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Page 6
But though you cannot keep him from the knowledge of evil, you can be a
potent factor in teaching him the hidden dangers that beset him, in
seeing that his young feet rest on the rock of true knowledge, and not
on the shifting quagmire of the devil's lies; but above all, in
inspiring him with a high ideal of conduct, which will make him shrink
from everything low and foul as he would from card-sharping or sneaking,
proving yourself thus to him as far as in you lies--
"A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light."
The boy thus mothered is saved as a rule from all physical risk.
And this in part anticipates my second point. You cannot let this
question alone if you are to aim at the highest for your boy. High
character is more to be accounted of than long life. And it is to you,
as a woman, that the guarding of the higher springs of his nature is
especially entrusted. My whole experience has gone to teach me, with
ever-increasing force, that the proposition that purity is vitally
necessary for the woman, but of comparatively small account for the man,
is absolutely false. Granted that, owing to social ostracism, the
outward degradation of impurity to the woman is far greater, I contend
that a deeper inner debasement is its sure fruition in the man. Cruelty
and lies are its certain accompaniment. As Burns, with a poet's insight,
has truly said:
"But oh! it hardens a' within,
And petrifies the feeling."
Yes, it is exactly that; "it hardens all within"--hardens and darkens.
It is as our Lord says: only "the pure in heart" are capable of divine
vision. Only the man who has kept himself pure, who has never sullied
his white faith in womanhood, never profaned the sacred mysteries of
life and love, never fouled his manhood in the stye of the beast--it is
only that man who can see God, who can see duty where another sees
useless sacrifice, who can see and grasp abiding principles in a world
of expediency and self-interest, and discern
"In temporal policy the eternal Will,"
who can see God in the meanest of His redeemed creatures. It is only
the virginal heart that has kept itself pure, that grows not old, but
keeps its freshness, its innocent gaiety, its simple pleasures. The
eminent Swiss Professor, Aim� Humbert, does but echo these words from
the sadder side, when, speaking of the moral malady which is the result
of impurity, he says:
"It does not attack any single organ of the human frame, but it
withers all that is human--mind, body, and soul. It strikes our
youth at the unhappy moment when they first cross the thresholds of
vice. For them the spring has no more innocent freshness; their
very friendships are polluted by foul suggestions and memories;
they become strangers to all the honorable relations of a pure
young life; and thus we see stretching wider and wider around us
the circle of this mocking, faded, worn-out, sceptical youth,
without poetry and without love, without faith and without joy."
Too soon and too earnestly we cannot teach our boys that the flaming
sword, turning all ways, which guards the tree of life for him, is
purity.
But thirdly, there are wider issues than the welfare, physical and
moral, of our own boys which make it impossible for us to take up any
neutral attitude on this question. We cannot remain indifferent to that
which affects so deeply both the status and the happiness of women. We
cannot accept a standard for men which works out with the certainty of a
mathematical law a pariah class of women. We cannot leave on one side
the anguish of working-class mothers just because we belong to the
protected classes, and it is not our girls that are sacrificed. At
least, we women are ceasing to be as base as that, and God forgive us
that, from want of thought rather than from want of heart, educated
women could be found even to hold that the degradation of their own
womanhood is a necessity!
Take but one instance out of the many that crossed my _via dolorosa_ of
the anguish inflicted on the mothers of the poor. I take it, not because
it is uncommon, but because it is typical.
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