The Girl and Her Religion Part 9

When we can calmly look at our schools, recognize the tremendous difficulties under which they work, realize their limitations, and with profound belief in what they have done, grat.i.tude for what they are doing and confidence in what they are going to do, get at our task of setting teachers free and vitalizing courses of study, we shall be able to generate in them all the atmosphere in which the girl will find inspiration for n.o.ble living.

Where can the girl turn for the life giving atmosphere? To the church?

Yes, if the church were awake to the facts and equipped to meet her needs. But what a small part of our country's girlhood comes into direct contact with the church, and how few churches have adequate leadership provided for those whom it does touch. The whole problem of adolescence is a problem of leadership. A wise leader has almost unlimited power in charging the atmosphere with the spirit of uplift. The church _must_ furnish leadership. It _must_ guide or lose its youth. It must advise with practical, possible advice.

Perhaps the day will come when groups of churches will unite in forming social centers and the business men of those churches shall _seriously_ consider the problem of where girls shall meet their young men friends and how they shall spend their evenings together. Perhaps some day the men of the church will select in their community a good, clean moving picture house, and there are some, where they can advise their young people to go, helping them thus to escape the snare of those who cater to evil.

Those most deeply interested in a girl's religion, have come to see its relation to every other phase of her life, and to know that one may not s.n.a.t.c.h amus.e.m.e.nts from the lives of young people, giving nothing in return.

Just what is wisest to give in return is our great problem. The church _must_ meet it and it needs help.

The time is ripe and more than ripe for the direct appeal to the home. It should be made through every avenue and in every language.

It should be made through every newspaper and printed in every tongue--"_Responsibility_ belongs to the home." All sorts of homes must help in making the atmosphere in which a young girl must live, _safe_, free from poisons that mean suffering and in the long run death to the best things.

I happened one day in a smoke laden city upon a group of women in one of the residential districts who were meeting together to see if all the families for a certain number of blocks east and west would promise to use only hard coal in their homes. One of the women, the mother of three young children, pictured vividly the difference it would make in the atmosphere their children must breathe and closed her appeal by saying, "But women, it means that we must _all_ burn it. The help one or two of us can give amounts to almost nothing. Into each of our cellars the hard coal must go and each of us must insist upon using nothing else. Then we shall have clean, pure air for our babies to breathe throughout all this section."

She had stated the answer to the whole problem of bringing inspiration to our girls. It will need _every_ home and _every_ church to keep the atmosphere clean and invigorating.

It may be that the girl herself is reading and thinking over this _Plea_ and _Promise_. If she is she will realize how earnestly we covet for her all the best things and how we long for wisdom to help her get them.

Perhaps she will think that _she_ can do a great deal toward getting them for herself, _and she can_. Let me recall to her mind one of the girls whom we find in almost every gymnasium cla.s.s, whose pale face and stooping shoulders attract at once the instructor's attention. Let me remind her of the special exercises given that girl for chest development, the advice about food and the command, "Live with your windows open. Let the air into your lungs." Again and again you will remember the instructor gave the command to the cla.s.s, "_Breathe_. Use your lungs! Half of you use only two-thirds of your lung capacity!" And then by way of emphasis she contrasted her own chest expansion and yours, adding, "If you want health, take deep breaths."

The Plea which I make to the girl herself is that she use, to the full capacity, her power to inhale those things that shall give inspiration for pure, helpful living. Every girl has that power. Some use only two-thirds of it, some one third, some have forgotten its existence. If a girl wants to really live she must "breathe deep," with her soul's windows open wide to the atmosphere that will give her strength. If she is obliged to live with those who do not think of these things, whose own spirits are starved, she can seek friends who will help, she can go to the places where her mind and soul are stirred as well as her senses, she can find in good books great uplift and courage. She will, if she truly wants inspiration and help to live n.o.bly, attend regularly some church where the service makes her long to be her best. She will, if possible, join some cla.s.s where she can study the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, who _now_ even as when He was here, lifts those who listen to Him out of failure and discouragement into hope, in whose presence every girl may breathe in the atmosphere filled with life giving power.

If a girl responds to this _Plea_ to open her soul to the great Giver of life, I can _Promise_ that she will find true happiness and joy.

