The common law by which the poor and weak
Are trampled under foot of vicious men,
And loathed forever after by the good";
when the Christian Church at length hears the persistent interrogation of her Lord, "Seest thou this woman?" and makes answer, "Yea, Lord, I see that she is young, and poor, and outcast, and degraded," and speaks to young men with something of the passion of the true Man—"It were better for you that a millstone were hanged about your neck and you cast into the depths of the sea, than that you should cause one of these little ones to stumble"; when the fact that a foolish, giddy girl's feet have slipped and fallen is no longer the signal for every man to look upon her as fair game, and to trample her deeper into the mire, but the signal to every man calling himself a man to hasten to her side, to raise her up again and restore her to her lost womanhood; when boys are taught from their earliest years that if they would have a clear brain, a firm nerve, and a strong muscle, they must be pure, and purity is looked upon as manly, at least, as much as truth and courage; when women are no longer so lost to the dignity of their own womanhood as to make companions of the very men who insult and degrade it; when the woman requires the man to come to her in holy marriage in the glory of his unfallen manhood, as he requires her to come to him in the beauty of her spotless maidenhood; then, when these things begin to be, will not God's order slowly evolve itself out of our disorder, and the man will become the head of the woman, to guard her from all that makes her unfit to be the mother of the race, and the woman will be the heart of the man, to inspire him with all noble purpose? As we stand by this great world-sepulchre of corruption our unbelieving heart can only exclaim: "It stinketh." But the Christ meets us with the words, "Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldst believe, thou shouldst see the glory of God?" That which has been sown in human weakness must be raised in divine power; that which has been sown in deep dishonor must be raised in glory. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, even the self-giving manhood of Him who is the Prince of Passion and the Lord of Love, the manhood lifted into God.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] In this chapter I have quoted some passages from an article of mine, "The Apocalypse of Evil," which appeared in the Contemporary Review, and received the strong commendation of Dr. Lightfoot, then Bishop of Durham. Many of the thoughts I owe to my friend, James Hinton, to whom my obligations on this subject are absolute.
[41] We must be careful, however, in urging this difficulty, to remember Dr. Martineau's teaching, which I have given in the third chapter, and bear in mind that the evil here is due to man's disorder, and not to Nature's order. In the animal world the reproductive instincts work out as orderly results as all other natural instincts, and are no stronger than is necessary for the preservation of the race.
CONCLUSION
And it is this great upward movement, lifting man to a higher level, which is given into the hands of us women, touching, as it does, all the great trusts of our womanhood. What are we women going to do in the face of such vast issues for good or evil?
Undoubtedly we stand at the parting of the ways. In England undoubtedly the old high traditions of English society have, at least in what is called the "Upper Ten," been lowered and vulgarized. Our literature is no longer as clean and wholesome as it was. The greater freedom that women enjoy has not always been put to high uses. And all around us in both countries the old order is changing, and the new order is not yet born. Old positions are becoming untenable, with the higher position and culture of women. It is becoming an impossibility for intelligent women with a knowledge of physiology and an added sense of their own dignity to accept the lower moral standard for men, which exposes them to the risk of exchanging monogamy for a peculiarly vile polygamy—polygamy with its sensuality, but without its duties—bringing physical risks to their children and the terrible likelihood of an inherited moral taint to their sons. It is an impossibility, now that mothers know, that they should remain indifferent as to what sort of manhood they send out into the world—the so-called manhood that either makes and maintains the miserable sinner of our streets or is content to give a tainted name to the mother of his child, or the true manhood lifted into God, whose marriage is the type of the eternal union of God and the soul, of Christ and the Church, and whose fatherhood claims kinship with the Father of lights. It is impossible for women who are agitating for the enfranchisement of their sex to accept as a necessary class in the midst of a democratical society a class of citizens who, in Dr. Welldon's[42] words, addressed to the University of Cambridge, "have lost once for all time the rights of citizenship—who are nobody's wives, nobody's sisters, nobody's friends, who live a living death in the world of men. There are one hundred and fifty thousand such citizens,—perhaps far more, in England and Wales—and all are women."
