Stray Thoughts for Girls Part 7

Some of you seem to think you will not have to give account of holidays to G.o.d--_I_ think you will be more called to account for them, for then you have a chance of showing your real stuff.

And when you are grown up, and quite free, feel that you are still more responsible.

Enjoy yourself to the top of your bent, but see that each day you gain new power to do what you ought, and what you make up your mind to do; and remember that this power is only gained in the using--and dies out if we do not use it. I shall be horribly disappointed if you do not gain this power, and if you do not use it well, "to the Glory of G.o.d and the Relief of Man's Estate."

Be ambitious--be all you were meant to be; make the world different; be generous--freely you have received, freely give.

Some one said to me the other day, "Girls are younger nowadays, and they go on being young till they are well through middle life. At sixteen we had to look after other people, but they shirk responsibility, till women of thirty are content to be like birds of the air, just amusing themselves, and feeling no call to be of any serious use."

I said, "Well, _I_ do not like to see even a girl of eighteen with no _raison d'etre_, 'living like a prize animal!'"

Why were you born? G.o.d thought about you, and took trouble about you, and has something you can do for Him. To exist beautifully is not enough! Have you definite duties, which you stick to even though they bore you, _e.g._, house duties, or reading aloud, or lessons with the younger ones? If not, find some!

Marcus Aurelius counted each day lost in which he could not at night look back on something he had done for others.

Jeremy Taylor, in the "Golden Grove," says:--"Suppose every day to be a day of business: for your whole life is a race and a battle; a merchandise, a journey. Every day propounds to yourself a rosary or chaplet of works, to present to G.o.d at night."

I have given you three pieces of advice--

I.--Vote on the right side in conversation.

II.--Show that you love your mother.

III.--Put salt into every day.

I would end with one more. I take it from Saint Simon, that clever on-looker at the Court of Louis XIV. whose memoirs are famous. His morning greeting to himself was--

_"Get up, M. le Comte! you have great things to do to-day."_

You will all of you go out to lives that you _can_ make empty and self-indulgent and narrow if you like; you _can_ shirk duties and eat capriciously or intemperately, and lie in bed too long; you _can_ idle about all day amusing yourself, and fill your mind with dress and gossip and spite;--perhaps you would feel there was "no harm" in such a life!

_No harm!_ I would rather hear you were dead than that you lived a life like that!

On the other hand, every day of your life you _can_ make the wings of your soul grow by an honest bit of self-denial, by an honest bit of work for others, by an honest bit of mental work.

Every day you can be _more worth having_; there is not one of you here who has not the power to make herself--and to _pray_ herself--into a n.o.ble, dutiful woman.

_"Get up, M. le Comte! you have great things to do to-day."_

[Footnote 3: Gray's Letters to W. Mann.]

A Friday Lesson.

Our course of lessons for this term brings us to-day to Jephthah's story; to decide on the amount of blame due to the father is not a matter which so nearly concerns us as to learn the lesson of true womanhood taught us by the daughter. Hers was no blind obedience; her reason for sacrificing herself gives us the true position of a woman as a helpmeet, and as a helpmeet in the performance of public duty. "If thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord"--her father must do his duty at all costs, and she will help him to do it, even at the cost of her own life. The place of every woman is to make duty possible and imperative for those about her--for brother, sister, husband, friend. How many women keep their menkind back from public duty by their fretfulness about the inconveniences entailed on themselves? A clergyman or doctor has to face fatigue or infection,--a citizen wishes to vote according to his conscience and against his interest: how often a woman--wife, sister, or mother--puts expediency before him, persuades him that "'second best' will do," instead of aiming at "one equal temper of heroic hearts."

Besides the love of her country and the sense of public duty, which shine out in Jephthah's daughter, notice the plain lesson of simple obedience, "That she subdued her to her Father's will."

The ideal of obedience is less thought of now than in the "Ages of Faith,"--perhaps, in one way, this is only a right development; but, though obedience is a "young" stage of moral growth, it is a necessary one,--mankind went through it, and each man or woman worth the name must go through it even as our Lord Himself did. I recognize the strength, the North-country virtue of "grit" in such independence and st.u.r.diness as that of the Yorkes in "Shirley," but the willing and reasonable obedience of a strong nature seems to me still higher--it is a n.o.bler att.i.tude of mind to feel, "I don't care whether I get my own way in this or that, or am my own master; I want to be in touch with the larger, higher life around me,"

that larger life of moral growth into which only a humble, teachable nature can enter. The larger, stronger nature--the big dog--yields gladly to its master; the small terrier nature loves to find an opportunity to yap and snarl. There is nothing fine about the unreasoning instinct to resent an order--it is rather the sign of a small nature. To take the commonest instances, when you are told to go to bed, or to mend your dress, or to put on a wrap, or to tidy your room, are you in any way a finer nature if you dawdle and argue and resent the order? Nothing is so small as self-sufficiency and self-centredness, whereas humility and obedience are of the Nature of our Lord Himself, and every humble and obedient soul is in communion with His Greatness. Dante's hierarchy of heaven, "in order serviceable," in ordered ranks, culminating in G.o.d Himself, gives us a feeling of harmonious greatness which is lacking in the scattered units of his "Inferno." It was only ign.o.ble greatness which preferred to reign in h.e.l.l rather than serve in Heaven.

