The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons Part 7

I remember in a series of allegorical pictures by an old master in the Baptistery at Florence, how, with the divine instinct of poets and artists, in the beautiful symbolic figure of Hope, the painter has placed a lily in her hands. Cannot we teach our sons that if they are to realize their dearest hope in life, that divine hope must ever bear a lily in her hand as the only wand that can open to them the paradise of the ideal, the divine vision which is "the master light of all our seeing," the deepest and most sacred joys of our life?

He safely walks in darkest ways Whose youth is lighted from above, Where, through the senses' silvery haze, Dawns the veiled moon of nuptial love.

"Who is the happy husband? He Who, scanning his unwedded life, Thanks G.o.d, with all his conscience free, 'Twas faithful to his future wife."[26]

Again, could we not give our boys a little more teaching about the true nature and sacredness of fatherhood? It always strikes me that the true ethics of fatherhood are not yet born. Were the true nature, the sacredness, and the immense responsibilities of fatherhood really and duly recognized, men could not look with the appalling lightness with which they do on providing some subst.i.tute for marriage, when they have not the means to marry in early life, and are under the very prevalent illusion that continent men who marry late run the risk of a childless marriage--a notion which so great an authority as Acton p.r.o.nounces to be absolutely false physiologically, and without foundation in fact. To bring a child into the world to whom he can perform no one of the duties of a father, and to whom he deliberately gives a mother with a tarnished name--a mother who, from the initial wrong done to her and the stigma which deprives her of the society of women, will only too probably not stay her feet at the first wrong step, but be drawn down that dread winding stair which ends in the despair of a lost soul--this, I urge, would be utterly abhorrent to every even fairly right-thinking man, instead of the very common thing it is. Did we see it truly, it would be a not venial sin, but an unpardonable crime.

Now, surely mothers can supply some teaching here which must be wanting for public opinion to be what it is. A quiet talk about the high nature, the duties and responsibilities of fatherhood cannot present any great difficulties.

I remember many years ago hearing Canon Knox Little preach a sermon in York Cathedral to a large mixed congregation, in which he touched on this subject. At this distance of time I can only give the freest rendering of his words, the more so as I have so often used them in my own meetings that I may have unconsciously moulded them after my own fas.h.i.+on. "Look," he said, "at that dying father--dying in the faith, having fought the good fight, and all heaven now opening before his dying gaze. Yet he withdraws his thoughts from that great hereafter to centre them upon the little lad who stands at his bedside. His hands wander over the golden head with

"'The vast sad tenderness of dying men.'

He triumphs over pain and weakness that he may plot and plan every detail of the young life which he can no longer live to guide and direct. And when at length he seems to have pa.s.sed into the last darkness, and they hold up the child to see if he will yet recognize him, suddenly the spirit seems to sweep back again over the dark river which it has almost crossed, and an ineffable light illumines the dying face as his lips meet the lips of his little son in one last supreme kiss--the father's love for one moment vanquis.h.i.+ng death itself. And what, I ask," said the preacher, in tones that thrilled that vast audience, "must be the sin of desecrating and defiling such a function as this, this function of fatherhood in which man seems to touch upon G.o.d Himself and become the representative of the Father in heaven--what must be the guilt of turning it into a subject of filthy jests and a source of unclean actions?"

The friend with whom I was staying had brought with her her Bible cla.s.s of Industrial School lads, and when the next day she asked what had struck them most in the sermon, they answered promptly, "What he said about fathers," Let us go and teach likewise.

But perhaps the most precious sphere of influence is that which comes to a mother last and latest of all--too late, unless the moral training of all preceding years has been made one long disciplinary preparation in self-mastery and pureness of living, for the higher and more difficult self-control, the far sterner discipline, of true marriage pure and undefiled. But if through her training and influence "the white flower of a blameless life" has been worn

"Through all the years of pa.s.sion in the blood,"

then this is the time when her long patient sowing comes to its golden fruitage. It is to his mother that a young man turns as his confidant in his engagement; it is to her that he necessarily turns for counsel and advice with regard to his young wife in the early years of his marriage.

A young man in love is a man who can receive divine truth even of the hardest, for love is of G.o.d, and its very nature is self-giving.

