The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons Part 2

I answer that a mother must know by what standard she is to educate her boy, and therefore must have the data supplied to her on which to form her own judgment, and be fully persuaded in her own mind what she is to aim at in the training she is to give him; and the mere fact that the current judgment of men involves the sacrifice in body and soul of a large cla.s.s of our fellow-women lays a paramount obligation upon all women to search for themselves into the truth and scientific accuracy of the premises on which that judgment is based.

"Can men keep their health and strength as celibates till such time as they have the means to marry?" is the question we have, then, to face.

Is the standard of the moral law possible to men who have to maintain a high level of physical efficiency in the sharp compet.i.tion of modern life?

Primarily, the answer to this question must come from the acknowledged heads of the medical profession. Now, I am thankful to say, we have in England a consensus of opinion from the representative men of the faculty that no one can gainsay. Sir James Paget, Acton in his great text-book, Sir Andrew Clark, Sir George Humphrey, of Cambridge, Professor Millar, of the Edinburgh University, Sir William Gowers, F.R.S., have all answered the above question in the strongest affirmative. "Chast.i.ty does no harm to body or mind; its discipline is excellent; marriage may safely be waited for," are Sir James Paget's terse and emphatic words[4]. Still more emphatic are the words of Sir William Gowers, the great men's specialist, who counts as an authority on the Continent as well as here:

"The opinions which on grounds falsely called 'physiological'

suggest or permit unchast.i.ty are terribly prevalent among young men, but they are absolutely false. With all the force of any knowledge I possess, and any authority I have, I a.s.sert that this belief is contrary to fact; I a.s.sert that no man ever yet was in the slightest degree or way the worse for continence or better for incontinence. From incontinence during unmarried life all are worse morally; a clear majority, are, in the end, worse physically; and in no small number the result is, and ever will be, utter physical s.h.i.+pwreck on one of the many rocks, sharp, jagged-edged, which beset the way, or on one of the banks of festering slime which no care can possibly avoid. They are rocks which tear and rend the unhappy being who is driven against them when he has yielded to the tide of pa.s.sion, they are banks which exhale a poison for which, no true antidote exists."

In face of such testimony as this, well might Mr. George Russell, in an address to young men, speak of "this exploded lie which has. .h.i.therto led so many astray."

Turning now from knowledge to fact, we have only to look at the French clergy to see that even in the extreme case of life-long celibacy it is not injurious to health. I know, in taking this case, I am grating somewhat harshly against Protestant prejudice. But the testimony that Renan bears on this point is irrefutable. Himself a renegade priest, he certainly would not have hesitated to expose the Order to which he had once belonged, and vindicate his broken vows by the revelation of any moral rottenness known within the walls of its seminaries. Far from this, he bears the most emphatic testimony in his autobiography that there is enough virtue in St. Sulpice alone to convert the world; and owns so strong was the impress made on his own soul by his training as a priest that personally he had lived a pure life, "although," he adds, with an easy shrug of his shoulders, "it is very possible that the libertine has the best of it!" Another renegade priest, also eminent in literature, bears exactly the same testimony. Indeed, when we remember the argus-eyed hatred with which the French priesthood is watched by the anti-clerical party, and the few scandals that appear in the public prints only too anxious to give publicity to them, this unimpeachable testimony is borne out by fact. I believe this testimony to be equally true of the English and Irish Roman Catholic clergy. Yet few would dispute the vigor of the physique of the Roman Catholic priests, or their capacity for hard and often exhausting work.

Let me, however, guard myself from misapprehension. That a celibate life, combined with rich feeding, French novels, and low thinking, does produce a great deal of physical harm goes almost without saying.

Nature, like her Lord, requires truth in the inward parts, and takes but small care of outward respectabilities that are but the whitewashed graves of inward foulness. Surely Lowell is right when he says, "I hold unchast.i.ty of mind to be worse than that of body." To live the unmarried life one must, of course, fulfil its conditions of plain living and clean thinking.