XVII

A PERSON NOT A FACT

Every thoughtful person craves facts. They are cold, hard, sometimes disconcerting but they carry weight. "It is a fact, it has been proven,"

hushes many a query and silences many an argument. And yet it is not in the array of facts which can be given at any moment that young people find their incentives and inspirations. They may have all the facts at their tongue's end but lack the fire which shall transfuse those facts into power to act in accordance with their teachings. Julius Caesar is a fact. A girl may have no doubt of his existence, she may not question the great events of his life, but he does not stir her to action. The fact of George Washington does not awaken the patriotism of a girl and in schools where merely the facts regarding his life are given his influence is practically negative. But whenever the facts have been breathed upon by a sympathetic spirit and the fact George Washington transformed into the personality that lives in the girl's presence then his influence begins to count.

It is not the facts about Abraham Lincoln that engender heroism. The facts may be presented in such a way as to hold but pa.s.sing interest. I have heard the life and times of Abraham Lincoln taught that way. But I have seen Abraham Lincoln presented to a cla.s.s of foreign girls by one to whom he had become a friend as real and genuine as if he stood by her side. As I listened _I_ saw Abraham Lincoln. I felt the kindness and patience of his great soul, the honest purpose and the fine courage of his life. The facts were there in that lesson but more than the facts were there. _He_ was there. At the close of the lesson that teacher looking into the faces of the girls who represented nearly every land across the sea said to them, "What do you think of him?" One girl responded eagerly "I think he was _grand_!" and a dark-haired intense girl, her black eyes glowing, rose and said with an earnestness and fervor I can _never_ forget, "I _love_ him!" "You shall hear more tomorrow," said the teacher, and they looked as if it were hard to wait.

A careful observation of the ways of presenting great men of history and great characters in literature to young people will convince one beyond doubt that the girl may store the _facts_ in the memory for a time, but if the living personality is presented _it_ will remain to mold and guide and influence the life. The teacher's greatest power is never in what she teaches but in what is revealed to the individual through her teaching. The mind hungers for facts, searches for facts and wearies of facts. It follows personality.

When Richard Watson Gilder tried to voice the plea of the young doubter, puzzled, perplexed and suffering from the great array of apparently conflicting facts and most of all from his own failure to win out over the temptations that swept over him he said:

"Thou Christ, my soul is hurt and bruised!

With words the scholars wear me out; My brain o'erwearied and confused, Thee, myself and all, I doubt.

And must I back to darkness go Because I cannot say a creed?

I know not what I think! I know Only that _Thou_ art what I need."

The fact is not enough. John Kendrick Bangs says it forcibly--

"A mere acceptance of the fact of love of G.o.d above, Of all the vast omnipotence of Him our Maker and Defence Is not believing."

Slowly we are getting back to the recognition of the proper place of fact, of its power as the background and basis against which and upon which Personality must stand. Our eyes are opening to see that if the girl is to gain a religion which shall mean life, she must gain it through a person who reveals a _Person_.

Here is Mary D----, a girl of fifteen, a worker in a mill employing a very cheap grade of help. Her face was hard, there was no light of antic.i.p.ation in her eyes--she had nothing to antic.i.p.ate. She toiled through the long hours, for there was no limit to her day in the state where she lives. Her home was not a home but a place where she could stay nights--when her father was not so quarrelsome through cheap drink that he drove her out. One day a woman at a noon service in the factory shocked at a profane remark of Mary's said reprovingly, "Don't you believe there is a G.o.d?" "Sure I do," said Mary, "but I don't see's it makes no difference to me." Further questions followed and Mary declared her belief, adding, "I don't bother much about them things."

Mary had some _facts_ and declared some sort of belief in them, but they made _no difference_.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FUTURE PROMISES NOTHING AND SHE HAS LOST HOPE]

The next summer, Mary, overcome by the work of the year and an attack of the grippe, was sent by a woman in one of the churches, to a girl's camp. She lived in decent fashion, she saw a lake, great mountains, sunsets and stars! She found flowers and sat quite still watching birds that seemed so marvelous to her.

Slowly she grew strong. One night she went to the sloping bank by the lake under the great pine trees to attend the twilight service. The sky was crimson with the sunset and there was a wonderful path of light across the lake. The songs and the beauty moved Mary's soul. She wanted something with all her heart that she had never wanted before. She did not know what it (the great change) was at first, but before she slept she turned to another girl in the tent and expressed it as best she could--"I want to be _good_," she said.

Through the weeks that followed she saw in the faces, in the kindness and courtesy, in the good times she had never known, in the women who planned them and in the songs and talks at sunset a _Person_. She heard His name often. He represented all of the happiness and comfort she had ever known and one day with all the eagerness of an awakened soul she said, "I love Him." They told her what changes must come in the life of a girl who said those words and meant them, for they had seen the faults in her and they were many. She was undaunted by all they said she must do, and answered in her uncouth fashion, "I'd die doin' them fur Him."