These old positions are simply impossible, each a moral reductio ad absurdam. We must institute a new and higher order. To do so we women must unite in a great silent movement, a temple slowly rising up beneath our hands without sound of axe or hammer. It will not make itself heard on platforms; its cry will not be heard in our streets. It will go on beneath the surface of our life, probably unheeded and unnoticed of men. Women must educate women; those who know must teach those who are in ignorance. Let mothers who have been roused to the greatness of the issues at stake take as their field of labor the young mothers whom they may know—possibly their own married daughters or nieces, possibly those who are only bound to them by ties of friendship. Use this book, if you will. If there are things in it which you don't approve of—and oh, how much of the divine patience of our Lord do we need with one another in dealing with this difficult question—cut out those pages, erase that passage, but do not deny those young mothers the necessary knowledge to guard the nursery or save their boys at school. And then try and follow it up by quietly talking over the difficulties and the best method of encountering them. Let us deny ourselves in order to give to associations or institutions for the elevation of women, as well as to that excellent society for men, the White Cross, which is spreading its purifying work through both countries.[43] Let us do what we can to help in organizing women's labor, so that a living wage may be secured and no woman be driven by starvation into selling herself for a morsel of bread. Let us endeavor to secure the franchise that we may have the power of legislating for the protection of women on the one point on which we stand in sharp opposition to all but good men; especially such measures as raising the age of consent, so deplorably low in some of your States, that your children are almost without legal protection; resisting State regulation of vice in the army; cleansing the streets by an Act pressing equally on men and women, and many others which will suggest themselves to you. But let us, at the same time, clearly recognize that the remedy must lie deeper than any external agency—must be as deep as life itself, and must be worked out in the silence of our own hearts and of our own homes. We must restore the law of God, quietly but firmly insisting on the equal moral standard for men and women alike; and we must maintain the sanctity and permanence of the marriage bond as ordained by Christ himself.
I say again I do not think, I simply know, by my own experience, that men will rise to any standard which women choose to set them. Ruskin's noble words are the simple truth:
"Their whole course and character are in your hands; what you would have them be they shall be, if you not only desire to have them so, but deserve to have them so, for they are but mirrors in which you will see yourselves imaged.... You fancy, perhaps, as you have been told so often, that a wife's rule should only be over her husband's house, not over his mind. Ah no! the true rule is just the reverse of that: a true wife, in her husband's house, is his servant; it is in his heart that she is queen. Whatever of best he can conceive, it is her part to be; whatever of highest he can hope, it is hers to promise. All that is dark in him she must purge into purity; all that is failing in him she must strengthen into truth; from her, through all the world's clamor, he must win his praise; in her, through all the world's warfare, he must find his peace."
Last, but not least, we must set ourselves to make our lives simpler and plainer, and oppose the ever-increasing luxury and love of pleasure, with its sure and certain result, a relaxed moral fibre, which, to a race called to such high destinies and difficult tasks as our Anglo-Saxon race, is simply fatal. It can, and it must be done. As Philip Hammerton remarks:
"It is entirely within the power of public opinion to relieve the world from the weariness of this burthen of expensive living; it has actually been done to a great extent with regard to the costliness of funerals, a matter in which public opinion has always been very authoritative. If it will now permit a man to be buried simply when he is dead, why cannot it allow him to exist simply whilst he is living?"