It may be that, in the maturer stages of life, obedience ceases to be a primary virtue. I am not at all clear when that mature stage begins,--but all would admit, in theory, that a n.o.ble character must have obedience as a foundation. I think it would help you if you could step outside your own momentary irritation at being ordered to do this or that, and see how unlovely it is to argue and stand on your rights and contest points. The essence of good breeding is to give way to others; quite apart from the consideration of the "Fifth Commandment," a thorough-bred person would shudder at the rude tone of voice, the snappishness, the contentiousness, the contradiction which many girls--otherwise "nice" girls--allow themselves to show in speaking to their mothers. How many of you feel quite guiltless on this score? I am afraid you would often have to blush if a stranger, to whom you looked up, could hear the way you answer back at home.

You half feel as though it were "fine" not to be ordered about;--but the "best" people in the Christian sense of the word, and the "best" people in the worldly sense, inherit the feelings of the ages of chivalry, that, the n.o.bler a man was, the more deference and service he showed to others: "_Ich dien_" is the motto of chivalry and worldly greatness.--"I am among you as he that serveth" was the saying of Him Who, "though He were a Son,"

"learnt obedience." For this next week, when you are tempted to answer back--to be independent--to resent being ordered--remember how much more beautiful, how much more n.o.ble, is a humble submissive temper, than the miserably small ambition of being your own master. Do not be so small-minded as to contest and resent authority. You sometimes hear a servant say, "That's not my place," or "I won't be put upon." You never hear a true lady speak in that temper,--and yet, is there any difference in spirit between this tone which you would condemn, and your own way of answering back? You cannot get out of bad habits all at once, but get your ideal right, and you will grow to it. If you are not living in your own family, and feel inclined to resent orders, remember the days of chivalry, when all pages (often princes by birth) spent their youth serving in other people's houses, and learning the motto of every true knight, "I serve."

And whether with strangers or at home, remember Him Who was subject unto His parents, Him of Whom Jephthah's daughter was but a faint type.

A Home Art; or, Mothers and Daughters.

Know your own work, and do it.

This is a simple sounding rule, but we all find practical difficulties in following it. You have most of you lately left school, and I think the difficulty of the first part of this saying must have struck some of you.

At school you knew your own work,--you had a certain time-table, you walked with the crutches of routine; and when you left school and found your day mostly at your own disposal, you learnt that a free life is far more difficult, and therefore far n.o.bler, than a life under direction.

It was pleasant at first to be able to carry out your own fancies, but you awoke after a while to the fact that you were not spending holidays but living your real life; and then the thought must have come, if you had any stuff in you, "I must anyhow live my life; am I living it n.o.bly?"

How can you live a n.o.ble life? Bacon gives us, perhaps, the best answer when he says that "the end of all learning should be the Glory of G.o.d and the Relief of Man's Estate." Shall this be the result of your school learning? Others can speak to you from experience, as I cannot, of the glory and happiness of a life spent in the Relief of Man's Estate: I would speak to you of a preliminary stage of work for that relief, of some of the difficulties which beset girls on first leaving school, and owing to which so much n.o.ble aspiration and unselfish enthusiasm run to waste.

I believe one of the main difficulties is _friction at home_; a difficulty on which I the rather dwell because it is harder, for those who know you personally, to speak of it without irritating you, or else criticizing your home. How is this home difficulty met? Some meet it by leaving home,--which reminds me of the minister who said in his sermon, "This is a serious difficulty in our belief, my brethren; let us look it boldly in the face,--and pa.s.s it by." Some lay themselves open to _Punch's_ attack, when he depicts a girl saying, "Mamma has become quite blind now, and papa is paralytic, and it makes the house so dull that I'm going to be a hospital nurse."

Many who are too clear-sighted to neglect home duties, yet leave this difficulty unfaced, in that they look for all the pleasure of their life outside home, and within that home allow themselves to live in an atmosphere of friction and peevishness. The girl who does that has left the riddle of home life unsolved: she was meant to wrestle with that difficulty till she wrung from it the blessing, the peace which comes only from self-conquest and acceptance of all the circ.u.mstances of her life.

