don't care whether she is married or not,
nor need she. She can afford to wait, as men often do, till they have
"seen life," and when their bones are full of aches, and their blood
tamed down to water, and they have done going out, and want somebody
to swear at and to nurse them--then marry!
Ah! the modern old maid has her eye-teeth cut. She takes care of
herself, instead of her sister's nine children, through mumps, and
measles, and croup, and chicken-pox, and lung fever and leprosy, and
what not.
_She_ don't work that way for no wages and bare toleration, day and
night. No, sir! If she has no money, she teaches, or she lectures, or
she writes books or poems, or she is a book-keeper, or she sets types,
or she does anything but hang on to the skirts of somebody's else
husband, and she feels well and independent in consequence, and holds
up her head with the best, and asks no favors, and "_Woman's Rights_"
has done it!
That awful bugbear, "Woman's Rights"! which small-souled men, and, I
am sorry to say, narrow _women_ too, burlesque and ridicule, and wont
believe in, till the Juggernaut of Progress knocks them down and rides
over them, because they will neither climb up on it, nor get out of
the way.
The fact is, the _Modern_ Old Maid is as good as the Modern Young
Maid, and a great deal better, to those who have outgrown bread and
butter. She has sense as well as freshness, and conversation and
repartee as well as dimples and curves.
She carries a dainty parasol, and a natty little umbrella, and wears
killing bonnets, and has live poets and sages and philosophers in her
train, and knows how to use her eyes, and don't care if she never sees
a cat, and couldn't tell a snuff-box from a patent reaper, and has a
bank-book and dividends: yes, sir! and her name is Phoebe or Alice;
and Woman's Rights has done it.
* * * * *