The Hour Before the Dawn

CONTENTS — PART I.

PART II. POST NAUFRAGIUM TABULA.

The attitude of the heart and will towards God differs so much in men whose past lives may have been equally guilty, that widely different motives are presented to the one and the other by those who would be God’s messengers to them. The voice of God is always the voice of love, for God is love; but as he invites and persuades and reassures some, so he uses terrors and denunciations with others, that, when they refuse to be drawn, he may scourge and drive his wanderers home.

There is a wide difference between you to whom I have been speaking, who are deeply persuaded of your own sinfulness, whose aching hearts conceal much of secret pain and sorrow, and others of whom I am about to speak. There are men around us who are daily poisoning the springs of our social and national life. They are the children of luxury, prosperous leaders in sin—heartless, self-indulgent, fashionable, audacious, triumphant sinners, who are selling their strength, and health, and rank, and manhood to Satan,—trading as long as they can on their personal advantages, graceful manners, light wit, knowledge of all the arts of seduction and ways of the world, and, if these fail, having recourse to solid gold, the price of iniquity, the price of blood and of souls. These men require costly sacrifices to be made at the shrine of lechery. They drag with them into the whirlpool of destruction everything they can lay 27their hands on that is sweetest and most beautiful in creation. Their haunts are the “dark places of the earth,” which are “full of the habitations of cruelty.” Cruel, ruthless, and desolating, they dispense plagues and death wherever they move by the very infection of their breath. Gentler natures, easily destroyed, and hardly if ever restored, fall before their devouring lusts; the bodies and souls of tender women are to them as though they had been expressly designed and created to be destroyed and broken to pieces for the relief of men’s basest needs, as sheep and oxen are provided to be slain for the satisfying of their hunger. These are they who have “the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart; who, being past feeling, have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness;” “filthy dreamers, who defile the flesh;” “speaking evil of those things which they know not; but what they know naturally as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves.” “Clouds are they without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.”

“Speaking evil of those things which they know not” is frequently in the sacred writings linked together with the practices of gross sensualists. Experience confirms this observation; these sensualists are also the cynics and scoffers, who continually sneer at the good of which they know nothing. In 28all their speech they aim at lowering the moral standard around them to the level of their own, and at reducing the general tone to the colour of their own minds; and thus they succeed in silencing the last whispers of conscience, which might disturb them in the midst of their profligacy by bringing to them from time to time the consciousness of a purer atmosphere not far off. They affect, until it becomes a reality to them, a profound scepticism as to the existence of any virtue, or possibility of virtue, or of any sincerity or unselfishness in the world. They see nothing but their own selfish and impure souls reflected in the society around them; they are unable to see anything else, a total blindness having fallen upon them, as upon the men of Sodom, from whose raging passions even the angels of God needed to be sheltered. They have become dead to the perception of moral worth and beauty. They are so given up to the flesh, that every thought which presents itself to the mind, every sight, every sound, comes to them loaded with heavy chains of impure and degrading associations. They are so petrified in scepticism, that if Christ himself in all his divine perfection of character were once again to appear among us, their estimate of him would be that of the fashionable profligates of his own time on earth, “a gluttonous man and a winebibber.” So tainted is the whole being of such men with the poisonous atmosphere of their Circean existence, that the divinest guests who should attempt an entrance into their breasts would be changed by them into swine; to them all that is best and sweetest in man, woman, or child, is born of evil, and tends to evil.

29And this moral blight is not reserved for those alone who are long experienced in evil. In many lands, and now partially in our own, the foulest vice is so instituted and organised as to supply a training in impure principle and in guilty practice to our youth from their earliest years. “It strikes our youth at that unhappy moment when first they cross the threshold of the abodes of officially-regulated vice; and when they recross that threshold to the purer air, O God! what fatal deed has not been done! For them the spring of life has no more flowers; the very friendships of their youth are polluted; they become strangers to all the honourable relations of a pure young life: and thus it is that more and more in these days we see stretching wider and wider around us the circle of this mocking, faded, worn-out, sceptical youth, without poetry, without love, without enthusiasm, without faith, and without joy.”^[4]

A dilution of this moral poison, this disbelief in God and in goodness, creeps upwards into the higher moral strata; it is communicated from the “lewd fellows of the baser sort” (for of the baser sort they are, though often the proudest blood of the aristocracy flows in their veins), to the minds of many who are worthy of a better creed; and we feel it around us, entering our homes through the pages of many books and writings, wherein these mournful cynics treat, in a hard and untruthful spirit, of all the most holy relations of life, of the tenderest and deepest secrets of the heart, as well as the deeper and more sacred mysteries of Providence, of which, 30indeed, they cannot but speak falsely and blindly, since they are ignorant of them, and have not the key wherewith to unlock such knowledge. These also are guilty, though it may be unconsciously so, of cruelty, because they rob men of hope, without which earth is darkness; “because,” saith the Lord, “with lies ye have made the heart of the righteous sad, whom I have not made sad;” because, in envy of the good which they have not found or have forfeited, they perpetually deny its existence, and spread around them the infection of despair.

“A licentious age is parent of a cruel age,”^[5] and in the case of the individual, cruelty follows quickly as the twin-companion of profligacy. It is not to himself alone that the impure man is cruel; indeed, so far as this life is concerned, he constantly saves himself and his reputation, while he destroys another. Men too commonly profess to believe that to further degrade and oppress a being already degraded and enslaved is a venial fault; that the sin of fornication is not the “deadly sin” it has been pronounced to be, because, they say, they do not destroy what is good, but only, under the force of temptation, take a sinful advantage of a great evil already existing. This is a fatally false judgment. The soul of the most forlorn outcast was redeemed by Christ, and is dear to him. Most certainly the souls of women are as precious to God as the souls of men; and God has never and nowhere said, that that which brings certain and utter destruction to the souls of women is a light offence on the part of men. Our Lord said, “It must needs be that 31offences will come;” but he added those awful words, “Woe unto that man through whom the offence cometh.” No one can say that any one man is responsible for the existence of the horrible fact that thousands of women, of young girls, of mere children, are continually dragged and driven to the fashionable markets of lust, and there slain like sheep appointed for slaughter. The offence is distributed among many, both of men and women, and the exact measure of the woe shall assuredly be dealt, by the God who judges not as man judges, to every one who has put forward a hand, even once, to help to crush the helpless, or to prevent the fallen from rising. The line is untenable between the first seducer of a woman, and the men who, cowardly, rush in when the victim is once down, to seize upon and devour her in their wickedness, until every trace of the divine stamp of womanhood is effaced. The case is as though a woman were buried alive by each man in a crowd flinging on her a handful of earth, or as though she were trampled to death by the marching over her prostrate form of a company of soldiers. Though no one singly seems to kill, yet collectively they kill her, and each one is guilty. The judgment of men of the world on this matter is for the most part shallow, selfish, and cruel; and when I look at the question in the light which Christ’s solemn words flash upon it, then I see how falsely or how wickedly some men speak and act. It avails not to plead, “The woman solicited me.” What if she had solicited you to assassinate her? Would her solicitation justify you in that? And after all, what is it that she 32wants of you when she solicits you? It is your money: if you are disposed to give that freely, no law of God forbids it; but the law of God forbids, and humanity forbids, your buying of her the permission to degrade her body and ruin her soul.

“Sophistical defences all vanish in the clear daylight of truth. When a sale is hideously unnatural, intrinsically unlawful, productive of cruel miseries to soul and body, the purchaser also is guilty,—and here is thrice guilty, beyond the seller; because he is seeking for carnal pleasure only; she can have no pleasure, but much rather misery, and is in quest of money only; nay, of the poorer women we may say, they are in quest of a bare livelihood only. The fine flaunting courtesans who are carried away by vanity, and obtain high prices from rich profligate men, less deserve our pity in their present phase of life; only that we know them to be on the fatal slope down which a large number of them will be carried, when the men who have bought them one by one abandon them, each justifying himself by the large sums which he has paid! What, then, will a thoughtful man say is the legitimate price of virtue? Either virtue is empty talk, or it is above all price. If any hardened man hold virtue to be mere talk, stern fact replies, that at least vice is a hideous fiend, a substantial and terrible reality, and its propagators are agents of cruelty.”^[6]

Your offence—my guilty brother—recall it! Though it be but that of which men speak so lightly, of having helped to trample down in the dust, so as to make rising again impossible for ever, one of 33those over whom the multitude tread every day, it is recorded against you, and your portion of the woe (you who set but one foot upon her), is waiting for you. “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish;” and the only true repentance is a practical repentance, which hastens to make restitution, to restore fourfold.

You are sceptical concerning these victims of men’s vices. To blacken them, to speak of them as beyond all hope of restoration, seems perhaps to lessen the uneasy sense of guilt which stirs at times within your breast. As one who knows something of the heart of the outcast, I can tell you that these victims on their part are sceptical concerning you and the possibility of your redemption; and the doubt has assuredly as much foundation to rest upon in the one case as in the other.