It is almost with a feeling of shame that I have dwelt at some length on the point we have been considering; but all through my ten years of work the sunken rock on which I was always making s.h.i.+pwreck was the necessity of the evil--often openly avowed by men, but haunting even the minds of women like a shadow--a shadow which gained solidity and substance from a sense of their helpless ignorance. I have even met with Christian women who have serenely averred to my face that they have been told, on authority that they could not question, that, were it not for the existence of an outcast cla.s.s, no respectable woman would be safe and we could not insure the purity of the home! So low had the moral consciousness fallen, through ignorance and thoughtless acceptance of the masculine code, that women calling themselves Christians could be found who seemed wholly unconscious of the deep inner debas.e.m.e.nt of accepting the degradation of other women as a safeguard to our own virtue and of basing the purity of the Christian home on the ruined bodies and souls of the children of the poor. Truly the dark places of the world within, as well as of the world without, are full of cruelty!

What can I do, in the face of such an experience as this, but humbly and earnestly beseech the women of England and America not to play fast and loose with the moral sense within them--- which is G.o.d's voice within us--but to hold fast to the moral law, one, equal, and indivisible, for men and women alike; and to know and feel sure that, whatever else is bound up with the nature of man or with an advancing civilization, the hopeless degradation of woman is not that something. It is G.o.d who has made us--not we ourselves, with our false codes, false notions, and false necessities; and G.o.d has made the man to love the woman and give himself for her, not to degrade her and destroy the very function for which she was made the blessed "mother of all living."

Only be sure of this: that men will rise to the level of any standard that we set them. For the present standard of what Sainte Beuve calls "l'homme sensuel moyen," which we have accepted and tacitly endorsed, we women are largely to blame. In my conferences with the clergy and earnest laity held in all our large towns it was always this that men spoke of as the greatest stumbling-block in their way. With the utmost bitterness they would urge that men of known fast life were admitted into society, that women seemed to prefer them rather than not; and it seemed to make no difference to them what kind of life a man led--whether he reverenced their womanhood or not. How could I deny this bitter accusation in the face of facts? All I could urge in extenuation was that I believed it was due rather to the ignorance than to the indifference of women, owing to the whole of this dark side of life having been carefully veiled from their view; but now that this ignorance was pa.s.sing away, I was only one of hundreds of women who ask nothing better than to lay down their lives in the cause of their own womanhood. Only when women learn to respect themselves; only when no woman worthy the name will receive into her own drawing-room in friendly intercourse with her own girls the man who has done his best to make her womanhood a vile and desecrated thing; only when no mother worthy the name will, for the sake of wealth or position,--what is called "a good match,"--give her pure girl to a man on the very common conditions, as things have been, that some other ten or twenty young girls--some poor mothers' daughters--have been degraded and cast aside into the gutter, that she, the twenty-first in this honorable harem, may be held in apparent honor as a wife; only when no woman worthy the name will marry under the conditions portrayed by our great novelist, George Eliot,--that of another woman being basely forsaken for her sake--then, and then only, will this reproach that men level at us drop off; then, and then only, shall we be able to save our own sons and bring in a better and purer state of things, enabling them to fight the battle of their life at less tremendous odds; then, and then only, shall we be able to evolve the true manhood, whose att.i.tude is not to defile and destroy, but "to look up and to lift up."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: _Short History of the English People_, by J.R. Green, p.

247.]

[Footnote 4: See a little White Cross paper ent.i.tled, _Medical Testimony_.]

CHAPTER IV

THE SECRET AND METHOD

There is a simile of Herbert Spencer's, in his book on Sociology, which has often helped me in dealing with great moral problems. He says:

"You see that wrought-iron plate is not quite flat; it sticks up a little here towards the left, 'c.o.c.kles,' as we say. How shall we flatten it? Obviously, you reply, by hitting down on the part that is prominent. Well, here is a hammer, and I give the plate a blow as you advise. Harder, you say. Still no effect. Another stroke.

Well, there is one, and another, and another. The prominence remains, you see; the evil is as great as ever, greater, indeed.

