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Page 12
[Footnote 4: See a little White Cross paper entitled, _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, 'cockles,' 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 'planishing,' 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 "planishing" 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 passion
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
God," 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 appetites, to the moral personality, with its conscience
and will? On the one hand, seeing the fatal proneness of man to obey his
appetites 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 appetites 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.
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