Stray Thoughts for Girls Part 10

Bishop Wordsworth's hymn suggests the highest lines on which to take the subject, and I would ask, are you specially careful to come to breakfast full of suns.h.i.+ne on Sunday mornings, as on a "day of rest and gladness"?

Is it a cooling fountain to you? Do you soak yourself enough in good thoughts to be more soothed and peaceful than you were on Sat.u.r.day? Was last Sunday a Pisgah's mountain?--did you cast so much as a glance at the promised Land, at what will make the true joy of Heaven, the being like Christ? did you seriously think over where you were unlike Him and where you could be more like Him in the coming week? "New graces ever gaining:"--did you gain any grace at all last Sunday--or would this week have been exactly the same if Sunday had been wiped out? Make up a prayer, for Sat.u.r.day's use, on the ideas in this hymn, or use the hymn in your prayers, as inspiration on Sat.u.r.day night and as self-examination on Sunday night.

Sunday should, as the Warden of Keble says, be a day of new plans for using the coming week better than we did the last, and this implies quiet time for thoughtfully considering both the past and the coming week. On Sunday we should breathe different air and see weekday vexations from a Sunday point of view.

Our Sunday reading may well include all that is referred to in Phil. iv.

8: "Whatsoever things are n.o.ble." I would not say this or that book is wrong on Sunday--a book which is good on Sat.u.r.day does not become bad on Sunday, but, as is the case with many excellent weekday employments, it may very well be a misuse of Sunday time, because we could be doing something better. I strongly advise you to make your Sunday books--and as far as possible all your Sunday habits--different from those of the week, if only to give yourself a chance of getting out of grooves, of getting that complete change of air which is so conducive to a new start in one's inner life and mental vigour. Lord Lawrence's Life would be splendid Sunday reading, but if you are reading it in the week, you would be wise to put it away on Sunday in favour of a change of air.

It is quite possible that you are busy on Sunday, sometimes a father or brothers, hard at work all the week, want you to amuse them on Sunday. Or you may be busy with Sunday-school or Cla.s.ses, which equally prevents the personal keeping of Sunday, while many household arrangements may make an old-fas.h.i.+oned Sunday impossible. (Let those who can have it be thankful instead of rebelling at its dulness!)

At the same time, I would suggest that the very young men for whose sake you are making the sacrifice--(the sacrifice of doing things which amuse you as much as them, sometimes more, since a young man occasionally likes to lie in a hammock and read, without having the girls always about)--those very young men need Sunday quiet whether they desire it or not.

Would it not be well also, if you do have games, to keep to those which allow of talk if the impulse comes, since a Sunday talk is often a help, and whether or no it is combined with boating or golf.

I do not say to you, stand out against household ways and make yourself disagreeable by carrying out a Puritan Sunday--the only kind I believe in.

No; surely that would be a very unchristlike way of spending Sunday.

But every girl knows the difference between helping to make a pleasant family circle and lounging idly through the day in self-indulgent gossip and games. You must do what others do, and yet you must have a clear plan of the reading and prayer and thinking which is right for you personally.

If you cannot do it at one time on Sunday, find another, or else get it done on Sat.u.r.day. Nearly every one could find time for Sunday duties, only you would rather not, because they are dull. I am not surprised, it is not natural to like them till the spiritual nature is alive in you, but that will never be until you force yourself to take this spiritual food as a duty, or rather, as essential to your life.

"A Sabbath well spent Brings a week of content And strength for the toils of the morrow."

Those are very old words by Sir Matthew Hale: I know them framed in the hall of an old-fas.h.i.+oned country house, and they bring back to me rest and quiet, and sweet sounds and scents--the bowl of roses and the pretty old chintz on the sofa just under the words.

I hope Sunday-like Sundays are not only to be found in old houses, but we all feel that Sunday quiet is likely to be the first thing sacrificed in the rush and bustle of modern life. But if we have no time to eat, we cannot keep up to working pitch, we lose vitality: if we have no time for spiritual food, our souls lose vitality, and unfortunately starvation of the soul is a painless process, so we may unconsciously be getting weaker and weaker spiritually.

You are regularly on your knees night and morning, but are you ever two minutes alone with G.o.d?--and yet "being silent to G.o.d"--alone with Him--is, humanly speaking, the only condition on which He can "mould us."[5] I am so afraid that the lawful pleasures and even the commanded duties of life, let alone its excitements and cravings, will eat out your possibilities of spirituality and saintliness: it is so easy to float on the stream of life with others--so terribly hard to come, you yourself, alone into a desert place to listen to those words out of the mouth of G.o.d, by which only your individual life can be fed. The self-denials of Lent are comparatively easy, but to gain that quietness, which Bishop Gore says is "the essence of Lent," is a hard struggle at all times of the year. Do not let any one think, "this is all very well for quiet homes, but I cannot be expected to act on it, since 'the week-end' is always so busy." It would be very unpractical to say, day after day, "I cannot be expected, for this and that excellent reason, to eat my dinner to-day."