But this is not all. Look at the warp which the plate has got near the opposite edge. Where it was flat before it is now curved. A pretty bungle we have made of it! Instead of curing the original defect, we have produced a second. Had we asked an artisan practised in 'planis.h.i.+ng,' as it is called, he would have told us that no good was to be done, but only mischief, by hitting down on the projecting part. He would have taught us how to give variously directed and specially adjusted blows with a hammer elsewhere, so attacking the evil not by direct but by indirect actions. The required process is less simple than you thought. Even a sheet of metal is not to be successfully dealt with after those common-sense methods in which you have so much confidence. 'Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?' asked Hamlet. Is humanity more readily straightened than an iron plate?"[5]

Now, in our moral "planis.h.i.+ng" we need to know where and how to direct our blows, lest in endeavoring to lessen the evil we not only increase the evil itself, but produce other evils almost as great as the one we intended to cure. The mistake that we commit--and this is, I think, especially true of us women--is to rush at our moral problems without giving a moment's thought to their causes, which often lie deep hidden in human nature. Our great naturalist, Darwin, gave eight years' study to our lowly brother, the barnacle; he gave an almost equal amount of time to the study of the earthworm and its functions, revealing to us, in one of his most charming books, how much of our golden harvest, of our pastures, and our jewelled garden-beds, we owe to this silent and patient laborer. Yet we think that we can deal with our higher and more complex human nature without giving it any study at all. We hit down directly on its moral inequalities, without giving a thought to what has caused the imperfection, when constantly, as in the sheet of metal which has to be straightened, the moral disorder has to be met, not directly, but indirectly--not at the point of the disorder itself, but of its often unsuspected cause. Purity, like health, like happiness, like so many of the higher aims of our life, has to be attained altruistically.

Seek them too directly, and they elude our grasp. Like the oarsman, we have often to turn our back upon our destination in order to arrive at our end.

Do not, therefore, think impatiently that I am putting you off with vague theories when you want practical suggestions, if I ask you first to give some patient thought to the causes of the disorder which seems to mark the side of our human nature on which the very existence of the race depends, and which cannot, therefore, be evil in itself. To me the problem presented was almost paralyzing. It seemed as if Nature, in her anxiety to secure the continuance of the species, had taken no account whatever of the moral law, but had so overloaded the strength of pa.s.sion as not only to secure the defeat of the moral law, but even of her own ends, by producing the sterility which results from vicious indulgence.

It was not till I met with two wonderful sermons on "The Kingdom of G.o.d," by that great master of "divine philosophy," Dr. James Martineau, that I first got a clue to the moral difficulty and to that fuller understanding of our human nature which is so essential to all who have the training and moulding of the young. And, therefore, I ask you to let me enter at some length into this teaching, which will not only give us light for our own guidance, but enable us to grasp the right principles on which we have to act in the moral training of the coming generation.[6]

Now, in trying to think out the laws of our own being, we are met at the very outset by the great crux in the moral world: What is the true relation of the material to the spiritual,--of the body, with its instincts and appet.i.tes, to the moral personality, with its conscience and will? On the one hand, seeing the fatal p.r.o.neness of man to obey his appet.i.tes and run into terrible excesses, ascetics in all ages and of all creeds have taught that the body itself is evil and the seat of sin; that its instincts must be crushed and its appet.i.tes repressed and eradicated; and that it is only so far as you trample your animal nature under foot that you can rise to be a saint. "Brute," "blind," "dead,"

have been the epithets bestowed on matter, which is a ceaseless play of living forces that rest not day nor night. To look down on the material pleasures with suspicion, to fly contact with the rude world and lose one's self in the unembodied splendors of the spiritual, to save souls rather than men and women, to preach abstract doctrines rather than grapple with hideous concrete problems--this has been the tendency of the religious spirit in all ages, a tendency of which positive asceticism, with its mortification of the body, and its ideal of virginity, and marriage regarded as more or less a concession to the flesh, is only an exaggeration.