The minds of these poor women are frequently distracted with speculations concerning the lives of their male partners in guilt. They are perplexed to conceive how it is that a man can for years, for his whole life perhaps, act a double part. They say, “We are sinners indeed, but we are not hypocrites; we do not, after plunging into impurity under cover of the darkness of night, take our place smilingly in the daytime among pure men and women, and go to church, it may be, on a Sunday. We receive all the blows and all the curses from society which we deserve, and sometimes more; but these men! tell us, is it possible for their consciences ever to be cleansed?” I wish to make it clear to you that these poor women consider the reclaimability of profligate men accepted by the world to be a doubtful possibility because of the hypocrisy of their 34lives. Their estimate of that hypocrisy is, that it must be death to the whole character. They feel themselves incapable of practising such an hypocrisy, deeply sinful as they are. They see their nightly male visitors received in society, courted by the world, surrounded by wife and children, holding offices of responsibility; and their poor souls are perplexed. Now, men who doubt the reclaimability of fallen women look upon unchastity as the one damning sin. The women, on the other hand, look upon the hypocrisy as the damning sin which shuts a man out from hope of heaven, if not from the London drawing-room. Thus, while one class of persons may be looking upon another class as utterly vile and irreclaimable, the very class so judged may be holding the same view with regard to their judges. Now, let me recall to your minds the story of the Pharisee and the Publican: the one would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but only said, “God be merciful;” the other, you know, was a reputedly respectable person. He who “knew what was in man,” asserted that the one was justified rather than the other. We find this Divine Person more in agreement with one of the judgments referred to above than with the other. That quality of mind which made the attitude of the publican more hopefully directed towards moral reformation than the other—namely, the quality of humility—is not unfrequently found in the character of outcast women. It is this honest humility, combined sometimes with a passionate desire to seem no better than she is, which constitutes the redeeming feature in the character of the poor outcast. She is not 35acting a double part. I fear it may be said as truly now as it was said long ago to persons who contemptuously speak of outcast women as a hopeless class—“The publicans and the harlots enter into the kingdom of heaven before you.”

I would ask you who, after years of shameful wallowing in sin, have taken to yourselves the comforts of home life, whose praises are in the mouths of men, who are smiled upon by pure women, and caressed by loving children, to come with me and look at this degraded woman, sobbing her poor broken heart out in a corner of some hospital ward, consumed by disease and misery. What was her life, and what was yours? She was perhaps slain through her heart’s best affections. The abandonment of herself to a person beloved was perhaps her first step to ruin; and who shall say that that self-abandonment in woman, which will make her fling herself away for another, is altogether devoid of some trace of unselfishness, which men would do well to mark and shield in her, and to imitate for themselves in a pure and good cause? What is there in such an one which makes her a greater sinner than yourself? Be honest! She is lost to society; you are petted by society. She is killed by the poison she drank; you survive. No after sweetness, no late consolations of home, nor the love of children, are reserved for her. She dies prematurely, and her place knows her no more. Your own past life could reveal sins as great before God as hers have been; and you are—I will not say happy, for a little knowledge of the secrets of hearts forbids me to use that word—but you are not in your coffin, in an unhonoured, unvisited grave. You are alive, 36and counting your solid blessings around you, and receiving the right hand of fellowship every day from the best part of society, of which, may be, you become gradually soothed into the belief that you are an honourable and worthy member. It would be vain to say to you, “Put away your blessings, strip yourself of earthly goods, come down into the dust, and proclaim yourself what you are.” I can but say to you, and I do so with grief and shame for you, “Take, if you will, all the delights of life, but take them in deep self-abhorrence and confession to God who bears with you so far. Take them, but fear! Your present prosperity is no sign of the favour of God towards you; it is his frown, not his smile; wheresoever you go, whether alone or in company, there is an invisible unbending finger pointing at you, and a voice more awful than that of the seer of Israel saying of you, ‘Thou art the man!’”

How fares it, I might ask of many, with the soul of her whom, having cherished as a wife for a time, you put away when you deemed it expedient to enter the estate of marriage, and with the souls of those children, hers and yours, whose existence (unacknowledged perhaps by you) cries every day to heaven against you? To you it is not difficult to step back into paths of virtue, and to establish yourself in a home, with a companion from whom you have been obliged to conceal the fact that you have yourself lived in adultery up to the time when you made the offer of yourself to her, and that your soul is stained with the sins of inconstancy and treachery. But for her who is set aside, the return to virtue is not easy. You dare not calmly contemplate her future. You know 37that should she even escape being carried away by that law of downward gravitation which so frequently governs the life of a woman who has once erred, and should retire into seclusion, yet she goes to her grave wronged, and marked with the world’s badge of shame. But I ask not of any duty fulfilled in regard to her temporal state. I ask you of her soul and eternal destiny. You think you have done well in bestowing large gifts of money. Take heed lest God say to you, “Thy money perish with thee!” because you have thought to atone with wretched gold for a moral nature wrecked and an immortal soul betrayed! You have tardily become convinced (you perhaps reply), that your relationships of an immoral nature must be broken off; but when you have broken off these, have you done all? Does God allow you to think only for your own restored respectability and your own salvation, while she who shared your guilt, it may be loved you truly, goes down to perdition? I beseech you to consider that we shall be called to answer before God for the souls of those with whom we have held close and intimate intercourse, for those whose nature was weaker than our own, and who strengthened themselves in sin by leaning against our stronger hearts; and that those children, of whose being you are the author, will be confronted with you in that awful day when it will not avail you any longer to ask, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Where is that woman, that child, whom you inoculated with your vices, or in any way injured through the weakness and cruelty of passion? Can you rest in peace one night upon your bed, until you have sought out those whom you have injured, and moved 38heaven and earth to repair the injury you have done? Or, if they have gone beyond your reach into the darkness whence you can never recall them, can you rest, enjoying your comforts and honours, until you have made restitution of other souls to God for those whom you have destroyed? There may be consciences more tender than your own, organisations more delicate than yours, which are now suffering, year after year, pains and miseries and darkness which you brought upon them. There may be companions of your youth who are now enduring the lifelong blight which you inflicted upon them, and who, when they meet you in public places now, and see you courted as leaders in society, are filled with contempt and hatred of you, knowing not that your outward success is no sign of God’s favour. You have brought souls into darkness and unbelief, causing them to ask, “Are God’s ways equal?” “Why dost thou show me iniquity, and cause me to behold grievance?... Wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he?”

Men who have been selfish in the indulgence of their evil nature are too often selfish even in repentance, content to recover themselves, with scarcely a thought for those who have suffered through them. I have deep sympathy with the sinful and sorrowful, and tempted and self-condemned; but with this self-love which will flee even to the right source for health and recovery, forgetting others, I have not the shadow of a thought of sympathy. It moves my deepest scorn.

Wherever the true sorrow has penetrated, wherever 39the lesson of the compassionate Saviour has been learned, however imperfectly, selfishness disappears; those who have no deep care for, and make no active effort for other sinners, especially for the victims of their own sin (if there be such), are strangers to the true inner life, however correct, and however highly praised, their outward life may be.

Few things are more sad to contemplate than the sight of men covering their deep, unhealed wounds with a late-attained outward virtue and decency, plastering their terrible griefs and diseases with the rewards which belong to the virtuous. These things ought not to be. Yet among those who have weakly, passionately, or in greediness of all that life can give, clutched and gathered round them all that is sweetest and best, there are some whose aching hearts still attest that they have brought them no real health, that they are but external props to an outward decency of conduct, leaving the deep sore untouched. To these I would speak gently and sorrowfully, not in anger. You know well that you are not healed by simply becoming outwardly moral. You know that only the Infinite can penetrate the necessities of your immortal being, and that only his hand can reach and apply healing to the deep wounds of your soul. The remedies you have chosen are to your soul’s disease only as the stimulants used for a person in consumption, which build him up for a while, and bestow a false health, an unreal vigour, a temporary excitement and fulness of the veins, which only make his decline more rapid and death more sudden, when sooner or later the disease breaks forth again. I beseech you, by the love of God, not 40to suffer these present good things to withdraw your eyes from the only cure, the only source of spiritual life and health. Better that you should suffer, that your heart should ache, and that your old wounds should torment you still, than that, in losing the sense of pain and shame, you should lose your own soul. These good things may be a support to your weakness in the regulation of your outward life, but they cannot give you eternal life nor cleanse the moral nature.

O my erring brothers! be warned, and be aware before the night cometh of the dangers of this later bliss, this earthly happiness or prosperity, as you are aware of the perils into which your first choice of evil brought you. There is an opiate in the purer cup which you now drink, as there was poison in the former cup of intoxication which at first was to you so pleasant, and afterwards stung like a serpent. Will you submit that this opiate should cause you to slumber with the poison not cast out, but working in you still—the poison which you can escape only by deep cutting, and cauterising with the fire which he brings who came “to bring fire on the earth,” who came to baptize us “with the Holy Ghost and with fire”?

“Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there?” Is there hope, not only for the erring and self-destroyed, but for the criminal who has misled and destroyed another, upon whose head rests the guilt of cruelty and treachery? With God all things are possible. “Nazarene, thou hast conquered,” were the last words of Julian the Apostate, closing the rebellion and defiance of a lifetime. The 41heart of the most scornful of the rebels against his holy laws may, by the hand of God, with whom nothing is impossible, be broken, softened, and laid bare to the kind and healing dews of heaven. If at some happy season an angel should descend and stir the deep waters of his soul, now so stagnant and congealed beneath the upper froth, I believe they might prove to be waters of healing. Would that he could hear through the dry air of the wilderness where he is dying of thirst the Divine voice, “What aileth thee?” and that his eyes might be opened to see close by his hand the well of water which he knew not of. “I will give to him that is athirst of the water of life freely.” “If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.” Thousands are dying of thirst and of the fever which accompanies it—dying with a deep well of water by their side, and with words of profane mockery and despairing denial on their lips.

A strong yearning possesses my soul to stretch forth my hand to the most hopeless creature that lives, to the wildest prodigal who ever fled from his father’s house, to call him brother, and to speak to him of life and of love. When there arose a mighty famine in that land, he began to be in want, and would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat, “and no man gave unto him.” This, that “no man gave unto him,” has often seemed to me the most sorrowful part of that story of the Prodigal. These suicides rush downwards to destruction, and men fear to put forth a hand to stop them, or hearts fail for want of love. We too readily include them all in one hopeless class, supposed to be 42sick beyond recovery, lost beyond recall. There is not one among us who possesses in its perfection “the intuitive decision of a bright and thorough-edged intellect to part error from crime.” But God does not judge men in masses. He, and he alone, takes exact account of every individual soul, with every particular of the circumstances, and the forces without and within the man which combined to hurl him down to his present estate of wretchedness. To us indeed they all appear as wandering stars, but God alone knows to which among them the “mist of darkness” is verily reserved for ever. There are moments of sanity and of sadness, in which the eyes are opened to see that they are selling their manhood and their immortality for—a mess of pottage!—moments in which a little thing—a word, a look, a hand held out—might mature disgust of self into the humble and firm resolve, “I will arise and go to my Father.” But that little thing “no man gave unto him.”

I know that in speaking of life and of love to some of these, I may be speaking into the ears of a corpse. The man is dead; he has died the death of a suicide; his day of grace is past long before his natural life is ended; he cannot be restored, not because God cannot or will not restore him, but because there is no longer left in his will or conscience or affections any spark of life or of power to respond any longer to the calls of God. But love will not easily be persuaded that the moment of death has arrived, nor that it is time to leave the bier of the dead and to return among the living; love, like Rizpeh, will watch with a constancy stronger than death by the silent corpses of the “dearly beloved and longed for,” 43fiercely denying that they shall be given as carrion to the wolves and the vultures. I do not know when life becomes extinct. God only knows. But I know that “charity never faileth;” that charity believeth all things, and hopeth all things; that she holds on in faith and hope, hearing the words, “enthusiast! fanatic!” uttered by those who have not made full trial of the long-suffering of God, and with the cautionings and doubtful questionings of some even of the followers of Jesus sounding in her ears. None know what God can do, and is ready to do, for the maddest, wickedest, vilest, and most self-destroyed of men or of women, save those who can say of themselves, “De profundis clamavi,” who have kneeled, in spirit, side by side with the Lord in the garden of Gethsemane, and have seen his sweat as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground, and who, in that awful hour of love and sorrow, have dared to say to him, “Lord, take of my heart’s blood also, and let it be poured forth for thee and thine.”

“I am the resurrection and the life; whosoever believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” So spake the Holy One. The soul of man is insatiable, for good or for evil. Fulness of life is desired by all; the breaking up of the frosts of winter, and the bursting forth of spring; the dreams of childhood restored, but restored as actual possibilities for us to grasp. The human heart thirsts for life, and for the utmost expansion of life.

The demoniac of Gadara, he who had the legion, seemed to possess life enough; he never rested day 44nor night, every moment straining to the utmost all the energies of his animal nature; no man could tame him, none could bind him, for he had often been bound, and had torn his fetters and broken his chains in pieces. Yet his dwelling was among the tombs. There is enough of demoniacal energy among us, which is not life, but a hideous mockery of life. Christ has not come to destroy life, but to save it, and by his own divine energy to cast out the demoniacal energy. “What a word is this!” it was said of him, “for with authority and power he commandeth the unclean spirits, and they come out.” Our Lord said, in his last conversation with his disciples, “This sign shall follow them that believe: in my name shall they cast out devils.” And before this his disciples had told him with gladness and wonder, “Lord, even the devils are subject unto us in thy name.” It has been recorded by historians of the earliest Christian times how the Christians triumphed over evil spirits, how they insulted and tormented the devil wherever they found him, making him remove his lodgings from the bodies of men “by a writ of ejectment from the name of Jesus Christ;” and how “Christians, of the meaner sort” even, did, without any ceremony, but only by their prayers and calling on the name of Christ, what was beyond the power of all the heathen sorcerers, with their Ephesian letters and magical incantations.

Not only from possessed persons were the evil spirits driven forth, but from every temple wherein they were worshipped as gods. Christ overturned shrines and temples in abundance; he “spoiled principalities and powers, making a show of them openly;” dethroned 45the false gods, from the most brutish to the highest, and quenched the false lights with the true.

Behold the power of Christ! the hope of those who are afflicted by the indwelling of some demon of uncleanness, or haunted by beauty, or dazzled by light which are not of God.

“Be not drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit.” For the drunkards of earth, maddened by whatsoever powerful excitements, who renounce their master-passion, God has in store “the new wine of the kingdom.” They need not fear to faint and die beneath the sudden withdrawal of what has been to them till now the sole sustaining stimulant of life. It was said of the followers of Jesus, “These men are full of new wine.” It is true! And there are such men among us at this day; and through this divine inebriation, this new passion, the love of Christ, which has cast out all opposing elements, you shall hear them speak, not as they have hitherto spoken, but “with other tongues, as the Spirit gives them utterance.”

The eye of faith and of love, surveying the infinite and eternal possibilities of redemption for the ruined soul, shall see, not the Magdalene only, not the woman only who was a “sinner,” but the still guiltier one, stronger in wrong-doing and deeper in treachery, bowing low before the all-conquering love. Lo! even

PART III. BAPTISMUS LABORIOSUS.

Early in the fifth century there dwelt on the western bank of the Jordan a monk named Zosimus, who had served God from his youth.

In the season of Lent A.D. 430, the Abbot Zosimus crossed the Jordan and penetrated into the heart of the untenanted wilderness on its eastern shore, there to meditate in silence on the temptation of our Lord. Having travelled for twenty days, praying as he went, he one day halted at sunset and sat down to rest. Raising his eyes, he saw what seemed to be a human form, fragile and wasted, with hair as white as snow. He approached, and the apparition being about to flee, he cried, “Stay, and tell me why you inhabit this desert?” Mary of Egypt (for it was she) stopped, and answered, “Wherefore do you wish to speak to me? You have travelled far only to find one sinner.” Zosimus, believing he had met with a saintly recluse, besought her prayers. “It is you,” she answered, “who should pray for me. I have great need; entreat the Lord that he will have mercy on me.”

Zosimus continued to urge her to reveal her history, and at length she spoke as follows:—“I am ready to die of shame in telling you what I am. I shudder to infect your ears, and the very air itself, with my story. Nevertheless, holy father, I will speak, obeying your request.

“Egypt was my country. I had good parents, 47who cherished me tenderly; nevertheless at twelve years of age I left them, and fled to Alexandria. I cannot speak, I cannot even think, of my life there; be it enough to say that for seventeen years I lived a life of infamy. This was my choice; I had not the plea of poverty.

“I saw, one day, a great crowd of people running towards the seashore. I asked where they were going, and was told they were about to embark for the holy city, Jerusalem, there to celebrate the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross of our Saviour. I embarked also, having no intention except to continue my former course of life. We arrived in Jerusalem. On the day of the festival, I repaired with the multitude to the sanctuary, but scarcely had my foot touched the threshold, when I felt myself repulsed by an invisible power. Attributing this to a superstitious weakness, I essayed again and again to enter, but was four times arrested and driven back as by an armed sentinel. The crowd poured in, and I was left alone. Confused and wearied, I sat down in a corner of the outer court of the temple. While there, some words which I overheard, addressed to the people within, opened the eyes of my soul, and then I understood why it was that I was not permitted even to look upon the symbol of our salvation. In desolation and anguish of spirit I smote upon my breast, and vowed with groans and tears that, might I but be suffered to enter the sanctuary, and look upon the cross on which Jesus died for sinners, I would forsake every sin, renounce the world, and flee whithersoever the Lord should guide me. No sooner had I thus spoken, than I felt that 48my vows were accepted, and the sentence of exclusion reversed. Once more I drew near to the barrier, and this time entered with ease. Overwhelmed with the thought of the incomprehensible goodness of God, and the readiness with which he receives sinners when they repent, I threw myself on the ground, and watering the pavement with my tears, implored divine guidance to show me what I must do. It seemed to me that a voice bade me fly from cities and from all the paths of men, and take refuge in the lonely wilderness. I left the church in haste. I ran all day, and in the evening reached the shores of the Jordan. I crossed the stream, and penetrated into the depths of the wilderness.