To lessen the expense of dress, which has risen twenty per cent, within the last thirty years; to restore amusements to their proper place, as recreation after hard work for the good of others; to resist the ever-increasing restlessness of our day, leading to such constant absences from home as seriously to threaten all steady work for the amelioration of the stay-at-home classes, and use up the funds which are needed for that work; to keep a simple table, so that the future Sir Andrew Clark may no longer have to say that more than half of our diseases come from over-eating; to resist the vulgar tendency to compete with our richer or more fashionable neighbors in their style of living—surely these sacrifices are not beyond us, to attain a great end, both for ourselves and our empire. If indeed we think we can meet this evil without making sacrifices amounting to a silent revolution in our life; if we think, as I have sometimes thought some women do think, that we can quench this pit of perdition in our midst by, as it were, emptying our scent-bottles upon it,—shedding a few empty tears, heaving a few sentimental sighs: "It is very sad! of course I can't do anything, but I am sure I wish all success to your noble work"—possibly even giving a very little money, say a guinea a year, to a penitentiary—all I can say is, God is not mocked. I know but one thing in heaven or earth that will quench it, and that is life-blood. Sometimes I have asked in anguish of spirit: "Will women give it?" I believe they will. But, whether we give it or not, what Matthew Arnold called "the noblest of religious utterances" holds good here: "Without shedding of blood there is no remission of this sin."
And it is because I know that mothers will spend their heart's blood in saving their sons, and because I believe that women, with their new-born position and dignity, will not go on accepting as a matter of course that their womanhood should be fashioned like the Egyptian sphinx, half pure woman, crowned with intellectual and moral beauty, dowered with the homage of men; and half unclean beast of prey, seeking whom it may slay, outcast and abandoned and forced to snare or starve—it is because of this, my rooted faith in women, that I have hope.
As long ago as 1880 Professor Max Müller, ever anxious for the interests of his Indian fellow-subjects, when Mr. Malabari came to ask him how he could rouse English public opinion with regard to the injuries inflicted on young girls by Hindu child-marriages, answered him at once, "Write a short pamphlet and send it to the women of England. They begin to be a power, and they have one splendid quality, they are never beaten."[44] And if this can be said of English women, still more may it be said of the women of America.
But, further, to strengthen us in this splendid quality, have we sufficiently recognized the new moral forces that are coming into the world? Have our eyes been opened to see "the horses and chariots of fire" which are silently taking up their position around us, to guard us and fight for us, that we may not be beaten; the deepened sense of moral obligation, the added power of conscience, the altogether new altruistic sense which makes the misery and degradation of others cling to us like a garment we cannot shake off, a sense of others' woes for which we have had to invent a new word? Lord Shaftesbury's legislation does not date so very far back; and yet when his Bill for delivering women and children from working in our mines was hanging in the balance, and the loss of a single vote might wreck it—women, be it remembered, who were working naked to the waist in the coal-mines, and little children of eight or nine who were carrying half a sack of coals twelve times a day the height of St. Paul's Cathedral—the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London left the House of Lords without voting, as the subject did not interest them; while in the lower House Bright and Gladstone both voted against the Bill, Gladstone being the only member who, when the Bill was passed by a bare majority, endeavored to delay its coming into operation! I ask, Would such a state of things be possible in these days? Am I not right in saying that new moral forces and sensibilities have been born within us which make such a state of things not only impossible, but simply incomprehensible?