"Love took up the harp of life, and smote upon its chords with might-- Smote the chord of self, that trembling pa.s.sed in music out of sight."

A pure affection is an almost awful revelation in itself to a young man of the true nature of sensual sin. He would gladly die for the woman he loves. And we look, therefore, to you mothers to bring into the world that Christian ideal of marriage which at present is practically shut up between the covers of our Bibles, that the man is to love the woman, the husband the wife,[27] "as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for it"; not our ideal of the self-sacrificing woman--our patient Griseldas and Enids and all the rest of it--but the self-sacrificing man, who is but poorly represented in our literature at all,--the man who loves the woman and gives himself for her, holding all the strongest forces and pa.s.sions of his nature for her good, to crown her with perfect wifehood and perfect motherhood.

This Christian ideal was doubtless intended to fulfil those restrictions of the Levitical Law which were to safeguard the health of the wife and secure the best conditions for the unborn child; laws and regulations to the observance of which the Jew doubtless owes his splendid physique and his still more splendid mental endowments, which, though he is the fewest of all peoples, bring him everywhere to the forefront,--in finance, in literature, in music, in general capacity,--and to which, I should be inclined to add, he owes his comparatively slow rate of increase, else it is difficult to understand the small numerical strength of this extraordinary race; but I know that this is a disputed point. No jot or t.i.ttle of these laws and regulations can pa.s.s away until they are fulfilled in some larger truth; for ignore them or not, they are founded on physiological laws; and it is on mothers'

recognizing this larger truth in the advice they give, and on their bringing in the Christian ideal, that the future of marriage mainly depends, and its being made more consonant with the higher and more independent position of women than it at present is.

Whilst the sight is so familiar of wives with health broken down and life made a burden, possibly even premature death incurred, by their being given no rest from the sacred duties of motherhood, to say nothing of the health of the hapless child born under such circ.u.mstances, can we wonder that the modern woman often shows a marked distaste to marriage and looks upon it as something low and sensual? Or can we wonder that married men, with so sensual an ideal of so holy a state, should, alas!

so largely minister to the existence of an outcast cla.s.s of women?

On the other hand, the remedy resorted to is often worse than the disease. I confess I have stood aghast at the advice given by Christian mothers, often backed up by a doctor whom they affirm to be a Christian man, in order to save the health of the wife or limit the increase of the family. The heads of the profession, in England, I believe, are sound on this point, a conference having been held some years ago by our leading medical men to denounce all such "fruits of philosophy" as physically injurious and morally lowering.

But if we want to know what their practical results are, the moral gangrene they are to the national life when once they have firmly taken hold of a nation, we have only to look across the channel at France--France with her immense wealth, but rapidly declining population, which in less than a century will reduce her from a first-rate to a second-or third-rate power, so that her statesmen have actually debated the expediency of offering a premium on illegitimacy in the shape of free nurture to all illegitimate children,--illegitimate citizens being better in their estimation than no citizens at all.

Would we have the Anglo-Saxon race enter on this downward grade? If not, then let us women silently band together to preserve the sanct.i.ty of the family, of the home, and sternly to bar out the entrance of all that defileth--all that sensualizes her men and enfeebles their self-mastery, all that renders the heart of her women too craven to encounter the burdens of being the mothers of a mighty race, flowing out into all the lands to civilize and Christianize, and "bear the white man's burthen."

One word more, a sad and painful one, but one which comes from my inmost heart. Do not pa.s.s by the sadder aspects of this great moral question and refuse "to open thy mouth for the dumb," for those "who are appointed unto destruction."