On the other hand, in disgust at the mutilation of human nature and under pretext of its consummation, has arisen the "fleshly school,"

whose maxim is "obedience to Nature,"--leaving undefined what nature, the nature of the swine or the nature of the man,--which holds that every natural instinct ought to be obeyed, which takes the agreeable as the test of the right, and which goes in for the "healthy animal" with enlightened self-interest as the safeguard against excesses.

Alas! the results are no happier. The healthy animal treads under his feet the helpless and the weak, who suffer that he may grow fat and kick. The attractive warmth and color and richness are found to be but rottenness and decay.

When, dissatisfied with the teaching of men, one turns to the great world at large, to see whether some practical instinct may not have guided men to a right adjustment, one's first feeling is one of dismay at the spectacle presented. The bodily instincts and appet.i.tes that seem to work aright in the animal world, in man seem fatally overloaded, and, instead of hitting the mark, explode with disaster and death at the outset.

Let us now turn to the teaching of Christ, and see whether it does not explain the deep disorder of the animal instincts in the world of man, and while saving us on the one hand from the self-mutilation of asceticism, and from the swinishness of the fleshly school on the other, whether it does not embrace the truth that is in both and teach us how to correlate the material and the spiritual.

Now, Dr. Martineau points out that Christ teaches, in contradistinction to asceticism, that the animal body, with its instincts and appet.i.tes, is as good on its own plane as the higher and spiritual attributes of man are on theirs. Our Father knoweth that, in common with other creatures, we have need of physical good, and He has provided us with a self-acting mechanism for its attainment, which will work rightly if only it is left alone and not tampered with. There is the same provision in us as in them of unconscious instincts and appet.i.tes for carrying on the lower life which is necessary as the platform of the higher spiritual being, to set it free, as it were, for the pursuit of its legitimate ends--all those higher and wider interests in life which are comprised under the one comprehensive name of "the kingdom of G.o.d."

And the teaching of Christ is: Neither hate nor fear this part of your nature with the ascetic, nor pamper and stimulate it with the Hedonist, but let it alone to act on its own plane; trust it, trust G.o.d who made it, while you throw all your conscious energies into the higher concerns of life; and you will find, when left to its own unconscious activity, it is neither an over-nor an under-provision for carrying on your subsistence and that of the race. "Take no anxious thought [(Greek: me merimnesete)] for the morrow." "Your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things," and has arranged your being accordingly.

"Seek ye first the kingdom of G.o.d, and all these things shall be added to you." "Behold the birds of the air; your heavenly Father feedeth them."

"Oh," says the practical man at once, "that is all very fine as sentiment; it is very Eastern and poetical; but I should like to know how, in these overcrowded days, I could support myself and family if I am to trust G.o.d to feed me and them like the birds of the air, and only think about religion." But is not this wholly to misunderstand our Lord's teaching? How does G.o.d feed the birds of the air? Is it not by incessant and untiring effort on their part? Those who have watched a pair of birds flying backwards and forwards to the nest under the eave may well question whether industry can go further. But in the unconscious being of a bird it is toil without [Greek: merimna], without thought and worry, and becomes, therefore, the very picture to us of trust in a higher Power, who has thus adjusted an unerring instinct to an unfailing end. The insect and the bird provide for the morrow, while they take no anxious thought for the morrow. "The agility which achieves it is theirs, the skill and foresight absent from them remain with G.o.d. And thus the simple life of lower natures, in its unconscious surrender to involuntary though internal guidance, becomes the negative type of perfect trust."[7]

But to leave his instincts and appet.i.tes to work, unimpeded and unconscious, on their own plane, while he concerns himself with matters of truly human interest, is just what man is not content to do. On the contrary, he takes his higher and spiritual nature down into them. He enhances their pleasure with all the powers of his imagination; he sets his intellect to work to plot and plan for their gratification; he loads them with the whole force of his spiritual will, and in so doing he overloads and maddens them. The instinct for food and drink, which in the animal is sufficient for the maintenance of health and activity, in the man becomes gluttony and drunkenness; the instinct for the preservation of the race becomes the licentiousness which produces sterility and defeats its own ends; the instinct of self-maintenance becomes the feverish greed and money-getting which leave no room for the higher life of beauty, and science, and wors.h.i.+p, and disinterested service. "Seek ye first the material," says the world, "and all these things shall be added unto you when you get the time for them"--which will be probably never.