You would soon find it advisable, for your own sake, to find some time at which you _could_ eat. I do not say, though it would be true, "it is a sin to break the Sabbath, and, in order to avoid G.o.d's anger, you must go to Church and read good books;"--I say, "for your own sake, you _cannot afford_ to neglect these things, and if you cannot find time on Sunday, it will be not only a crime but a blunder if you do not make time on Sat.u.r.day or Monday." I only say, "if you do not eat enough to keep you alive, you will die; and if you do not feed on the Word of G.o.d, your soul will shrivel away."

Dante saw some souls in h.e.l.l whose bodies were still alive on earth,--their friends in Florence and Lucca had not the faintest idea that these men, seemingly a part of everyday life, were, all the time, "dead souls." There is hardly a more terrible idea in all that terrible book, and yet it is a possibility in our own daily life--this atrophy of the spiritual nature, corresponding to the atrophy of the poetical nature which Darwin noted in himself as due to his own neglect. Mr. Clifford, in "A Likely Story," forcibly depicts a soul awaking in the next world to find that through this unconscious starvation, there was no longer anything in him to correspond with G.o.d. "The possibility of death is involved in our Lord's words about the power of living by the Word of G.o.d."

Sometimes we are too tired to keep Sunday properly, and we give to "private sloth the time which was meant for public wors.h.i.+p;" but surely then the Sabbath breaking lay really in the week's excess of work. If we allow ourselves to live so hard in the week, to be so late on Sat.u.r.day, that we are sleepy and stupid on Sunday morning, then we are not keeping the Fourth Commandment, even if we force ourselves to go to Church; we are not serving G.o.d with a fair share of our mind and strength.

In these over-worked days of nerve exhaustion, it should be an inducement to remember how fresh and unwearied Mr. Gladstone was kept by his regular Sunday habits. He said, "Sunday I reserve for religious employments, and this has kept me alive and well, even to a marvel, in time of considerable labour. We are born on each Lord's day morning into a new climate, where the lungs and heart of the Christian life should drink in continuously the vital air."

Retreats and Rest-cures are nowadays found to be imperatively necessary; but are not both symptoms of something over-wrought in our system? Would it not be well for some if they tried, as Miss Wordsworth suggests, the effect of keeping one Sunday in the week?

I do not wish to dwell on the unselfish side of the question--the moral obligation of keeping to those forms of entertainment and games which give as little trouble as possible to servants,--I am sure that needs no enforcing on a generous mind.

Neither do I wish to discuss what employments are suitable for Sunday, though I should like to draw your attention to a suggestion, in the Bishop of Salisbury's Guild Manual, that Sunday letters should always, as a matter of principle, have some Sunday element in them, and that we should refrain from writing to people with whom we were not on this footing. How often our Sunday letters only clear our writing-table, that it may be freer for Monday's business!

Neither do I speak of our duty to G.o.d in the matter of wors.h.i.+p, nor of the definite rules as to church-going which each must make for herself, if her religion is not to vary with every house she stays in; I do not speak of the obligation binding on every member of the Church to conform to her Church's regulations as to united wors.h.i.+p. Every one of these points need a chapter to itself, and I wish to keep to a single point which seems in great danger of being neglected in this hurrying age, when there is such terrible likelihood that we may "never once possess our souls before we die."

It is not the duty of keeping Sunday on which I want to lay stress, but the fact that we dare not, for our own safety's sake, neglect it. Our moral thoughtfulness, our spiritual growth, the very existence of our inner life, depends on our obtaining a sufficient supply of the air of Heaven to keep our souls alive. To use Dean Church's words: "On the way in which we spend our Sundays depends, for most of us, the depth, the reality, the steadiness, of our spiritual life."

[Footnote 4: Methuen. 1_s. 6d._]

[Footnote 5: "Be silent to G.o.d, and let Him mould thee."--Ps. x.x.xvii. 7.]

Friends.h.i.+p and Love.

"The fountains of my hidden life Are through thy friends.h.i.+p fair."

No word in our language has a n.o.bler meaning than "friends.h.i.+p;" it is a pity that none is more often abused. Every hasty intimacy formed by force of circ.u.mstances--often merely by force of living next door--is dignified with the t.i.tle; but a deeper bond is needed to make a real friends.h.i.+p. "By true friends.h.i.+p," says Jeremy Taylor, "I mean the greatest love, and the greatest usefulness, and the most open communication, and the n.o.blest suffering, and the most exemplary faithfulness, and the severest truth, and the heartiest counsel, and the greatest union of minds of which brave men and women are capable."