“From that hour to this I have studied to flee from the face of man, in the hope that one day I may see the face of God.”

Zosimus asked, “How long have you been in the desert, and how have you lived?”

Mary answered, “I have lived in this solitude more than the number of years in which I lived a life of sin. The herbs and fruits of the desert have been my food, and God’s providence has not failed me.”

The abbot asked, “Did not so sudden a transition from a life of licence to one so severe cost you much?”

“Abbot Zosimus,” Mary replied, “you ask me a question which I hardly dare to answer. The memory of the anguish I have suffered terrifies me yet: pray that God may grant me fortitude. Yes, truly for many years after I had forsaken my evil life, I strove with constant and violent temptations. I fought with them as with wild beasts. Here, in the silence of the wilderness, I seemed to be carried back again in 49spirit into the tumult of cities; I saw again the crowds of men who followed me, I heard their flattering words; the air rang round me with their passionate songs, summoning me to the responses with which I was so long familiar. Hungry and fainting, I longed for the fleshpots of Egypt; seeking vainly to assuage my thirst, I drank again in imagination the wines which had often intoxicated me. There were times when every memory which could most shake me assailed me at once, and threatened to drag me forcibly from my retreat. At such times I would prostrate myself on the earth and cry aloud to God, whose aid I once had known. Many nights have I passed thus, filling the desert and rending the skies with strong crying and supplications. God gave me the victory at last. After many years, these torments ceased. Since then I have suffered much from cold and heat, hunger and thirst, and many infirmities, but the mercy of God has sustained me, while year by year I have offered up prayers for every soul which had formerly fallen and sinned through me or with me. I have poured out my soul in anguish and in weeping for them; I have offered up myself a sacrifice for them, night and day, summer and winter, praying that their sins may be washed away, and that the plea of my broken heart, cast at the Saviour’s feet, may avail to open the gates of paradise for them.”

She then took leave of the abbot, requesting that he would meet her again in a year at the same spot. “Pray for me,” she cried, and disappeared.

In the Lent of the following year Zosimus went forth on his search. The way was long, the desert 50barren and scorched. As he drew near to the appointed place, no sound, no movement indicated the presence of any living thing. His eyes sought long in vain for a human form. At last they fell upon a corpse. Prone on the earth she lay, her face towards the east; and by her side, in characters rudely traced upon the ground, he read, “My name was Mary.”

The abbot wept and raised the body; he buried Mary in a lion’s lair.

For surely lion-like throughout those seventeen years of mortal strife, alone, in the wilderness, among the wild beasts, tempted of the devil, had that weak woman endured to raise indignant protest against the horrors of her former sin, dared to confront God’s outraged majesty with that mute, unquenchable appeal.

In some church of Northern Italy, I remember to have seen a picture of a woman clinging to a cross in a sanctuary to which she has fled for refuge; around her throng on every side innumerable faces of men. She cannot safely look for one moment this way or that; desperately, with closed eyes, she clings to the cross. Shall we blame such an one because her foes are so many and so strong? or, if she knows that in flight is her only safety, shall we forbid her to flee?

If this fervour of repentance and indomitable fortitude, I hear you say, had found expression in active labours for those fellow-beings for whom Mary besieged heaven with her prayers, many would have been blest, and she herself a nobler being. True; nevertheless might Mary, and such as she, rise up 51in judgment against the men of this generation, who dally with temptations, and above all things fear to push their virtue to extremes; who may have courage for action, but have not courage or endurance to dare to be for a season alone with God; to whom a few years of self-denial seem a burden too grievous to be borne; whose repentance may be a fervour of sentiment, but is seldom a reality of pain.

Thus did they sorrow, and thus did they endure, those heroes strong in humility, those heroines of the olden time. They bore the cross till the weak flesh sank beneath the burden; they hasted from the city of destruction, though their path was as a slender thread hung over gulfs of fire. So came it that they subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, turned to flight the armies of the aliens, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire; so came it that the outcast of Alexandria has left a name greater than that of the Ptolomies, insomuch that when the pure-hearted Van Eyck was summing up in one great argument the annals of the early faith, he painted even her, Mary of Egypt, in the forefront of that glorious company who gather to the adoration of the spotless Lamb.

In the beginning of the thirteenth century lived Margaret of Cortona. Her painful history, the sins and sorrows of her youth, have been recorded by annalists of the Church in Italy. The eyes of her soul were opened by a tragical event; she resolved, once for all, that her future life should be one constant act of repentance. She sought her father’s 52home, from which she had long strayed; he rejected her, and drove her, with bitter reproaches, from his house. She took her little child by the hand, and wandered forth; retiring to a distant part of a deserted garden, she fell on her knees and wept bitterly. Then there drew nigh for her one of those terrible hours when the powers of hell seem to gather all their forces together for the destruction of a tempted soul. Even thus in a garden Augustine fought his last and fiercest fight with hell, till peace came to him in the message of a singing child. Thus in a garden the Saviour of the world “began to be sore amazed and very heavy,” enduring and vanquishing the “unknown agony,” and making victory possible for men.

Forlorn and hopeless, Margaret’s first thought was of suicide. Then there rushed back upon her the recollection of her brilliant, sinful past. She was twenty-one years of age, and exquisitely beautiful. What had she not still in her power? How often has such a moment come to a frail girl who through her fall becomes the despised and rejected of men!—a moment when on the one side are famine, friendlessness, and shame, on the other an easy road to immediate luxury and praise, with scope for all her power to please, and satisfaction for her instincts of passionate affection. “If they will not love me in my penitence, let them love me in my sin;” how many times has this thought decided the ruinous relapse, overcoming a deep and genuine horror of the sin!

But Margaret was reserved for better things. After a long struggle, an inspiration of grace seemed 53to bear into her heart the words, “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.” “His mercy,” she said to herself, “his mercy endureth for ever;” and calm at last, and strong, she rose from the earth, prepared to go wherever the guardian of her soul should guide her. She took the road to Cortona, which she reached at sunset. As she entered the city, two ladies met her; struck by Margaret’s wearied movements, her maternity, her beauty, her sadness, they accosted her. Margaret told them her story; they offered her a home. She lived for a brief period under this generous protection; but her life there was too easy and delicate to satisfy her desire of self-abnegation. She began to devote herself to the most forlorn and miserable of her fellow-women, nursing them in sickness, and proclaiming to them the unfathomable mercies of God. Though courting seclusion, her devoted life became known, and she was invited to enter the third order of St Francis, an order of seculars, who were bound to maintain the active duties of life in the world. “From this time,” her biographer says, “she seemed like a new creature in Christ Jesus; her heart was set on fire with the love of God and of man. Sadness and terror gave place to peace, and that tender sorrow, sweet and bitter, which the accepted soul alone can know.” She laboured now with redoubled assiduity. In the hospitals in which she served, the attendants, in the intervals of work, sang and chatted together; but Margaret prayed, and “often those who saw her ceased to sing, and kneeled with her and prayed also; and when she spoke of the love of God and 54the severe purity of his holy law, no heart, however much the slave of pleasure, remained unmoved.”

Finding that the work she was doing drew her away too much from the poor, and into the ranks of the more prosperous classes, she abandoned it, and took a small room in the humblest part of the city, and there she consecrated herself entirely to the service of the poor and the outcast. To these she became a mother indeed. Her work, her time, her humble dwelling, all that she had was theirs, insomuch that, giving to their necessities of her own clothes and bedding, she was found sometimes in winter with scarcely covering sufficient for the protection of her worn frame. So maternal was her attitude towards them, so delicate and bountiful the sympathy she gave to all, both men and women, that multitudes forsook the doors of other helpers and spiritual guides, and crowded round her humble dwelling. She laboured with her hands in order to gain money to help the indigent, and to give an impulse to the self-help of young girls and needy women. Margaret, however, had her dark hours, when memories of the past and present allurements combined to trouble her soul and shake her faith. Her sole resource at these times was to take refuge in the deepest shadow of the cross. Fragments of her private writings remain to this day, wherein is revealed the motive power which enabled her to be “faithful unto death.” Advised by an aged priest to moderate her labours and her self-denial, she replied, “My father, never while I live shall there be a truce between my soul and the evil that is in me.” Sometimes she would rally her body in the 55quaint fashion of the saints of old: “Wherefore servest thou not the Lord as eagerly as thou formerly servedst sin? Nay! do not lament, do not pretend thou art dying. If thou wouldst dwell with Christ, win thy crown and slack not.”

To the soul which has learned truly to love God, God’s choice, whether of work or of suffering for that soul, is welcome. When men sin, and he afterwards appoints for them a lot of privation, or pain, or of redoubled effort through the whole of life, his appointment is not for the destruction and defeat of their newly-awakened hopes and aims, but in order to their fulfilment.