You cannot keep your son in ignorance of the facts; the state of our miserable streets, every time he walks out in the evening in any of our large towns, absolutely forbids that possibility. But you can place him in the right att.i.tude to meet those facts whether in the streets or among his own companions. It is by fighting the evils without that we can best fight the evils within. It is in dragging them down that we are lifted up. A n.o.ble pa.s.sion for the wronged, the weak, the sinful, and the lost is the best means for casting out the ign.o.ble pa.s.sions which would destroy another in order to have a good time one's self. At present the stock phrase of a virtuous young man is, "I know how to take care of myself." You have to put into his lips and heart a stronger and a n.o.bler utterance than that: "I know how to take care of the weakest woman that comes in my path." Surely it is requiring no impossible moral att.i.tude in our sons, rather mere common manliness, to expect that when spoken to by some poor wanderer, he should make answer in his heart if not with his lips, "My girl, I have got a sister, and it would break my heart to see her in your place, and I would rather die than have any part in your degradation." One mother I know, who had been much engaged in rescue work, and into whose heart the misery and degradation of our outcast girls had entered like iron, taught her young son always to take off his hat before pa.s.ssing on, whenever he was accosted. He told a friend of mine that he had scarcely ever known it to fail. Either the poor girl would say, "Sir, I am very sorry I spoke to you"; or more frequently still that little mark of human respect would prove too much, and she would silently turn away and burst into tears. If our sons cannot bare their heads before that bowed and ign.o.ble object on whom the sins of us all seem to have met--the wild pa.s.sions of men, as well as the self-righteousness of the Church--then our young men are not what I take them to be,--nay, thank G.o.d! what I know them to be, sound of head and sound of heart. They get hold of facts by the wrong end; they cut into the middle of a chain, and look upon the woman as the aggressor, and contemplate her as an unclean bird of prey. They do not in the least realize the slight and morally trivial things that cast too many of our working-cla.s.s girls down into the pit of h.e.l.l that skirts their daily path--often as mere children who know not what they do, often from hunger and desperation, often tricked and drugged, and always heavily bribed. But let them know the facts, let them read a little paper such as the _Black Anchor_, the _Ride of Death_, or _My Little Sister_,[28]

and they will feel the whole thing to be, in their own rough but expressive words, "a beastly shame," and fight it both in themselves and in others, for our sakes as well as their own. For the misery as things are is this:--that men divide us into two cla.s.ses--we pure women for whom nothing is too good; and those others, whom they never a.s.sociate with us, for whom nothing is too bad. And what we have to teach them is this--that our womanhood is ONE that a sin against them is a sin against us, and so to link the thought of us to them that for the sake of their own mothers, for the sake of their own sisters, above all, for the sake of the future wife, they cannot wrong or degrade a woman or keep up a degraded cla.s.s of women.

I am aware that, besides the suggestions I have made, young men require a plain, emphatic warning as to the physical dangers of licentiousness and of the possibility of contracting a taint which medical science is now p.r.o.nouncing to be ineradicable and which they will transmit in some form or other to their children after them. We want a strong cord made up of every strand we can lay hold of, and one of these strands is doubtless self-preservation, though in impulsive youth I do not think it the strongest. But to give these warnings is manifestly the father's duty, and not the mother's; and I hope and believe that the number of fathers who are beginning to recognize their duty in this matter, as moral teachers of their boys, is steadily increasing. In the case of widowed mothers, or where the father absolutely refuses to say anything, perhaps the paper I have already mentioned, _Medical Testimony_,[29]

would be the best subst.i.tute for the father's living voice.

And now let me conclude this chapter, as I concluded the last, with a few scattered practical suggestions which may prove of use. My experience has been that the vast majority of our young men go wrong not from any vicious tendencies, but from want of thought, want of knowledge, and a consequent yielding to the low moral tone of so-called men of the world, and the fear of being chaffed as "an innocent." See that your boy is guarded from this want of thought and want of knowledge. When your son is a Sixth Form boy--it is impossible to give the age more definitely, as it must depend upon the character of the boy--place in his hands the White Cross paper, _True Manliness_ which will give him the facts about his own manhood. This paper was carefully revised by the late Bishop of Durham, Dr. Lightfoot, whose specialty was young men; and upwards of a million copies have been sold, which in itself guarantees it as a safe paper. Nor need you as a mother of sons fear to read over any of the White Cross papers, since they concern themselves, as their name denotes, with purity and a high ideal of life--not with the sewer, but with the fountain of sweet waters.