Now, then, do we not begin to see why the animal instincts and appet.i.tes, which make for order and happiness, and fufil their end in the animal world, lead to such intolerable disorder in the world of man? Their laws, like all other laws in the Divine economy, are holy and just and good; but man by not observing their conditions makes them work evil and death. Do you not see that to be a healthy animal is just what man cannot be except by being a true and high-minded man, all his conscious energies taken up and absorbed on a higher plane, with none left over to filter down into and disorder the animal instincts, which only work aright when left to their own unconscious activity? Fix your consciousness long enough on the tip of your little finger, and you will feel a p.r.i.c.king sensation in it. The mind directed intently to any part of the frame will produce a flow of blood there. Any physician will tell you that this is one of the greatest difficulties he has to contend with in his patients; the mind being steadily directed to some disordered spot increases the congestion which is the result of disease.

Unconsciousness, therefore, is the very channel in which our animal nature works healthily and undisturbed according to its own laws. But you are a self-conscious being, and not as the animals. G.o.d keeps the keys of their nature in His own hands. They are shut up to certain ends which are in His purpose rather than in their minds. They are locked within limits of their nature, which are absolute, and cannot, therefore, be transgressed. But man, in virtue of his self-consciousness, is emphatically "he who hath the keys, who openeth and no man shutteth, and who shutteth and no man openeth." All the secret recesses of your being lie open to you, and no man can close it to your vision.

You can voluntarily shut the door of salvation and hamper the lock, and no man can open. A limit is no absolute limit to you because your very consciousness of the limit involves your consciousness of the beyond which makes it a limit. And therefore to you as a self-knowing existence, with your being necessarily surrendered into your own hands, two faculties have been given as a subst.i.tute for the unconscious necessity of an animal nature: First, a self-judging faculty which we call conscience, or a power of discerning between a lower and a higher, and a sense of obligation to the higher which enables you to correlate your faculties and functions in their true order of relative excellence; and secondly, a spiritual will, capable of carrying the decisions of conscience into practical execution and attaining to a necessity of moral law. The true function of man's will is not, therefore, to add itself on to any one of his instincts and give it a disordered strength, but, while throwing its chief conscious energies into the higher interests of life, to rule his instincts and appet.i.tes according to those higher interests. This, when the condition of that infinitely complex thing, modern civilized life, interferes, as at times it must do, with the legitimate exercise of his instincts, and his good has to be subordinated to the good of the greater number, may occasionally involve a hard struggle, even when the instincts have been left to their own healthy natural play; but at least it will be all the difference between a struggle with a spirited animal and a maddened and infuriated brute.

"But," asks Dr. Martineau, "if the animal instincts and appet.i.tes are to be directed by conscience and ruled by the will in accordance with the dictates of conscience, what becomes of the unconsciousness which is necessary for their right action? Its place is gradually supplied by habit, which is the unconsciousness of a self-conscious being." The habit of plain living and spare food, so necessary to high thinking, at first acquired possibly by real effort of will, by real fasting and prayer, becomes a second nature, that sets the will free for higher conquests. The habit of purity, which at first may have resulted only from a sleepless watch of the will in directing the thoughts and imagination into safe channels, becomes an instinctive recoil from the least touch of defilement. The habit of unworldly simplicity, which may have had to be induced by deliberate self-denial, becomes a natural disposition which rejects superfluities from unconscious choice.