Have any of you the lurking thought, "I was born by no choice of my own: those who brought me into the world owe duty to me, not I to them?" I have known some say this, and I have known many act as if they thought it, and I have known some who felt as if G.o.d had better work for them to do outside home, and have either gone off to do it, or have chafed against life because they could not go. It does seem to me that the present very general eclipse of the old Roman virtue of filial piety lies at the root of much of the unsound work, and of the undone work, of the present day.

Know your own work, and do it. What is your work on leaving school? Is it not to learn to fit into your home? At school, when you got your remove, your duty was to get into the work of the new form, and to do it. You have now been moved to higher and far more difficult work than any sixth form, you are in the school of home. Are you learning its lessons, or are you fretting for a remove? It may be you find life so easy and pleasant at home that you feel any talk of its difficulties does not apply to you; it is all play so far. But I know so many who feel this friction on leaving school, that I am sure it must be the case with some of you.

If any here fail to feel the debt they owe at home--the debt which G.o.d enforced as next to the debt owed to Himself--let me remind them that the whole instinct of mankind has responded to the appeal of parents; filial piety has always been reverenced and held beautiful, and the hereditary sense of mankind must be taken into account in deciding what is, or is not, a virtue. But supposing I granted, for the sake of argument, that the original debt was on your parents' side and not on yours, what then? You remain as bound as ever to show them submission and devotion; all, in short, that the old-fashioned believers in the Fifth Commandment thought to be due from a daughter. If you are striving after a n.o.ble life you must give all this,--if you owe allegiance to either the Christian ideal of love or to the Pagan one of strength. "If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love G.o.d Whom he hath not seen?" and, equally, if he love not his brother close at hand, how can he love brethren afar off?

It is a poor sort of love which lavishes itself on self-chosen and, therefore, less irritating objects of charity, and is powerless to influence the home atmosphere. It is a poor sort of strength which shrinks from the hardest fight, from the conquest of self at home.

Is not every right and wise piece of good work for others an attempt to help them to train themselves to live a higher life? And can we dare to put our hand to this plough while neglecting our own training?

I was asked to speak to you about WORK, and you may think I am forgetting this in dwelling on home life. Not at all; I am looking on home life not as an end in itself, but as G.o.d's great training-school for His best workers; as the special place for the development of those qualities which are essential to all true and lasting work for "the Relief of Man's Estate."

I do not think I underrate the difficulties girls find; quite apart from her own faults and weaknesses, a girl who leaves school and goes home has probably three difficulties to contend with.

First, the change from restraint to liberty, which is a difficult phase in every life. Will you make it a change from "the rich bounties of constraint" to self-restraint, which is better still; or will you let it be a change to the weak lawlessness of a drifting life? If you would respect yourselves, and be worthy to take part in the great battle between good and evil, make and keep some rules for yourselves. Have a rule about getting up in the morning and (almost equally important) about going to bed at night; a rule against novels in the morning; a rule to read something sensible every day. Make what rule you please, only keep it, or you will never be more than a c.u.mberer of the ground. Reading is the best thing to save your life from being eaten away by trifles. The best advisers say to a man taking a country living, "Read, read, read;" I say to you, read doggedly; the snare of a free life is desultory reading. Make any plan of stiff reading you like, and stick to it for one year, writing out notes of what you read, and you will be fitter for real work if it comes, as come it will.

I dare say you find reading is cold work,--very few women really enjoy knowledge for its own sake,--you are tempted to throw it up, and to drift in an easy good-tempered way, which pleases the others much more than your shutting yourself up to read. And the others are quite right in expecting you, now school is over, to be a woman, "with a heart at leisure from itself" and from self-improvement. One of the hardest home lessons for some girls to learn is the power of sitting idle and chatting. They feel it waste of time; they long to be doing something tangible; and yet a home atmosphere is mainly the result of the mother having acquired the art of leisure. You will be very unrestful house-mothers when your turn comes, and very unsatisfactory daughters and sisters in the mean time, if you are always at high pressure, and giving your family to understand that you must not be spoken to!

Too often the girl, who by dint of conscientious struggles keeps up real study, gets out of touch with her surroundings, and sees the stream of family confidences, and affections, and appeals for help and sympathy flowing towards the easy-going sister, who makes no struggles of any kind.

Your great wish is to be a true woman, "with continual comfort in her face." Are your books, and your self-discipline, and your time-table, only a hindrance to this? Must you starve either head or heart? Why cannot you seem outwardly at leisure, and yet live an inner life of thought and work?

It needs self-denial, forethought, economy of time, and that most Christian grace of tact; but these are all attainable, all part of that Wisdom which "orders all things sweetly and strongly," and which is the rightful heritage of every true woman. Let no delusion about amiability induce you to leave off reading and study, only be very discreet as to how and when you do it.