Three Addresses to Girls at School Part 2

I am not going to preach you a sermon of quite the usual type, but intend rather to offer a few detached remarks without attempting to weave them into any unity of plan, or to connect them with any particular text from the Bible. Such unity as these remarks may possess will result not from design but from the nature of the subject. For I am going to speak about religion.

Now as I write this word I almost fancy I hear the rustle of an audience composing itself to endure what it foresees must be a dull and uninteresting address. "Religion! he can't make that interesting." Now, why is this? What is religion, that in the eyes of so many clever and intelligent and well-educated young people it should be thought dull?

Of this one point I am quite sure, that it is the fault of our misunderstanding and misrepresentation, in the past and the present, that religion seems dull.

Religion is, in its essence, the opening to the young mind of all the higher regions of thought and aspiration and imagination and spirituality. When you are quite young you are occupied of course with the visible things and people round you; each hour brings its amus.e.m.e.nts, its occupations and its delights, and reflection scarcely begins. But soon questions of right and wrong spring up; a world of ideas and imaginations opens before you; you are led by your teachers and your books into the presence of great thoughts, the inspirations that come from beauty in all forms, from nature, from art, from literature, and especially from poets; you come under the influence of friends--fathers, mothers, or other elders--who evidently have springs of conduct and aspirations you as yet only dimly recognize; and mixed with all these influences there is that influence on us from childhood upward of our prayers that we have been taught, our religious services, our Bibles, and most of all the Sacred Figure, dimly seen, but never long absent from our thoughts, enveloped in a sort of sacred and mysterious halo--the figure of our Lord Jesus Christ enshrined in our hearts, and that Father in Heaven of Whom He spoke. All these are among the religious influences; and what is their aim and object? What is it that we should try and extract from them for ourselves? How should we use them in our turn to better those who come after us?

Well, I reply, they should all be regarded as the avenues by which our human nature as a whole ought to rise, and the only avenues by which it can rise, to its rightful and splendid heritage and its true development. We cannot be all that we might be without straining our efforts in this direction of aspiration towards G.o.d, towards all that is ideal, spiritual and divine.

We are often inert, effortless, and then the religion I have spoken of repels us because it demands an effort; we are often selfish, and it repels us because it calls us out of self; we are often absorbed in the small and immediate aims for present enjoyment, interested in our own small circles, and religion insists that these are not enough. It is for ever calling us, as all true education calls us, as literature and history call us, to rise higher, to see more, to widen our sympathies, to enlarge our hearts, to open the doors of feeling and emotion.

Religion therefore may make great demands on us; it may disturb our repose; it may shake us, and say, look, look; look up, look round; it may be importunate, insistent, omnipresent, but it is not dull.

There is a sham semblance of religion which you are right in regarding as dull, for it is dull. When it is unreal and insincere it is deadly dull; when phrases are repeated, parrotwise, by people who have either never felt or have long lost their power and inspiration, then too it is deadly dull. When a sharp line, moreover, is made between all the various influences that elevate us, and place us in presence of the ideal and spiritual world; when the common relations of life, when art, poetry, criticism, science; when educated and refining intercourse and conversation, and all that occupies us on our intellectual sides is cla.s.sed as secular, and the only helps to religion that are recognized are services and creeds and traditions of our particular church, then such religion cuts itself off from many of its springs, and from most of its fairest fields, and _is_ barren, and unprofitable, and dull.

You are not likely to make this error. You are perhaps more likely to make the opposite error, by a natural reaction from this. Because, when all the world of interest and beauty and human life is opening before you, you cannot believe that religion is confined to the narrow sphere of ideas in which it was once thought to consist, and is still sometimes declared to consist, you may think that you can dispense with that narrow but central sphere of ideas; and there you are wrong. I am quite sure that there is no inspiring and sustaining force, which shall make your lives worthy, comparable to the faith which Christ taught the world, that we are verily the children of G.o.d, and sharers of His Divine life, heirs of an eternal life in Christ towards which we may press, and the appointed path to which lies in the highest duties that our daily life presents and consecrates. On this inspiring power of faith in Christ I shall not speak to-day. I mean to speak on one only of the duties which form the path to the higher life, which you may overlook, and yet which is inherent in religion.