This is what takes place where direct conflict is necessitated by the constant readjustment of the individual, with his instincts and appet.i.tes, to his social environment which so complex a state of society as that of modern civilization involves. But under ordinary circ.u.mstances, where the teaching of Christ is observed and all the conscious energies of the man are absorbed in seeking first the kingdom of G.o.d, there the need of conflict on the lower plane is at least partially done away with. The whole current of thought and will, flowing into higher channels, is drained away from the lower instincts and appet.i.tes, which are thus restored to their natural unconsciousness, with only an occasional interference on the part of the will to subordinate them to human ends and aims, or to those demands of a high and complex civilization in the benefits of which we all share, but for whose fuller and richer life we have in some directions to pay, and perhaps at times to pay heavily. The scientific man who in his pa.s.sionate devotion to the search after truth--the kingdom of G.o.d as revealed in the order of the universe--exclaimed testily that he had no time to waste in making money, had no conflict with the instinct of self-subsistence maddened into greed. It worked out a sufficient quotient of bread and cheese to insure the healthy exercise of his brain, and that was enough. The Alpine climber, intent on mastering a printless snow-peak, has not to control an appet.i.te sharpened by mountain air from sinking into the gluttony which would be fatal to the cool head and steady foot necessary for his enterprise. The man who has a n.o.ble pa.s.sion for the weak and defenceless, who from the first has cultivated a chivalrous loyalty to women, putting far from him the lowering talk, the cynical expression, the moral la.s.situde of society, and guarding his high enthusiasm from the blight of worldly commonplace, has no need to fight against the lower instinct that would degrade them or wrong the weak and defenceless. The conflict is there, but it is removed to a n.o.bler and higher battle-field, a battle against the sacrifice of the weak by the strong, whilst in him the lower life may be left to settle itself, as in the unconscious birds of the air. "Love G.o.d," as St. Augustine said, "and do what you will." "Be a child of the water, and you may be a child of the wind, blowing where it listeth."

"Seek the kingdom of G.o.d first, and all these things shall be added to you."

This, then, is the first great practical lesson that we learn from the study of the laws of our human nature, taken in their widest aspect, under the teaching of the Divine Master, the "open secret" of overcoming in man and woman alike, that which restores to us our whole nature, and vindicates it, even in the depths of disorder into which it has practically fallen, as originally bearing the Divine stamp. The more unconscious we are in the pursuit of physical good, the better for the ends of life; the more conscious we are in the pursuit of moral and spiritual good, the nearer we are to that kingdom of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost which we seek. Get out of the narrow individualism or atomism--for let us never forget that individual and atom are the same word--which threatens to dwarf and pulverize us, which keeps within our view only the narrow range of our own interests and defeats their true pursuit by the very intensity of attention it concentrates upon them; and live, as Goethe says, "in the beautiful, the good, and the whole," the kingdom of the Eternal. Have the higher pa.s.sion that casts out the lower. The physician whose conscious aim is the relief of human suffering and the enforcement of the laws of health, even though a large professional income may be added to him; the lawyer who regards himself as the minister of the Just One to uphold the law of right and equity, whose reputation does not rest on his skill in getting off a fraudulent company without costs, and who makes his money not by his "practices," but by his honest practice; the man of science who reverently devotes himself, as the servant of the truth, to "think G.o.d's thoughts after Him," in the words of Kepler's prayer, and establish the kingdom of law and order, in the humbleness of conscious limitation which forbids dogmatizing; the artist who is true to his art and does not subordinate the laws of the eternal Loveliness to the s.h.i.+fting laws of the temporary market; the capitalist who looks upon himself as the steward of the public good, and to whom material gain is the means and not the end; the workman who does good work for the kingdom of G.o.d's sake, knowing that every stroke of good work is a brick in the palace of the great King, and who scorns to scamp because it pays; and, generally speaking, every man who is so intent on helping and serving others that his thoughts are taken off himself and centred on another--these are the men who are seeking first a kingdom of G.o.d, wherein dwelleth righteousness; these are the men who, living in the higher life can rule the lower--the men whose feet are in the lilies, and to whom the floods of earthly pa.s.sion, even when they beat hardest, end in the flight of a dove and in a triumphal arch of light.