I address myself to you, friends, whose faces are now turned towards the light, who have laid aside, or earnestly desire to lay aside, “every weight and the sin which does most easily beset you.” You have ceased, perhaps, to bewail the defeat of earthly ambitions, or your lessened power of enjoyment of the best things, and you now only mourn over your weakened energies of body and mind, because they render you less able to serve him effectually while you live. A deeper knowledge of God and of his ways will, I think, tend greatly to reassure you on this head. You speak of a life baffled in hope and in action; these are sad words, yet it may be asked, Does it not seem almost a law in the kingdom of grace that every life which is finally victorious shall be at first baffled? Was not our blessed Lord’s life baffled for a time? To human eyes it was. It appeared a great failure, ending tragically.

Now that you have risen above despair, and are quickened by a mighty hope, and have received the 56gift of life and love, one of the first things needful for you is, doubtless, a complete acquiescence, an acceptance, once for all and without a murmur, of the measure of correction and of outward disappointment which is apportioned to you now, presenting your souls to God as blank, clean-washed tablets, for him to write upon them what he pleases, as instruments ruined, it may be, for every use except the highest use of all. Even though you had now all but spun your last thread, and your earthly future had dwindled into a few weeks or months of inaction, suffering the penalties of sin, remember the dying malefactor! Even he bore his testimony to Christ (a testimony which will be carried down to the remotest ages), firmly rebuking the blasphemy of his companion, and preaching from his cross of shame the virtue of the sinless One. But many to whom I speak have still much of life, and of the more serious work of life, before them. I wish that I could by any words convey to you that which I feel may be in store for you, if by the grace of God you are enabled not only to receive the inward healing, but to dedicate your lives wholly to God. Some of you, who have fallen, and have been lifted up again, and strengthened by him whose feet you have not ceased to kiss, will understand me when I speak of a more complete self-dedication than any which we commonly see among Christian people. To you Christ’s words will not seem intolerable when he speaks of forsaking houses, brethren, sisters, father, mother, wife, children, and lands, for his name’s sake and the gospel’s; to you it will appear a light thing that you should deny yourselves in the matter of 57meat and drink, of ease, and sleep, and social enjoyments. There are idols of the heart and soul, sweet dreams, golden futures, reasonable ambitions of this world, resting-places, homes, loves, hopes—to give up all these for Christ’s sake!—“who is sufficient for these things?” You are the men whose past should make you ready for these things, and whom God can make sufficient for them. I believe that much of the work of God which is waiting to be accomplished in our days on earth will not be accomplished until Christ has large armies of voluntary martyrs. Society is in peril from dangerous wounds which will not close until the young, the brave, the undaunted, the reckless, for Christ’s sake, armed from head to foot in the impenetrable armour of God, shall cast themselves into the yawning gulf. It is from among you that this army may be greatly recruited. God can make of you, who have been so terribly marred by sin, the boldest, bravest soldiers of the cross; he can use you for great necessities, for hard and noble service, as pioneers in wildernesses and rough places of the earth, as leaders of forlorn hopes, to do the fatigue-work of God’s army, and to fill every post of the utmost danger and exposure. It is to his glory that he is able to furnish precious material out of the very rubbish of the earth, that he should gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost, and direct to one holy end all these scattered and desecrated energies. In order to this, Christ requires whole-hearted, willing martyrs.

He has had such martyrs as witnesses and landmarks at all times. There have been men and 58women who have endured the breaking of their own hearts for the love of Christ, who have resolutely cut off the right hand or plucked out the right eye for his sake. Upon the altars of such self-sacrifice has ofttimes been kindled a holy fervour which moved the world. A strange and inextinguishable energy has appeared in some of these lovers of Christ, these unwearying evangelists and lifelong martyrs, which it has perplexed the world to account for. They have been enabled to work miracles among the hearts and souls of their fellow-men. They have passed through life as unknown, yet well known; as dying, and behold they live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing all things; taking pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake.

I cannot greatly admire the reformed profligate, professing now the fear of God, who greedily gathers to himself every good thing that life can give him, avoiding actual sin, but enjoying himself to the utmost of his remaining power of enjoyment. God is munificent, bountiful, generous to the evil and the good, the just and the unjust. It is true that he oftentimes allows the man to take all that he can get, and to be happy in his own way; but it is not the highest happiness which he has chosen, it is not the noblest choice nor the truest life; but then it is a life without the heavy cross, and therefore to most men it is the chosen, the welcome life. I am filled with grief and shame when I see how little there is among men of that noble self-scorn which 59would urge them, having been great in sin, to be great in self-denial. If such men could see their past in the true light, see what it is to have wasted youth, and strength, and energy, to have desecrated love, and aided in the destruction of bodies which should have been temples of God, they would put away from themselves henceforward in disdain the precious gifts of earth, not in contempt of the gifts, but in anger at the thought that they themselves should seem to know so little of true sorrow and true revenge as to touch such gifts. They would put away all thoughts of ease and of enjoyment, and of striking roots to bind them to a world in which they must henceforward be as strangers and pilgrims, dispensers of blessing and succour, enriching out of their own deep poverty. They would make haste to live the life of the Crucified, freed from private cares and joys, taking their lives in their hands, “counting not their own lives dear unto them,” and to go forth whithersoever the Lord should send them, their faces heavenward, pressing on to labour in the great harvest-field before the sun goes down, and, for every soul which they have hurt by their past neglect or open sin, to gather in and repay to the Lord a thousand. Their desire would be to be claimed entirely, to be laid hold of by God, to be gathered up in the hollow of his hand, that they may be hurled forth again as fiery arrows from the hand of a giant whose quiver is full, to execute his will to the ends of the earth. They would cease to make nice and niggardly calculations of how much of the world, of ease, and of pleasantness they ought to give up, and of how much they 60may lawfully keep, but would question rather how they may give up their all, and make their life a complete holocaust, heaping sacrifice upon sacrifice at the feet of the Holy One who redeemed them.

I know that to some men such words as these are “a hard saying;” yet I know also certainly that there are others in the world to whom the thought of a whole surrender is more attractive than that of a half surrender, who do not shrink from the darkest valleys and the most rugged ascents of the Via Crucis; indeed to whom, looking back on their past life, this new life of entire self-abandonment seems the only one for them; to whom its glory is revealed in the midst of its anguish; who feel it would be a shame to them to live as other men, or even to linger among the green pastures and by the still waters where the happier of Christ’s flock are nourished, who have been led by gentler paths to a high wisdom and purity in the knowledge of God. These men are content to put by all rest and enjoyment until they see God face to face. And yet, from the moment that the vow of complete self-dedication is made, the future joy dawns upon these hearts with a clearness never known before. From the moment that the resolution is taken, a great calm begins to fill the soul. There is a distinct loss and a distinct gain. The Master whom we serve is so generous that he will never suffer those who have stripped themselves for his sake to be without full compensation. He lavishes his greatest wealth, his most precious gifts, upon his poor ones who have deliberately made themselves poor for his sake. Henceforward their life of outward hardship, of toil, of poverty in the matter 61of life’s best things, may make them to appear in the eyes of men of the world as “of all men most miserable,” but the inward vexation and conflict are at an end; sorrow still fills their hearts, but it is no longer the restless sorrow of the world; it is the sorrow of the Man of Sorrows, which he who has been made a partaker of them would for ever choose rather than the purest joys of earth.

And when did any age call for great devotion of heart more than our own? The malady of the age deepens; men’s hearts are filled with doubt and perplexity. How will God restore faith and establish righteousness on the earth? We know he can do it, but by what means we know but very imperfectly. It will surely be in a great measure through the individual life of his witnesses on earth that he will renew the spiritual life of the world; through men and women “full of the Holy Ghost and of power.” It is through the human voice that he will speak in pleading accents. He will make himself felt through the warm pressure of human hands stretched forth for help, and through the earnest affection of human eyes accustomed to penetrate the unseen. The miracles of men’s lives are the only miracles which will convince the incredulous.

And now, I beseech you, let the honest and courageous contemplation of the character of the day in which we live, its worst symptoms and its most threatening dangers, be to you who are aspiring to a renewed life an added incentive to humble, determined, and indomitable efforts. Such a contemplation may lead you to a clearer conception of the part you (young men especially) are called 62on to play at this time, and of the manner in which your past experience, humbling or sad as that may have been, may be subordinated to the service of suffering and sinful humanity, which now more than ever groans and travails in pain and in expectancy of a coming redemption.

Our own country seems at this time to stand hesitatingly, like Hercules in the Greek fable, at the point of divergence of two paths leading in opposite directions. Her future seems to hang in the balance. Without moral faith it is impossible that any nation should ever progress; and there has lately seemed to be a decay of moral faith, tending to a universal and fatal lapse, and leading downward to that state which Proudhon, in words which have in them the sound of a funeral-bell, declares France to have reached, that of “an effete people,”—“une nation finie.” Rank, wealth, and power are too often seen to be in league with profligacy and materialism. There is much hollowness and hypocrisy in the upper stratum of society, while a spurious Science vaunts itself as the future redeemer of mankind, trampling under foot the feelings, aspirations and sensibilities of all God’s wonderfully-fashioned, sentient beings, and aspiring to sit in God’s seat as omniscient ruler, not only of the material creation, but of the souls and affections of men. Our high material civilisation has armed the human brute with new instruments of his lust and his ferocity. We are in danger of being carried back to the “uncertainties and despair of a paganised philosophy, which in time, sweeping away all that elevates man, will land us among the ferocities and lusts of a paganised society.”