"Friends.h.i.+p is the perfection of love," says the Proverb, and a certain James Colebrooke and Mary his wife, buried in Chilham churchyard, seem to have been of this mind, for the climax of their long epitaph is, that they "lived for forty-seven years in the greatest friends.h.i.+p."

Proverbs on this subject abound, and teach varied lessons: "A faithful friend is the medicine of life;" but it would seem to act differently on different const.i.tutions, for, on the one hand, we are told, "a Father is a Treasure, a Brother is a Comforter, a Friend is both;" on the other, we hear the familiar exclamation, "Save me from my friends!" which is justified by experience from the times of Aristides downwards, and is endorsed by Solomon, when he said, "He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to him;"--words of which the wisdom will be felt by all who know what it is to feel unreasoning prejudice against some unoffending person, solely because of the excessive praise of some injudicious friend. Yet none the less are we bound to defend our friends behind their backs and to set them in a fair light. If we cannot aspire generally to St. Theresa's t.i.tle of "Advocate of the Absent," honour demands that we should at least earn it with regard to our friends: though it requires infinite tact to avoid making your friend fatiguing, if not distasteful, to your listener in so doing. For Tact, as well as Honour, is a necessary condition of friends.h.i.+p, in speaking both of, and to, your friend. In this matter of tact, Courtesy covers a large part of the ground.

"We have careful thought for the stranger, And smiles for the some time guest, But we grieve our own With look and tone, Though we love our own the best."

This applies most to brothers and sisters, but also to friends; it takes the delicate edge from friends.h.i.+p if we think ourselves absolved from the minor courtesies of manner and speech.

We often say pretty things to an acquaintance, and omit them to a friend, "because she knows us, and we need not be ceremonious." But ceremony is not half such a bad thing as this age seems to think; it may be overdone, but so may its opposite. Why should we not give our friend the pleasure of this or that acknowledgment of her powers, which a stranger would give her, but which she would value far more from us, even though she "knows we know" it? Saying those things makes the wheels of life's chariot run smoothly,--we think them, why are we so slow to say them? Why should "the privilege of a friend" be synonymous with a cutting remark? Why should we all have reason to feel that "friend" might, without any violation of truth, be subst.i.tuted for the last word in that acute remark on the "fine frankness about unpleasant truths which marks the relative"? Well might Bob Jakes say, "Lor, miss, it's a fine thing to hev' a dumb brute fond o'

yer! it sticks to yer and makes no jaw." This question of making no "jaw"

is rather a vexed one. Most people's experience would lead them to attend to a canny Dutch proverb, which observes that a "friend's" faults may be noticed but not blamed: since the consequences of blaming them are mostly unpleasant; but a braver proverb says, "A true friend dares sometimes venture to be offensive;" and we read that it is our duty to "admonish a friend; it may be that he hath not said it, and, if he have, that he speak it not again." But this earnest remonstrance which is sometimes required of us is very different from the small, nagging, and somewhat impertinent criticisms which pa.s.s so freely between many friends. But defending an absent friend is not the only point of honour essential in true friends.h.i.+p. At the present time the Roman virtues seem somewhat at a discount,--they are suspected of a flavour of Paganism; it is more in accordance with the Genius of our Age to show our interest in our friend by talking over his moral and spiritual condition (and _par parenthese_, all his other affairs) with a sympathizing circle, than to heed the old-fas.h.i.+oned idea, "He that is of a faithful spirit concealeth the matter." How often do we hear, "I wouldn't, for the world, tell any one but you, but--;" and then follows a string of repeated confidences which the friend under discussion would writhe to hear; yet the speaker would be most indignant at being considered dishonourable, because "it was only said to So-and-so, which is _so_ different from saying it to any one else"! The Son of Sirach made no exception in favour of "So-and-so" when he said, "Rehea.r.s.e not unto another that which is told unto thee, and thou shall fare never the worse." If it be true of a wife, that "a silent and loving woman is a gift of the Lord," I am sure it is no less so of a friend; in friends.h.i.+p, as in most relations of life, silence, in its season, is a cardinal virtue.

Girls are often tempted to retail their family affairs to some chosen friend, from a love of confidential mysteries; the pleasure of being a martyr leads not only to the communication of moving details of home life, but frequently to their invention. A friend of mine adopted a niece, who afterwards married and wrote from India asking her aunt to look through and burn her old letters. My friend found touching pictures of home tyranny in the letters from school friends and answers to similar complaints, which the niece had evidently written about her own treatment and since forgotten; possibly the home circles of the other girls would have found the same difficulty that my friend did in recognizing themselves:

"Portrayed with sooty garb and features swarth."