Should your boys be so inclined, you might suggest their joining that band of modern knights, the White Cross Society.[30] It is a great thing to give a young man a high ideal to act up to, and the White Cross would certainly give him this, as well as save him, with its definite obligations, from evil that is incurred from sheer thoughtlessness and animal spirits, enforcing a respectful and chivalrous treatment of women, even when by their fast ways those women show that they have no respect for themselves. But more especially is this the case with regard to the second obligation, to discountenance coa.r.s.e jests and allusions and the by no means nice sort of talk that often goes on in smoking-rooms, and by which, I am convinced, more than by any other agency the mind and conscience of young men is gradually deadened and defiled, but in which they are apt to join from sheer thoughtlessness and sense of fun. Their White Cross obligation might screw up their moral courage to utter some such pointed rebuke as Dr. Jowett's to a lot of young men in a smoking-room, "I don't want to make myself out better than you are, but is there not more dirt than wit in that story?"

or that other still more public rebuke which he administered at his own dinner-table when, the gentlemen having been left to their wine, a well-known diplomat began telling some very unsavory stories, till the still, small, high-pitched voice of the Master made itself heard, saying, "Had we not better adjourn this conversation till we join the ladies in the drawing-room?" At least they can keep silence and a grave face; and silence and a grave face are often the best damper to coa.r.s.e wit. Why, I ask, should men when they get together be one whit coa.r.s.er than women? It is simply an evil fas.h.i.+on, and as an evil fas.h.i.+on can and will be put down as "bad form."

I think also that joining the White Cross will make young men more active in trying to influence other young men and to guard and help their younger brothers, with all the other priceless work that they can, if they will, do for our womanhood among men, but which, from shyness and reserve and the dread of being looked upon as moral prigs, they are apt to let go by default.

But whether you agree with me or not with regard to your sons' joining an organization, see that they a.s.sume their rightful att.i.tude of guardians of the purity of the home. We women cannot know anything about the inner secrets of men's lives, or know whom to exclude and whom to admit to the society of our girls. This ought to be the part of the brothers. G.o.d knows we do not want to make a pariah cla.s.s of men on the same lines as are meted out to women. The young man who wants to do better we are bound to help, and no better work can be done in our large cities than to open our homes to young men in business or in Government offices, etc. But men who are deliberately leading a fast life and who are deeply stained with the degradation of our own womanhood, with no wish to rise out of their moral slough, these must be to us as moral lepers, to be gilded by no wealth, to be cloaked by no insignia of n.o.ble birth, or we stand betrayed as hypocrites and charlatans in our own cause. If our position in society is such as obliges us to receive such men, we all know the moral uses of ice, and under the guise of the most frigid politeness we can make them feel their absolute exclusion from the inner circle of our friends and intimates. There need be no discussion between you and your son--just the hint: "Oh, mother, I would not ask that fellow if I were you," and you will know what is meant.

Much may also be done by keeping up the general high tone of the home.

One mother of eight sons, who all turned out men of high, pure life, if ever they used in her presence such expressions as "a well-groomed woman," or commended their last partner at a ball as "a pretty little filly," would instantly interrupt them and ask incisively, "Are you talking of a horse or a woman? If you are talking of a woman, you will be pleased to remember that you are speaking in the presence of your mother and your sisters." And if any scandal about a woman was mooted, the conversation was at once quietly turned into another and more profitable channel.

A word of homely advice from you to your sons with regard to our streets at night: never to loiter, but to trudge on quickly, when they would be rarely molested, may be advisable and useful.

As to absolute watchfulness with regard to the young maid-servants in your house, this is so obvious a point that it scarcely needs mentioning; though at the same time I have known the most culpably careless arrangements made when the family are away for their summer holidays, young maid-servants being left alone in the house while the young men are still going backwards and forwards to their business; or the whole family going out and no older woman being left in charge of the young domestics. What can one expect but that, having sown moral carelessness, we shall reap corruption?

But even with no such culpable neglect of our responsibilities, I do wish we would cultivate more human relations with our servants, and so get them to work more consciously with us in maintaining a high Christian tone in our homes. If we would but take a more individual interest in them and their belongings, as we should do with those we count our friends; getting a good situation for the younger sister who is just coming on, possibly giving her a few weeks of good training in our own household; giving the delicate child of the family change of air and good food, even taking in a baby to enable a sick mother to go for a short time into a hospital. All these things I have found possible in my own household. And surely such thought and care for those they hold dear would form a living bond between mistress and servant. If we would take the same thought and care for pleasant breaks in the monotony of our young servants' lives as we do for our own girls, would the servant difficulty press upon us to the same degree? Nay, if we could set going a weekly or fortnightly working party with our own servants in some cause which would interest us both, reading out some interesting narrative in connection with it, could we not even in this small way establish a bond of common service and make us feel that we were all working together for the same Master, so that our servants might become our helpers, and not, as they sometimes are, our hinderers, in bringing up our children in a high and pure moral atmosphere?