63If our country is to escape moral and political ruin, the spirit of a deep and true repentance, that replenishing shower promised for the refreshing of God’s inheritance when it is parched and weary, must be poured out upon us from on high. We must be rebaptized in first principles; pure and holy truths must be accepted, taught, and proclaimed perseveringly by the people and among the people. We must not stand still and wait, expecting this teaching from our recognised spiritual instructors, and from the churches; though, as sharers in the blessings of a moral revival, these will lend their aid. Still less must we be sanguine in any expectation of an initiative of good from the upper classes, and those who have a factitious influence borrowed from rank or some conventional prestige. It is in the more serious classes of the people (under God) that we hope, and especially in the rising generation, if they can “escape the corruptions that are in the world through lust,” and the deadening materialistic creed which attracts in crowds the votaries of pleasure and men of the world.

Nothing has more forcibly indicated the materialistic tendency of our day than the public endorsement, which the last ten years have witnessed, of the unequal standard of morality for the sexes. This double standard is man’s invention, for his own base convenience. It is not the standard of Christ, and it is inconsistent with every principle of justice and right. Christ taught the absolute equality of the moral law in its application to men and women, to rich and poor alike. As if to correct with scourging the false standard—oppressive of women and indulgent to men—which he found existing in his 64day on earth, he pronounced the sternest denunciations of high-class male profligacy, while he received with the utmost gentleness the woman of the city who was a sinner, who had crept to his feet, and restored her to her lost place in society, separating her for ever from her sins. From this standard and this judgment, founded on the eternal truth of the unity of the moral law, men have separated themselves as far as the east is from the west; and not men only; women of the higher classes, “women that are at ease,” possessing, themselves, a merely negative virtue, become capable, through a cowardly subserviency to custom and masculine opinion, of deep and positive cruelty towards their own sex.

Christ’s teaching in this matter has been practically frustrated and denied century after century, and upon its denial have been founded legislation, customs, and public institutions, criminally and cruelly immoral and unjust. Man, claiming for himself an impure privilege to sin, is, in spite of his profligacy, received in society and entrusted with moral and social responsibilities, while the lapse of a woman of the humbler classes, though that lapse has been induced by the pressure of poverty or the allurements of love, is made the portal for her of a life of misery and shame. Society drives such an one out of bounds, sets its hell-hounds on her track, and makes recovery all but impossible. It is not now by profligate men alone that theories of life are propounded in accordance with wicked practice. It is not the sensualist and materialist alone who declare that unchastity is a “necessity” for man, and that the “priestess of humanity,” the degraded and 65outcast woman, must continue to the end of time to offer up sacrifices for society, herself the victim on the sacrificial altar, her soul, affections, will, immortal spirit, cast, together with her frail and suffering body, into the burning fiery furnace, the Gehenna of the insatiable lust of the male brute who rules her destiny here on earth. We now hear good men echoing this deadly doctrine in a somewhat milder form. Christian ministers themselves are not free from this dire confusion of the moral vision; if they had been so, it would have been impossible for them to stand aside, silent as they have been, while the audacious doctrine of the necessity of unchastity was publicly proclaimed, and the lie was openly given to the truth of the unity of the moral law by the proclamation and endorsement in public enactment of the unequal standard accepted in society. The attitude of Christian ministers towards the sin of unchastity, and their silence concerning the vice and cruelty of men in their relations with women of the poorer classes, are a mournful comment on the ease with which right principles may decay, and yet the servant of God himself may not mark their decay. It has indeed been reserved for us at this day to see something of the “infinite capacity for cowardice in men.” How is it that, when our nation said, through the voice of its rulers, “Evil, be thou my good!” when those rulers elevated that destroyer of peoples and tribes and nations, sexual vice, into a recognised industry officially organised, every pulpit in the land did not ring with a clear denial of the impious doctrine underlying the cynical deed? I have indicated the answer. The whole moral 66atmosphere around us is poisoned by the influence of the “old and chartered lie” which scourges humanity, that that which is sin, degradation, and shame for woman, is but a light and venial offence, if offence at all, in man. But we see a light as of the approach of the dawn of day. The night is indeed far spent, and many are watching for the promised revival as those that watch for the morning. There is conflict around us, strong, persistent, increasing. God be thanked, wherever there is conflict there is life! On the one hand there are faith, virtue, freedom; on the other hand materialism, profligacy, oppression, and slavery. Great antagonistic forces are drawing nearer for battle. There is a sound as of nations arousing; the heart of this people is more deeply stirred in our day than it has yet been in this century. We have fallen upon a solemn time. It is a period of sifting, when God, by his messengers and his providences, shall “throughly purge his floor,” and sift the nations as chaff is sifted from the wheat. The innermost thoughts of men’s hearts are being revealed; light has penetrated “the dark places of the earth, which are full of the habitations of cruelty.” Light, too, has visited the consciences of men; they that are of the light are hastening towards the light; they who “hate the light because their deeds are evil,” horrified at the presence of light, are flying from it. Iniquity abounds; yet the Lord is pouring forth his Spirit, “as the latter rain,” abundantly. The enemy comes in like a flood, but the Spirit of the Lord is raising up a standard against him.

Religious awakenings have lately been realised 67among us far and wide, and continue to spread over many parts of Europe and America. It is clear that, in order to combat with any success the materialism of our age, embodied in accepted theories, customs, laws, and institutions, we need some great manifestation of the power of God. That much-wished-for breath of heaven appears to be now visiting us. Indolent souls are aroused, and baptized into a fresh spiritual life. A cloud of blessing is hanging over many lands. We stand in awe and expectation, seeing in these things the hand of God. Without entering into the mystery of these spiritual visitations, we must recognise the fact that there are periods when it seems as if God granted a special audience to waiting souls on this suffering earth, and as if the prayers sent up through many barren years met at last a quick and abundant response. Such times have been frequently accompanied or followed, in a greater or less degree, by the casting off of national evils and the overthrow of great instituted abominations, the overturning of conventional standards, and the revival of a higher morality. It was strikingly so when, in America, a widespread and earnest religious revival preceded that final encounter of antagonistic principles which resulted in the overthrow of the great slave system. It will tend somewhat to discredit the thoroughness of the present religious impulse if it should fail to come into direct collision with the greatest of our social evils. It is not enough that the spiritual teachers now appealing to the masses of the people should include in their ministrations certain “women of the city who are sinners;” they ought directly to deal with 68the false and guilty theory that impurity is necessary for men, that the institution of harlotry must for ever remain in the heart of Christendom, and that a mere remnant of souls is all we may expect to save from the grasp of that tyranny. It will be a sad thing for the future of our country if we do not avail ourselves of this Pentecostal breath of Heaven in order to bring down the strongest of Satan’s strongholds to the ground. The holy men who are the appointed instruments for the promotion of this revival movement devote themselves daily and hourly to the work of receiving all anxious inquirers who come to them, unweariedly teaching, praying, and comforting; infinite pains are bestowed on the individual. And in this they act as Christ acted. It is to the awakening of the private conscience that God has committed the real history and progress of mankind. But if, the private conscience being awakened, the man who is the subject of the awakening regards all those lost and unhappy beings who are not, manifestly to him, the subjects of the same awakening grace, as permanently excluded by a decree of Providence, as a portion of the “world lying in wickedness,” which must for ever continue to lie in wickedness; if he persistently declines to seek the reform of our social institutions lest he should soil his own soul by contact with something which he deems to belong to the domain of Satan; then the progress which God has committed to the awakening of the private conscience will be indefinitely arrested, and extraordinary spiritual awakenings will be discredited; reproach will lie at the door of those to whom the gracious advances of the Spirit of God have been made, and 69their fidelity will be impugned. A bright and cheering hope will rest upon the future when the present religious movement becomes more aggressive and more openly hostile to evils which are patronised by the rich and influential; and of this practical development signs are not wanting, especially in Switzerland and in the South of France, where the religious awakening has been felt, and is continuing to spread, and where its leaders have emphatically pointed to the overthrow of the “typical crime of the universe,” prostitution, as the necessary sequel to a deeply-renewed spiritual life among the nations. We want a far more stern, searching, and uncompromising religious work than we have yet seen in our own land; one which shall boldly attack the gigantic sins of the day, the greed of wealth, those trades which flourish on the ruin of the bodies and souls of men, and that conspiracy of avarice and lust by which is accomplished the destruction of tens of thousands of the daughters of our people. We want a spiritual and moral awakening which shall probe and combat the great social inequalities and wrongs that are undermining the very foundations of religious and social life. It will scarcely be denied, that the evils which those who desire to see righteousness established on earth are called on to attack and to destroy, culminate and find their last and most terrible expression in that gigantic iniquity, that systematised profligacy, which is now openly advocated. Isolated efforts will not avail. Whole communities of men and women, unanimous in respect of the end to be attained, must arise simultaneously to the rescue; and we already see the beginning of such a movement in many lands. This movement 70has arisen precisely at the moment when the evil itself had become aggressive in a sense never before witnessed in the history of the world; when it had found apologists among teachers and disciples of science and philosophy, and when the very foundations of society had begun to be threatened by the prevalence of the lying dogma, that any faculty, because it exists, may be used without further question; that the practice of fornication, and the devotion to destruction of those who minister to it, are based on an imperious and unconquerable necessity, and that a truce must now be proclaimed between society and these monstrous evils, against which it is at once unwise and hopeless any longer to make war. The birth of the movement in opposition to this “lying dogma” has been the signal for fearless speech. Silence on the subject is at an end. Immorality, however fashionable, and however influential its apologists, will henceforward no longer be allowed to fortify itself in conventionality by the abject silence of public opinion, nor shall it be permitted to retain its place in civilised societies and professedly Christian countries as one of the officially recognised and protected institutions of society.