They wanted her to leave the mill but she said no, one of the girls was leaving and she was to have her place with lighter work. She wanted to go back and tell the girls some things, she said.

Not three years have pa.s.sed but Mary D---- is a new girl. She is attractive; one can scarcely believe unless he has seen it. She is clean; she is happy. Her friends secured a position for her father out-of-doors where he had loved to work as a boy. Mary took him to the Mission and there he promised to begin the fight against his enemy. The men in the Mission helped. Regular pay made a decent home possible. They have begun to live.

Overcome by the effects of ignorance and sin, failures as citizens, as individuals, as human souls, they met a _Person_ and life was transformed. If it were possible to replace in every factory for Mary D---- who a.s.sented to the facts but pa.s.sed them by as having nothing to do with her, Mary D---- who met a Person and loved Him what a world of new moral forces we could create!

He was revealed to Mary D---- not in the abstract which could not impress her but in the concrete which she understood. O if only we _could_ grasp the significance of that!

Ruth M---- was a college junior with ancestry and wealth, brilliant, sarcastic, selfish. She knew all the facts and accepted them. She was a member of a church with which she had united at fourteen as had her mother and grandmother before her. She did not think much about the facts, they had not greatly impressed her. If questioned, she promptly stated that she believed this and that, she thought such and such things were probable though no one could prove them, and dismissed the subject to talk of her own plans and interests.

Then her great sorrow came. In a moment she lost everything dear to her.

They called it an accident. She held G.o.d accountable and in bitterness and anger turned her back upon all the facts. The months pa.s.sed and her health breaking she was obliged to leave college. At the beautiful health resort to which she went she met a girl she had known well when a little child. They renewed the friendship. Then the girl's sorrow came.

It was not death, it was far worse, scandal and disgrace in her family, which had been unstained before. Out of a clear sky it came.

In amazement Ruth watched her friend. She saw her suffer but she saw no conquering bitterness, heard no words of wild rebellion. She looked into a sweet calm face and saw a girl less than twenty, with life's conditions changed in a moment, adjust herself to the new conditions and go on. Seeking a solution she questioned her friend and met a Person. Day after day as she saw Him revealed in that heroic life, as she beheld the girl overcoming in His strength natural resentment against the injustice and unkindness of those who would make her suffer for the sins of her parents, the facts were swallowed up in the Person and she loved Him.

Together, the past summer, in a rest camp for mothers and babies they worked out the commands of the Person who had made it possible for them to take up life after bitter loss and find it sweet.

If one could summon to a central place the girls who have met the Person what an inspiration they would be! Of every sort and condition, of every color and nation, speaking languages new and old and dialects that have never been written, all uniting in the testimony that He has made life great for them.

The facts are in chaotic state. Parts of truth and segments of universal fact are waiting for man to unite them. Only the perfect whole can speak with certainty and we must wait for that. The creeds are countless. They do not matter much. The Person said little about them. They are just our poor attempts to put in words--G.o.d and His will. It is

"Not the Christ of our subtile creeds But the Lord of our hearts, of our homes, Of our hopes, our prayers, our needs; The brother of want and blame, The lover of woman and men, With a love that puts to shame All pa.s.sions of mortal ken."

The only way to meet a fact is to face it, follow it and see where it will lead. It is prejudice that blinds one's eyes to facts. It is only man's limited vision, that makes a part seem as a whole, that accepts as _fact_ the thing he would _like_ to be a fact, that one need fear. Facts that _are_ facts need never cause one to doubt. For fact is truth and truth leads to G.o.d. The business of every church and every teacher of religion is to discover the facts, _and present the Person_.

If the girl herself is reading these words let her be a.s.sured that more than any array of facts that she can gather, more than any proofs man can summon, she needs the Person. The handicapped girl finds in Him strength to triumph in spite of it, the privileged girl finds in Him the inspiration for her work of extending her privileges, the girl who is easily led to find in Him one who never leads astray, the girl who is misunderstood can find in Him one who understands perfectly, the indifferent girl who "means to" will find in Him a friend to encourage, steady and compel, the girl who worships the twin idols can find in Him a rescuer who shall set her free, the girl of high ideals will see in Him the highest Ideal, the source of all the others, and the average girl of the every day with her good points and bad, her successes and failures, will find in Him a Friend who will make life seem wonderfully worth while.

Don't let the mult.i.tude of things in which you are interested, the maze of contradiction, the abstract facts, the trials and hardships of life, the pleasures you love, or any other thing make you pa.s.s Him by. If you gain everything else in life and miss Him you will fail to know what life means. If you find Him you will find Love and that is the best thing life can give.

XVIII