Now, you will see at once the intensely practical bearing of this teaching on the training of your boys. You are not called to hit down directly on the evil, to give warnings against vice, or to speak on things which your womanhood unspeakably shrinks from mentioning. What you are called to do is to secure, so far as you can, that the mind and soul moves on its own proper plane. It is more an att.i.tude you have to form than a warning you have to give. And here it is that the imperative need of high positive teaching comes in. Till parents, and especially mothers, recognize their G.o.d-given functions as the moral teachers of their own children, till they cease to shunt off their responsibilities on the professional shoulders of the schoolmaster, we had better frankly give up the whole question in despair. Strange and sad it seems to me that at the end of the nineteenth century after the coming of our Lord I should have to plead that the moral law is possible under every condition to any man, and that parents are _ipso facto_ the moral teachers of their own children. And yet it is the denial, tacit or explicit, of these two primary truths that has been the greatest obstacle to the progress of my work.

But I appeal to you: Who but a mother can bring such a constant and potent influence to bear as to secure the mind and character moving on its own higher plane in relation to the whole of this side of our nature? Who so well as a mother can teach the sacredness of the body as the temple of the Eternal? Who else can implant in her son that habitual reverence for womanhood which to a man is "as fountains of sweet water in the bitter sea" of life? Who like a mother, as he grows to years of sense and observation, and the curiosity is kindled, which is only a cry for light and teaching, can so answer the cry and so teach as to make the mysteries of life and truth to be for ever a.s.sociated for him with all the sacred a.s.sociations of home and his own mother, and not with the talk of the groom or the dirty-minded schoolboy? Who so well as a mother, as he pa.s.ses into dawning manhood, can plead faithfulness to the future wife before marriage as well as after? Nay, as I hold by the old Spanish proverb "An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy," who like a mother, by her prayers and ever-present example and influence, can lead him to the Highest, and impress upon him that his life is given him for no lower end than, in the words of the Westminster Confession, "to know G.o.d and to glorify Him for ever"; and that therefore he is made on a very high plan--as Browning puts it, "Heaven's consummate cup," whose end is to slake "the Master's thirst"; and that the cup from which He drinks must be clean inside as well as out, and studded within and without with the pearl of purity?

But refuse to give him this higher teaching and training; go on, as so many mothers have done, blankly ignoring the whole subject, because it is so difficult to speak to one's boys,--as if everything worth having in this life were not difficult!--leave him to the teaching of dirty gossip, of unclean cla.s.sical allusions in his school-books, of sc.r.a.ps of newspaper intelligence, possibly of bad companions whom he may pick up at school or business, and be sure of it, as this side of his nature is awakened--in his search after gratified curiosity or pleasurable sensation, in utter ignorance of what he is doing, through your fault, not through his--he will use his imagination and his will to strengthen the animal instincts. What ought to have been kept on a higher plane of being will be used to stimulate functions just coming into existence, and pre-eminently needing to be let alone on their own plane to mature quietly and unconsciously. Thus dwelt upon and stimulated, these functions become in a measure disordered and a source of miserable temptation and difficulty, even if no actual wrong-doing results. If you only knew what those struggles are, if you only knew what miserable chains are forged in utter helpless ignorance, you would not let any sense of difficulty or shrinking timidity make you refuse to give your boy the higher teaching which would have saved him.

It is told of the beautiful Countess of Dufferin, by her son and biographer, Lord Dufferin, that when the surgeons were consulting round her bedside which they should save--the mother or the child--she exclaimed, "Oh, never mind me; save my baby!" If you knew the facts as I know them, I am quite sure you would exclaim, in the face of any difficulties, any natural shrinking on your part, "Oh, never mind me, let me save my boys!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: _The Study of Sociology_, by Herbert Spencer (International Scientific Series), p. 270, fifth edition, 1876.]

[Footnote 6: I quote here at some length from a White Cross paper called _Per Augusta ad Augusta_, in which I summarized and applied Dr.

Martineau's teaching, as I do not think I can do it more clearly or in more condensed form. By some mistake it came out, not under my name, but under the initials of the writer of _True Manliness_ and several others of the White Cross Series. I only mention the mistake now to safeguard my own intellectual honesty.]

[Footnote 7: _Hours of Thought_, by Dr. Martineau, vol. i., p. 35, third edition.]