The “new word of progress” among us is clear; and while contending on every hand against all the unmistakable proximate causes of prostitution, we shall wage a spiritual warfare against its ultimate cause,—the permission and sanction of the double standard, the doctrine that impurity in man is a slight and excusable offence, while in woman it is a deadly and unpardonable sin. Our task at this day is to teach unremittingly, unweariedly, both publicly and 71privately, the great and forgotten truth of the unity of the moral law. There is no double dispensation of the moral law; that law is one, as God is one. “The law of personal purity obliges men and women equally to rule their lives by their highest spiritual ideal, to fulfil their highest conceptions, moral and intellectual. It prohibits any violation of the spiritual nature for the temporary and apparent satisfaction of the physical nature. Such a violation of the soul is rightly called impurity. It destroys the purity in human life which lies in the supremacy of the spiritual will and affections, mastering, moulding, and animating the material body. The natural law ordains a contest as the necessary condition of spiritual life. In this contest the purest personal motives, manly and womanly honour, modesty and courage, are engaged in the service of the spirit. But the defeat of the will degrades the human being beneath the level of a brute; since self-indulgence, contrary to the higher nature and the will, its instrument, is not the natural obedience to a true, self-sufficing instinct, but is abnormal, impure, and evil in its personal as in its social consequences.”^[7]

Much scepticism prevails, even among those who profess the faith of Jesus Christ, on the subject of the permanent reclamation of the victims of society, outcast women. Baffled or disappointed in two or three attempts to elevate such women, and reinstate them in society, most persons abandon the effort, and too often thenceforth go about proclaiming the moral 72irreclaimability of these poor fallen ones. With as much reason might they proclaim it to be an impossibility for trees, stripped of their foliage by the winter’s cold, ever to regain their leaves in spring, inasmuch as they themselves find it beyond their power to redress the woods with verdure, or to call to a new life the dormant and buried root hidden in the frost-bound earth. God alone can give life to the soul; and these souls, sinned against and despairing beyond all others, will answer only to the call of God, or of the follower of Christ who has derived, through deep spiritual communion with him, the secret of the rare and awful power of quickening souls. “The works that I do,” said that Holy One, “shall ye do also, and greater works than these shall ye do.” “I perceive that virtue is gone out of me,” he said, when a trembling woman, who had touched the hem of his garment, stood upright before him, “healed of that plague” which had blighted her life. That Holy One alone could say in its fullest sense, “I and my Father are one;” hence he alone in the fullest sense could be the channel of healing virtue to suffering men; and for the working of miracles of healing in the soul, they alone are sufficient who live in unbroken communion with God.

John Eudes of Normandy, who lived in the seventeenth century, coming forth from a retirement of five years spent in unceasing prayer and thought, accomplished a great reformation work in France, especially in the matter of public morality and the overthrowing of the conventional ideas concerning the relative guilt of men and women who were impure. 73It is told of him, that one day while preaching to a vast congregation in the great church of St. Stephen’s at Caen, carried away by the thought of the sin of the world and of the numbers before him who were its slaves or victims, he ceased for a moment to speak, and then cried out, in a voice of piercing emotion, “Mercy, O my God, have mercy!” The whole congregation, falling on their knees, began to weep and to sigh, and repeated, as with the voice of one man, the words, “Mercy, O my God, have mercy!” Another very talented and popular preacher, a great admirer of Eudes, believed, on hearing this, that he could produce the same effect by the same method; he tried it, and pausing in the course of a beautiful sermon soon afterwards, used the same words in a voice of deep emotion; but though he repeated them twice, no heart was touched, no one knelt, all remained seated and silent. This preacher had not won, through years of deep communion with God, that “virtue” which, like an electric fire, flowed from the inmost soul of Eudes to the hearts of all who heard him. Thus, among ourselves, the outward means by which repentance and life are brought to dark and dying souls may be employed by men and women who have not the spiritual power to render those means effectual. In that case, their actions and appeals are but a performance, a representation, instructive to the beholder, and edifying, it may be, by way of example, but no more.

Yet is there not a work to be done by those who are conscious that they lack the faith which would enable them to “receive their dead to life again,” and to bring their fellow-sinners to the feet of God? 74Assuredly there is. Of this same John Eudes it is said, that when he had daily proclaimed the love of God to multitudes of the poor women of his city, lost in misery and sin, he called some of his disciples around him, and explained to them his need of their help. He “found that the weak seeds of better feelings, of repentance and a desire to return to God, which by grace were sown in their hearts while listening to his words, could not take root under the pressure of poverty and the pestilential atmosphere of vice and misery in which they lived.” He accordingly induced many of his friends “to receive these poor women into their houses, to give them work, to educate them, and, as far as possible, to improve their moral character.” Thus they were placed in conditions more favourable for the restoration of self-respect, and for the reception of the hopes and aspirations of the spiritual life. There is not one among us, however faltering our own advance in the better life, however unworthy, however ignorant as yet in spiritual matters, who has not within his or her reach the possibility of aiding in this holiest mission of restoring the fallen, or of arresting the progress along the path of destruction of some fellow-man or woman. A word, but one word, of gentle human kindness, has marked, thousands of times, the turning-point in a career of ignorance, recklessness, or despair, and has given the impulse in the opposite direction. Multitudes of the most unhappy class of sinners might be drawn out of the mire, separated from the entanglements of the circumstances which surround them, and set forth in the paths of honour and virtue, by the mere stretching forth of a helping 75hand, succeeded by the patient combined efforts of those who, in repentance and humility, sincerely desire to redress some human wrong, and who, if not yet spiritually strong, are at least full of human sympathy. For this work of raising from the dust the daughters of our country’s shame, a generous faith in human nature and its capabilities is indispensable. When this kind of faith is associated with a sound understanding, common sense, a tender heart, and a lively and healthy imagination, those who possess it are able to meet every fellow-creature, however unfortunate or degraded, however far removed by class distinctions or education, on the broad ground of a common humanity. The secret of reclamation, viewed from the human side, is delicately and frankly to elicit the true God-given character, buried beneath the guilt and shame, and to give permanence to that character. It is in vain for any one, not possessing in some degree such generous faith in and reverence for human nature in its saddest plight, to attempt to influence the women who are the victims of our social depravity. There are men who continually spread abroad on all hands the false and cruel belief that such women are past hope, unsexed, incapable of purification, and more degraded than the men who have sinned with them.

It fills me with grief and shame to see the hold that this belief has got among large classes of virtuous people, especially in the higher ranks, where it has least of all the opportunity of correction by practical and personal knowledge of the conditions of life which surround the daughters of the people, and of the character and homes of the poor. But I doubt 76whether the most powerful reasoning on this subject would convince any one who in his heart believes that fallen women are lost, irreclaimable, unsexed, mere animals, harpies, and the like; for the cause of this misapprehension lies in the heart and character of the person who misapprehends; and unless the heart of that person can be reached, and his whole mode of thought and of life be changed, there is no hope whatever of influencing him on this head. A single look at a man’s face is often enough to indicate whether it is of any use to ask him to aid in the reclamation of fallen women. In some men’s faces I see faith; in others, none. In order to convince these doubters in this matter, I must ask them to come with me to haunts of evil repute, and to poor homes and hiding-places of shame, and learn the reality of the lives of these poor women, and then say whether they are not altogether human beings like ourselves, with hearts and consciences, sorrows and joys, tender hopes and poignant regrets. But then I reflect that this would be, in some cases, useless; for the very approach and presence of some men, and of some women too, paralyses the good there is in these outcasts.

If I were to take with me one of these sceptics about human nature, and introduce him among these women, they would look in his face in their peculiar, keen, and inquiring manner; they would read his thoughts with a quickness of perception which is developed in these Pariahs by the pain of their position, and they would at once turn to him their bad side—the hard, or bitter, or defiant side: hence it is impossible to convince these same men even by 77this means, because there are certain affinities lacking which are needful to draw out the goodness which there is in these outcasts; and therefore these sceptics will ever continue to assert that such women are beyond hope, and to call them by every contemptuous and ungracious epithet.

Nothing is more common than the assertion (we hear it reiterated ad nauseam), that women who sell themselves for money are degraded beyond all other beings, and that the sin so perpetrated is one with which the sin of the man, her partner, is not to be compared for moral turpitude. In the face of this assertion, I will fearlessly avow, and I speak from a large experience, that some of those who thus sin are among the least guilty—I will even say the most capable of nobility of motive, of that unhappy class.