Equal with Honour, and before Tact, among the conditions of Friends.h.i.+p, I would place Truth, for there can be no union without this for a basis. We have touched already on the truth involved in what is called being "faithful" to a friend, but there are many other kinds required. Pa.s.sing over the more obvious of these, I would draw attention to the subtler form of untruth, involved in endowing your friend with imaginary gifts and graces.

Yet the more we know of a true friend, the more we find to reverence in him, and the more ground for humility in ourselves: "Have a quick eye to see" their virtues; nay, more, idealize those virtues as much as you will, for this is a very different thing from endowing them with those they have not; this is only learning to see with that divine insight essential to the highest truth in friends.h.i.+p. "There is a perfect ideal," says Ruskin, "to be wrought out of every human face around us," and so it is with our friends' characters.

And when we have found that ideal and true self, we must be loyal to it--loyal to our friends against their lower selves as well as against their detractors. Plutarch says, "The influence of a true friend is felt in the help that he gives the n.o.ble part of nature; nothing that is weak or poor meets with encouragement from him. While the flatterer fans every spark of suspicion, envy, or grudge, he may be described in the verse of Sophocles as 'sharing the love and not the hatred of the person he cares for.'" Such a bit as that makes us forget the centuries which have rolled between us and Plutarch; his temptations are ours--how much easier it is to us to please our friends by sympathizing with their feelings, whether that feeling be right or wrong! How much pleasanter it is to us to gratify our selfish affection by giving them what they want, as Wentworth did King Charles, than to brace them to endure hardness for the sake of others!

We are so apt to give and to ask for weakening consolation. Sympathy in the ordinary use of the term is more weakening than anything, and it is pleasant to give and to take.

But sympathy should be like bracing air: "no friends.h.i.+p is worth the name which does not inspire new and stronger views of duty." We all care to be sons of consolation,--let us see to it that we brace others instead of giving mere pity. We all like to be pitied, but in our heart we are more grateful to the friend who puts fresh spring into us, by what perhaps seems hard common sense. Those are the friends whose memory comes back to us when circ.u.mstances, or years, or distance, have drifted us far apart.

The friend who fed the weaker part of us never gets from us the same genuine affection with real stuff in it. How much easier it is to sympathize with our friends' unreasonable vexation--to join in their uncharitable speeches, or in laughing at something we ought not to laugh at, than to brace them

"to welcome each rebuff That turns earth's smoothness rough, each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!"

We find it very hard, almost impossible, to live always up to our own best self, and we may be quite sure our friends do too, whether they talk about it or not, and our duty, as a friend, is to see their best self and help them to be it. Very often the mere fact of knowing that our friend sees our n.o.bler nature, and believes in it, heartens us to keep faith in it and to go on striving after it. "Edward Irving unconsciously elevated every man he talked with into the ideal man he ought to have been; and went about the world making men n.o.ble by believing them to be so."

It rests with each of us to draw out the better part in others; we all know people with whom we are at our best, and we have failed in our Duty to our Neighbour if we do not make others feel this with us. "Each soul is in some other's presence quite discrowned;" let the reverse be true where we are.

It is a terrible thought that we have perhaps made others less n.o.ble, less pure, less conscientious, than they would have been. We can never repair the harm we do to one who loses faith in our goodness,--he inevitably loses some part of his faith in goodness itself. "Much of our lives is spent in marring our own influence," says George Eliot, "and turning others' belief in us into a widely concluding unbelief, which they call knowledge of the world, but which is really disappointment in you or me."

n.o.body, who has not watched or felt it, knows the laming of all spiritual energy, the hardening, the blighting of all n.o.ble impulse which comes from this sort of knowledge of the world; and who can say that he has never (more or less) been thus guilty?--it is more truly blood-guiltiness than anything else, for it helps to murder souls.

Perhaps the greatest of the innumerable blessings which friends.h.i.+p confers on the character, lies in this fostering of moral thoughtfulness produced by its responsibilities: "I know not a more serious thing than the responsibility incurred by all human affection. Only think of this: whoever loves you is growing like you; neither you nor he can hinder it, save at the cost of alienation. Oh, if you are grateful for but one creature's love, rise to the height of so pure a blessing--drag them not down by the very embrace with which they cling to you, but through their gentleness ensure their consecration."[6]

It needs a n.o.ble nature to be capable of friends.h.i.+p, or rather a nature which has carefully trained itself by discipline and self-denial, so as to develop all the possibilities of n.o.bleness which were latent in it.