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Page 4
During those ten years of warfare, passing as I did from family to
family, and always concerned with questions that touch upon the
innermost shrine of our life, I necessarily became the recipient of many
hidden sorrows. In fact, my fellow-creatures used me as a bottomless
well into which they could empty their household skeletons; and I used
often to reflect with sardonic satisfaction that I should never run dry
like other old wells, but that death would come and fill me up with a
good wholesome shovelful of earth, and I and my skeletons would lie
quiet together. But in this way I gained a knowledge of what is going on
under the surface of our life, whether we choose to ignore it or not,
which possibly can only come to those who are set apart to be
confessors of their kind; and the conclusion was forced upon me that
this evil, in one form or another, is more or less everywhere--in our
nurseries, in our public, and still more our private, schools,
decorously seated on magisterial benches, fouling our places of
business, and even sanctimoniously seated in our places of worship.
After the first two years of work among women I found that it was
absolutely hopeless attacking the evil from one side only, and I had to
nerve myself as best I could to address large mass meetings of men,
always taking care clearly to define my position--that I had not come
upon that platform to help them, but to ask them to help me in a battle
that I had found too hard for me, and that I stood before them as a
woman pleading for women. The first of these meetings I addressed at the
instance of the late revered Bishop of Durham, Dr. Lightfoot, who took
the chair, and inaugurated the White Cross Movement, which has since
spread over the civilized world. And throughout this most difficult side
of my work I had his priceless co-operation and approval; besides the
wise counsel, guidance, and unfailing sympathy of one whom but to name
is to awake the deepest springs of reverence, Dr. Wilkinson, then the
incumbent of St. Peter's, Eaton Square, afterwards Bishop of Truro, and
now Bishop of St. Andrews. But so great was the effort that it cost me,
that I do not think I could have done this part of my work but for my
two favorite mottoes--the one, that "I can't" is a lie in the lips that
repeat, "I believe in the Holy Ghost"; the other, received from the lips
of Bishop Selwyn, that "If as soldiers of the Cross we stick at
anything, we are disgraced forever."
But lastly, and perhaps best of all, as giving weight to any suggestions
that I may make, across the dismal mud swamp that I often trod with such
an aching heart and faltering steps came to meet me God's best and
highest, with outstretched hands of help and encouragement. It was the
highly-cultivated and thoughtful women who, amidst the storm of obloquy
that beat upon me from every quarter, first ranged themselves by my
side, perceiving that the best way to avoid a danger is not to refuse to
see it. Some were women already in the field in connection with Mrs.
Butler's movement, to which our nation owes so much, some were roused by
my words.
In all our large towns where I formed Associations for the Care of
Friendless Girls I was in the habit of reporting my work to the clergy
of my own church, whose sympathy and cooperation I shall ever gratefully
acknowledge. Ultimately, the leading laity, as well as some
Nonconformist ministers, joined with us; often these conferences were
diocesan meetings--to which, however, Nonconformists were invited--with
the Bishop of the diocese in the chair; and after my address free
discussion took place, so that I had the advantage of hearing the
opinions and judgments of many of our leading men in regard to this
difficult problem, and getting at men's views of the question.
The matter that I lay before you, therefore, has been thoroughly and
repeatedly threshed out at such conferences, as well as in long,
earnest, private talks with the wisest and most experienced mothers and
teachers of our day; and it is in their name, far more than in my own,
that I ask you to ponder what I say.
Do not, however, be under any fear that I intend in these pages to make
myself the medium of all sorts of horrors. I intend to do no such thing.
It is but very little evil that you will need to know, and that not in
detail, in order to guard your own boys. We women, thank God, have to do
with the fountain of sweet waters, clear as crystal, that flow from the
throne of God; not with the sewer that flows from the foul imaginations
and actions of men. Our part is the inculcation of positive purity, not
the part of negative warning against vice. Nor need you fear that the
evil you must know, in order to fulfil your most sacred trust, will
sully you. This I say emphatically, that the evil which we have grappled
with to save one of our own dear ones does not sully. It is the evil
that we read about in novels and newspapers, for our own amusement; it
is the evil that we weakly give way to in our lives; above all, it is
the destroying evil that we have refused so much as to know of in our
absorbing care for our own alabaster skin--it is _that_ evil which
defiles the woman. But the evil that we have grappled with in a life and
death struggle to save a soul for whom Christ died does not sully: it
clothes from head to foot with the white robe, it crowns with the golden
crown. Though I have had to know what, thank God! no other woman may
ever again be called upon to know, I can yet speak of the great conflict
that involved this knowledge as being the one great purifying,
sanctifying influence of my life. But even if, as men would often
persuade us, the knowledge of the world's evil would sully us, I know I
utter the heart of every woman when I say that we choose the hand that
is sullied in saving our own dear ones from the deep mire that might
otherwise have swallowed them up, rather than the hand that has kept
itself white and pure because it has never been stretched out to save.
That hand may be white, but in God's sight it is white with the
whiteness of leprosy. Believe, rather, the words of James Hinton,
written to a woman friend: "You women have been living in a dreamland of
your own; but dare to live in this poor disordered world of God's, and
it will work out in you a better goodness than your own,"--even that
purified womanhood, strong to know, and strong to save, before whose
gracious loveliness the strongest man grows weak as a child, and, as a
little child, grows pure.
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