Why then should we despair? What! Has God built up His everlasting marble of broken shells, and will He not build up his temple of the future out of these broken efforts of ours? Has He made His pure and splendid diamond out of mere soot, and shall we refuse to see in the blackest and foulest moral problem the possibilities of the diamond, of a higher life worked out in the process of its solution, reflecting His light and His love? Has He made His precious sapphire of the mere mud that we tread under our feet, and, when we insist on our little sisters' being no longer trodden like mud "under foot of vicious men," may they not in the course of their redemption bring an added hue of heaven to our life, an added purity to home and family, and behold, instead of the old mud, a sapphire throne, and above it the likeness as of a divine man?[45]
But to those who still hang back with a feeling of almost angry repulsion from the whole subject which makes them refuse even to face the perils and temptations of their own boys, I would address no hard words, remembering but too well the terrible struggle it cost me to make this my life work. Only I would remind them of that greatest act in all history, by which the world was redeemed. The Cross to us is so associated with the adoration of the ages, so glorified by art, and music, and lofty thought, that we have ceased to realize what it was in actual fact such as no painter has ever dared to portray it; the Cross, not elevated as in sacred pictures, but huddled up with the jeering crowd; the Cross with its ribald blasphemies, its shameful nakedness, its coarse mockeries, its brutal long-drawn torture. Do you think it cost the women of that day nothing to bear all this on their tender hearts? Yet what was it that made men draw nearer and nearer, till the women who at first "stood afar off, beholding these things," we are told, at last "stood by the cross of Jesus"; and, when all men forsook Him and fled, placed themselves heart to heart with the Divine Love bearing the sins of the world and casting them into the abysmal depths of its own being, deeper even than the depths of man's sin? What was it but their faithfulness to the Highest that they had known which made them endure the Cross, despising the shame?
And now, when at the end of the ages He once again calls us women to stand heart to heart with Him in a great redemptive purpose, shall we hang back? Shall we not rather obey the Divine call, enduring the Cross, despising the shame, and, like those women of old, winning for ourselves, by faithfulness unto death, the joy of being made the messengers of a higher and risen life to the world?
God grant that the power of the Holy Ghost may overshadow us and enable us to make answer with her whom all generations have called blessed: "Behold the hand-maiden of the Lord!"
FOOTNOTES:
[42] Late Head-Master of Harrow; now Metropolitan of India.
[43] I would especially commend this modern order of knighthood to the prayers and support of women. It is bravely fighting our battle for us and doing the public work among men. As it attacks what is especially the sin of the moneyed classes, it is unpopular, men resenting its interference with what they call their private life, and it is always in peril for want of funds. The White Cross league admits women associates for intercessory prayer—and what mother will not be thankful for that?—for any work where women's aid is needed, and for raising funds for what is so emphatically our own cause. I would earnestly suggest to women who have incomes of their own that they should leave the White Cross a small legacy, so as to place it on a firmer basis. I hope myself to leave the English branch £2000.
[44] From an article in the Nineteenth Century on "Meddling with Hindu Marriages."
[45] Ezek. i., 26.
APPENDIX
In Mr. Edward Thring's address to the Church Congress at Carlisle in 1841, he said:
"Curiosity, ignorance, and lies form a very hot-bed of impurity. We pay heavily for our civilized habits in false shame and the mystery in which sex is wrapped.
"I confess that for curiosity I have no remedy to propose. Ignorance and lies are on a different footing. I suppose everyone is acquainted with some of the current lies about the impossibility of being pure. The only answer to this is a flat denial from experience. I know it is possible, and, when once attained, easy. The means, under God, in my own case, was a letter from my father. A quiet, simple statement of the sinfulness of the sin and a few of the plain texts from St. Paul saved me. A film fell from my eyes at my father's letter. My first statement is that all fathers ought to write such a letter to their sons. It is not difficult if done in a common-sense way. Following out this plan at Uppingham in the morning Bible lessons, I have always spoken as occasion arose with perfect plainness on lust and its devil-worship, particularly noting its deadly effect on human life and its early and dishonored graves. Ignorance is deadly, because perfect ignorance in a boy is impossible. I consider the half-ignorance so deadly that once a year, at the time of confirmation, I speak openly to the whole school, divided into three different sets. First I take the confirmees, then the communicants and older boys, then the younger boys, on three following nights after evening prayers. The first two sets I speak very plainly to, the last only warn against all indecency in thought, word, or deed, whether alone or with companions. Thus no boy who has been at school a whole year can sin in ignorance, and a boy who despises this warning is justly turned out of the school on conviction."
Finally, he dwelt upon the necessity of school life having joined to it a home life. The purifying influence of a good woman and a fuller recognition of woman's work and place in the world he looked upon as that which promised most for lifting mankind into a higher atmosphere of pure life.
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