The duty which I shall speak of is the necessity of entering into the life and needs and sympathies of others; of living not with an eye exclusively on yourself, but with the constant thought for others. It is the law of our being that admits of no exception. You may hope that the law of gravitation will be suspended in your case, and leap out of the window; but you will suffer for your mistake; and you will be equally mistaken and equally maim your life, if you think that somehow the law of the spiritual world would admit of exception, and that you can win happiness, goodness, and the full tide of life; become the best that you are capable of being, while remaining isolated, self-absorbed--by being centripetal, not centrifugal. It cannot be. Now this is worth saying to you, because you know here at school what a united social life is. All girls do not know this. You do. There is distinctly here a school life, a school feeling, a house feeling. No casual visitor to your playing fields and hall can mistake this. And you know that this enlarges and draws something out of your nature that would never have been suspected had it not been for school life. But when school life ends, what will become of this discovery that you have made? Boys, when they leave school and have developed the pa.s.sionate feeling of love for their old school,--the strong _esprit de corps_, the conviction that in brotherhood and union is their strength and happiness,--contrive to find fresh united activities, and transfer to new bodies their public spirit and power of co-operation. Their college, their regiment, their football club, their work with young employes, their parish, their town--something is found into which they can throw themselves. And again and again I have watched how this has become a religion, a binding and elevating and educating power in the mind of young men; and again and again, too, I have noticed how without it men lose interest, lose growth and greatness; individualism creeps on them, half their nature is stunted. For the individual life is only half the life; and even that cannot be the rich and full and glorious thing it might be, unless it is enlarged on all sides, and rests on a wide social sympathy and love.

But how is it for girls when they leave school? It is distinctly harder for you to find lines of united action. Society tends to individualize young ladies; its ideal for them is elegant inaction and graceful waiting, to an extent infinitely beyond what it is for young men. You do not find at your homes ready-made a.s.sociations to join, or even an obvious possibility of doing anything for anybody. And so I have witnessed generous and fine school-girl natures dwarfed, cabined, confined; cheated of the activities which they had learned to desire to exercise, becoming individualistic, and therefore commonplace; not without inward fury and resistance, secret remonstrance, but concealing it all under the impa.s.sive manner which society demands.

Something is wrong: and your generation is finding this out, and finding out also its cure. Year by year greater liberty of action is open to educated women; and educated women are themselves seeing, and others are seeing for them, that they have a part to play in the world which none others can play; if they do not play it, then work, indispensable to the good of society, and therefore to their own good, is undone. I say to _their own good_, for we all want happiness: but happiness is not won by seeking for it. Make up your minds on this point, that there are certain things only to be got by not aiming directly at them. Aim, for example, at being influential, and you become a prig; aim at walking and posing gracefully, and you become an affected and ludicrous object; aim even at breathing quite regularly, and you fail.

So if you aim at happiness or self-culture or individualistic completeness, the world seems to combine to frustrate you. People, circ.u.mstances, opportunities, temper, everything goes wrong; and you lay the blame on everything except the one thing that is the cause of it all, the fact that you yourself are aiming at the wrong thing. But aim at making everything go well where you are; aim at using this treasure of life that G.o.d has given you for helping lame dogs over stiles, for making schools, households, games, parishes, societies, sick-rooms, girls' clubs, what not?--run more smoothly; wake every morning with the thought what can I do to-day to oil the wheels of my little world; and behold people, circ.u.mstances, opportunities, temper, even health, all get into a new adjustment, and all combine to fill your life with interests, warmth, affection, culture, and growth: you will find it true: good measure, shaken down, heaped together, and running over, shall men give into your bosoms.

Ah! but _what_ can one do? It is so hard to find out the right thing.

Yes; and no possible general rule can be given. You must fix the ideal in your mind, and be sure that in some way or other openings will arise.

I will not touch life at school; you know more about that than I do, and perhaps need not that I should speak of public spirit, and generous temper, and the united life. I will only say that a girl who does not throw herself into school life with the generous wish to give pleasure and to lift the tone around her, does not get more than a fraction of the good that a school life like this can give, and does not do her duty. I speak of later years alone. And in the first instance, and always in the first place, stand the claims of home. I dare say you remember the young lady who wanted to go and learn nursing in a hospital, and was asked by the doctor why she desired this. "Father is paralysed," she said, "and mother is nearly blind, and my sisters are all married, and it is so dull at home; so I thought I should like nursing." I don't want you to emulate that young person. Grudge no love and care at home: no one can give such happiness to parents, brothers, sisters, as you can, and to make people happy is in itself a worthy mission; it is the next best thing to making them good. And remember also, that there are many years before you: and that though it may seem that years are spent with nothing effected except that somehow things have gone more smoothly, you yourself will have been matured, deepened, and consolidated by a life of duty, in a way in which no self-chosen path of life could have trained you. And if, as is quite possible, some of you are impatient already for the exercise of your powers in some great work, I will preach patience to you from another motive. It is this: that you are not yet capable of doing much that is useful, from want of training and general ability. I remember Miss Octavia Hill once saying that she could get any quant.i.ty of money, and any quant.i.ty of enthusiasm, but that her difficulty was to get trained intelligence, either in men or women. So, a few days ago, Miss Clementina Black, who is Hon. Secretary of the Women's Trade a.s.sociation, said to a friend of my own that she had had many voluntary lady helpers of various degrees of education and culture, and that she had found without exception that the highly educated students were the most fitted to do the work well; that they alone were capable of the patience, accuracy, and attention to detail which were one essential quality to the doing of such work, and that they alone could provide the other essentials, which can only spring from a cultivated mind--viz., wideness of view, sense of proportion, and capacity for general interest in other important questions--social, literary, and intellectual. "It is this cultivation of mind which prevents you from being crushed under the difficulty and tedium and disappointment which must attend every effort to teach principles and promote ideal aims among the ma.s.s of ignorant, apathetic, uninterested, and helpless working women, who must themselves in the last resort be the agents in bringing about a better condition of industry."