But when all things are said and done, I know that with every mother worthy the name there must be moments of deep discouragement and sense of failure--a sense of mistakes made with some difficult nature to which her own gives her but little clue; a sense of difficulties in vain grappled with, of shortcomings in vain striven against. Which of us have not had such moments of despondency in the face of a great task? In such moments I have often called to mind one of those parables of Nature which are everywhere around us, unseen and unheeded, like those exquisite fresco angels of the old masters, in dim corners of ancient churches, blowing silent trumpets of praise and adoration and touching mute viols into mystic melodies which are lost to us. So thin has the material veil grown under the touch of modern science that everywhere the spiritual breaks through. Often in that nameless discouragement before unfinished tasks, unfulfilled aims, and broken efforts, I have thought of how the creative Word has fas.h.i.+oned the opal, made it of the same stuff as desert sands, mere silica--not a crystallized stone like a diamond, but rather a stone with a broken heart, traversed by hundreds of small fissures which let in the air, the breath, as the Spirit is called in the Greek of our New Testament; and through these two transparent mediums of such different density it is enabled to refract the light and reflect every lovely hue of heaven, while at its heart burns a mysterious spot of fire. When we feel, therefore, as I have often done, nothing but cracks and desert dust, we can say, "So G.o.d maketh his precious opal." Our very sense of brokenness and failure makes room for the Spirit to enter in, and through His strength made perfect in human weakness we are made able to reflect every tender hue of the eternal Loveliness and break up the white light of His truth into those rays which are fittest for different natures; while that hidden lamp of the sanctuary will burn in your heart of hearts for ever a guide to your boy's feet in the devious ways of life.

In conclusion, I should like to record an incident full of encouragement to mothers. A young fellow of eighteen or nineteen, whom his widowed mother had brought up on the principles which I have been advocating, said to her one day, "Mother, you know that men don't always think like you about poor girls." "Alas!" she replied, "I know that but too well; but what makes you say so?" "Well, mother, I was with a lot of college fellows yesterday, and they were giving one another the best addresses in the West End to go to." "But didn't you say anything?" "No, I only kept silence. Had I said anything, they would only have called me a confounded prig. There were three other fellows who kept silence, and I could see they did not approve, but we none of us spoke up." "Oh, my son," exclaimed his mother in great distress, "how are we to help you young fellows? Do you think if the clergy were more faithful, they could help you more than they do?" "I don't think they would listen to what a parson says." "Then if doctors were to warn you more plainly than they do?" "I don't think it would be of much use; they would not heed; and then a fellow generally goes to a doctor too late." "Then what can we do, what can we do?" "Well, I think there is only one person who can really help, and that's a fellow's mother--she can save him, if she would only try."

Doubt not, but earnestly believe. "In every man's breast is to be found a lotus-blossom," says the pretty old Indian saying, and, watered by your prayers and your tears, be sure it will blossom into "the white flower of a blameless life."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 26: Coventry Patmore.]

[Footnote 27: The word in Greek is the same for woman and wife.]

[Footnote 28: White Cross Publications, E.P. Dutton & Co., 31 West Twenty Third Street, New York.]

[Footnote 29: Office of White Cross league, 7 Dean's Yard, Westminster Abbey, London.]

[Footnote 30: THE WHITE CROSS OBLIGATIONS. I. To treat all women with respect, and endeavor to protect them from wrong and degradation.

II. To endeavor to put down all indecent language and coa.r.s.e jests.

III. To maintain the law of purity as equally binding upon men and women.

IV. To endeavor to spread these principles among my companions, and to try and help my younger brothers.

V. To use every possible means to fulfil the command,

"Keep thyself pure."]

CHAPTER VIII