You may rest a.s.sured that if you set your mind on a career of splendid usefulness for your fellows (and I hope every one of you here aims at this), then you will need all the training that the highest and most prolonged education can give you. Become the most perfect creature you have it in your power to become. If Oxford or Cambridge are open to you, welcome the opportunity, and use the extra power they will give you. If not, then utilise the years that lie before you, in perfecting your accomplishments, in self-education; in interesting and informing yourself on social questions, in enlarging your horizon, while you cheerfully, happily, brilliantly perform _all_ your home duties.

And during this period of preparation which you all must go through, remember that there are some things which you can do better in your inexperience and ignorance than any other people. How is this? Tell me why it would be more comfort, and do more good sometimes to a poor sick woman to bring her a few primroses or daffodils than to give her any substantial relief. The reason is the same. The very freshness and innocence of young faces, that sympathise without having the faintest suspicion of the sin and misery of the world, is more refres.h.i.+ng and helpful than the stronger sympathy of one who really knows all the evil.

You can be primroses and daffodils, and give glimpses into a purer world of love and gentleness and peace.

And if a prolonged training is impossible to you, it is often possible for you to a.s.sist in some humble capacity some lady who is so engaged in work on a scale which you could not yourself touch. Be her handmaid and f.a.g and slave, and so gradually train yourself to become capable of independent action.

But to sum up all I am saying it amounts to this--Where there's a will there's a way, and I want you to have the will.

Did you ever think for what reason you should have had such a splendid time of it in your lives? Not two girls in a thousand are getting such an education as you are, such varied studies, such vigorous public school life, such historic a.s.sociations. And why? Because you are better than others? I think not. It is that you play your part in the great social organism our national life; hundreds are toiling for us, digging, spinning, weaving, mining, building, navigating, that we may have leisure for the thought, the love, the wisdom that shall lighten and direct their lives. You cannot dissociate yourselves from the labouring ma.s.ses, and in particular from the women and girls of England. They are your sisters; and a blight and a curse rests on you if you ignore them, and grasp at all the pleasures and sweetness and cultivation of your life with no thought or toil for them. Their lives are the foundations on which ours rest. It is horrible in one cla.s.s to live without this consciousness of a mutual obligation, and mutual responsibility. All that we get, we get on trust, as trustee for them. I remember that Thring says somewhere, that "no beggar who creeps through the street living on alms and wasting them is baser than those who idly squander at school and afterwards the gifts received on trust."

I know that our cla.s.s education isolates us and separates us from the uneducated and common people as we call them, makes us perhaps regard them as uninteresting, even repellent. Part of what we hope from the girls who come from great schools like this is, that they shall have a larger sympathy, a truer heart. Remember all your life long a saying of Abraham Lincoln's, when he was President of the United States. Some one remarked in his hearing that he was quite a common-looking man.

"Friend," he replied, gently, "the Lord loves common-looking people best; that is why He has made so many of them."

You can all make a _few_ friends out of the lower cla.s.s; you cannot do much; but learn to know and love a few, and then you will do wider good than you suspect.

But you are beginning to ask--Is all this religion? You expected something else. Let me remind you of the man who came to Jesus Christ, and asked Him what he should do to obtain eternal life. And this question, I may explain, means--What shall I do that I may enter on that divine and higher life now while I live; how can I most fully develop my spiritual nature? And the answer was--Love G.o.d; and love your neighbour as yourself. Go outside yourself in love to all that is divine and ideal in thought and duty; go outside yourself in love to your neighbour--and your neighbour is every one with whom you have any relation; and then, and then alone, does your own nature grow to its highest and best. This is the open secret of true religion.

Eastertide is the teacher of ideals. Its great lesson is--"If ye were raised together with Christ, seek the things that are above." If by calling yourself a Christian you mean that you aim at the higher, the spiritual, the divine life, then think of things that are above. [Greek: Ta ano phroneite], think heaven itself. And heaven lies around us in our daily life--not in the cloister, in incense-breathing aisle, in devotions that isolate us, and force a sentiment unreal, morbid, and even false, but in the generous and breathing activities of our life.

Religion glorifies, because it idealizes, that very life we are each called on to lead. Look, therefore, round in your various lives and homes, and ask yourselves what is the ideal life for me here, in this position, as school-girl, daughter, sister, friend, mistress, or in any other capacity. Education ought to enable you to frame an ideal; it ought to give you imagination, and sympathy, and intelligence, and resource; and religion ought to give you the strong motive, the endurance, the width of view, the n.o.bleness of purpose, to make your life a light and a blessing wherever you are.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: An Address given to St. Leonard's School, St. Andrews, on Sunday, April 13, 1890.]