I could tell you of a girl whose father was pining in sickness, and could not even get a farthing candle or a bit of coal to lighten and warm the cellar where his agonised nights were spent. I have seen the daughter with her face buried in his rags of bedclothes, weeping her heart out. Then she goes forth, and returns with various unexpected comforts, and says, “Don’t ask, father, where I got them;” and so she ministers to him till he dies, buying a shell to place his body in, and a bunch of violets to lay on the breast of the corpse; and all out of the sale of her own cold, trembling, hungry person, not carried away, mark you, by any vanity, or morbid instinct, or passion, except the passion of pity for a dying father. And yet we hear doctors and statesmen and philosophers, and even women, say, “If 78women will be so base as to sell their persons, they are no longer women; they deserve anything, even to endure the ‘seal of their degradation,’” in the official recognition, as a patented industry, of that dark and degrading traffic, which to themselves has been only the last resort of hunger and despair.

I could tell you of one whom I entreated that that day on which I found her should be the beginning of a new life; and who, looking despairingly at the skeleton of a child on her knee, replied, with white lips, “Gladly would I cease to do evil; but what is to become of my little boy? I am obliged to go out at night to get him a piece of bread.” I could tell you of another to whom I said the same, and who, looking with clear, frank, sorrowful eyes in my face, said, “I never chose evil; but I can get no work. Look at my mother; neither she nor I have broken our fast since yesterday at this hour.” Her mother was an old woman, stone blind, who clung to her one support, her daughter, to guide her across the floor to her corner by the fire and to bring her her daily crust. These are not fictions, but facts.

Strange that it should be needful to put to the consciences of men who have sinned, the question, Did you sin because of hunger? Were you driven by want and starvation to the baseness of bartering virtue for money? Nay; you were not poor; it was you who paid the money. What, then, was your motive? Was it love? You shudder at the word in such a connection. I press you no further. But I adjure you to echo no more the false and shallow verdict that she is the greater sinner whose poverty is an incentive to, ofttimes the sole motive of, her sin. 79It is difficult for those who are raised far above those conditions which press so cruelly on the sons and daughters of toil and poverty to realise what hunger means. They have never experienced, and have no power to imagine, what is meant by the pain of hunger—I mean starvation hunger—that gnawing and faintness, increasing through weeks, months, and years, of insufficient nourishment, that passion for sustenance which becomes a raging instinct, and drowns all other feeling.

Here is a truthful history, which has its counterpart in every city, in every poor quarter of every city, in every street where the poverty-stricken swarm and cower.... “With a few clothes, a few shillings, a Bible and a Hymn-book, the orphan made her venture in the world. She sought long for service, but in vain. She had no credentials. She next turned to the city, and to the thousands fiercely struggling for employment she added one more. Work proved scarce and hands too plentiful. Long had the little bundle of clothes given by the kind nurse at the hospital been exchanged for a smaller bundle of pawn-tickets, and yet only just enough occasional work could she find to keep up doomed hope. Then day by day, with boots which disclosed almost the whole stockingless foot within, in a gown too thin even for summer wear, almost her only covering, to the city she tramped through snow and mud; night by night she sat in her room in wet clothes by a fireless grate. She had taken a little room for herself: it was an empty attic, but when she first entered it, she felt as Jacob on the Syrian common after his vision of the ladder and 80the angels. It was her Bethel. There, like the patriarch, she ‘vowed a vow, saying, If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, then shall the Lord be my God.’ But heroic effort and long patience left her in bitter winter, without ‘bread to eat,’ and without ‘raiment to put on.’ One night she entered this room, and throwing herself starved and weary on her bed, looking towards the little Bible on the window-sill, madly she cried, ‘It’s no use—it’s no use; I am not the sort for God;’ and covering her face with her thin black shawl, she sobbed and shrieked in blank despair. Day by day she had sought work for her fingers, and day by day, through wanton eyes and wanton tongues of warehousemen and clerks, she had learned that she could make a market of her beauty. The one she had strenuously sought; the other she had heroically refused; but what must be the end? So far as starvation and suicide were concerned, neither seemed unlikely to her. Yet was not that dreaded life as good as friendless girls of that kind ought to expect? What had been the experience of her honest, almost martyr’s efforts after a virtuous and independent life?... Two years gone by; a crowd become acquainted with the hysterical laugh, the wild reckless despair, of a miserable woman in the custody of the police in a well-known thoroughfare. But they had not seen the struggles and tears which in solitude had often knitted the now brazen brow, and dimmed the now fiendish eye. They had not heard the vows and prayers which had arisen in an agony from the lips that now poured forth curses. At 81what cost the purer life had been exchanged for this, God only knew.”^[8]

Hear a tale told by one of the victims herself of our social inequalities. “I am,” she said, “the daughter of a minister of the gospel; and I pledge my word, solemnly and sacredly, that it was the low price paid for my labour that drove me to sin. I could only make two-and-ninepence a week at shirts, and should have starved but for the streets. At last I swore to myself that I would keep from it for my boy’s sake. I had pawned my clothes, and slept in a shawl and petticoat under a butcher’s shed. I was trying to get to the workhouse. I had had no food for two days. My baby’s legs froze to my side, and I sank upon a doorstep. A lady found us, and would have fed us, but I could not eat; she rubbed the baby’s legs with brandy. That night I got to the workhouse; but they would not take me in without an order; so I went back to sin for one month. It was the last. In my heart I hated it; my whole nature rebelled at it; and nobody but God knows how I struggled to give it up. I pawned my only gown more than once.” At the time when this woman told her story, she had been eight years at service, honoured by her employers. She was on an errand of mercy to save other women from the same fate, when the recipient of her narrative met her: he took a day’s journey to confirm the facts. Her employers spoke of her sobriety, industry, and modesty. She told her story with her face hidden in her hands, the tears dropping through her fingers, and sobbing so as scarcely to be understood.

82Another true story:—A beautiful Jewess, in years still a girl, but worn and aged by suffering, came to my door. Mention of her had already been made in the police columns of the daily papers. She had sought to conceal the birth of her child; she had been followed, and all the circumstances hunted up by a certain vigilant and zealous police-agent, who was highly commended for the deed. She had undergone her legal punishment, and now, broken-hearted with the sense of wrong suffered, even more than of wrong done, she sought help that she might go “far away, somewhere.” Some months had passed, and she was gone “far away, somewhere,” into the presence of God, when a letter arrived for her. She had asked me to open any such letter, even if addressed “private,” as this was. “I have nothing to hide from you,” she said. The letter was that of a man inviting her to return to him. It flattered: “Among the many girls I see, none are so handsome as you. Why don’t you write?” And the writer pleaded in selfish and inflamed language, as the father of the infant, for renewed favours from the persecuted mother. The writer was Police Constable ——,^[9] the father of the infant, the same vigilant and zealous agent who had hunted up the shrinking mother, dragged her before the court, sought out “the child” (his own!), and received the commendation of his employers. I think I hear you utter words of scorn or indignation as you read this. But why, I ask, why feel indignant with the policeman? Policemen are “men of like passions” with yourselves. This man did but perform the duty which 83he had been taught in dragging to light and conveying to jail this young and frail victim of his own seduction. His case does not differ greatly from that of the magistrate who committed to prison the girl to whom he had paid money (the price of his sin) in the street the previous night, and who, as he sat on the bench, heard the charge from her own lips with unflinching countenance; nor does it differ greatly from that of the legislator who waxes eloquent in Parliament in advocacy of laws for the punishment of women, far, far less morally guilty than himself. As we sow so must we expect to reap. We have made the police the judges of the morality of the people, or rather, I should say, of the morality of our women only. We have invested them with powers with which the wisest and purest man might tremble to be entrusted; and then we send them forth to watch and dog the feet of women; to repress women, and to call it repressing vice; to punish immoral women only, and call it punishing immorality. The men who share the guilt of women are carefully, even studiously ignored, or suffered to pass on, permitted to enter and re-enter the abodes of infamy unrebuked and unchecked, protected by the law even there, allowed to solicit the inexperienced or innocent wanderer in the street, to take their fill of sensuality, and to hunt after “all uncleanness with greediness.” The police, our despots of the future, are daily and systematically trained, by our customs, laws, language, and acts, to believe that the man may sin with impunity, and that the woman alone is responsible, that there is, in fact, one moral law for the man and another for the woman; and 84through this perpetual pursuit of the weaker sinner, while privilege is reserved for the stronger, the “old and chartered lie” is unceasingly promulgated anew, and is ever obtaining a firmer hold on popular belief, while the victims of this false standard become ever more faint and hopeless as the hour chills and darkens before the dawn appears. Nevertheless “the morning cometh.”

I said that the secret of reclamation is gently and delicately to elicit the true God-given character; but characters differ, and present an infinite variety; hence a machinery of a uniform nature, brought to bear upon these infinite shades of natural disposition and capacity for good, must present an obstacle through its lack of elasticity in its application as a reformatory discipline. It is beginning to be more and more felt that the old system of bringing together large communities of young women separated from the rest of society, and all more or less blighted by the one form of sin, is not the happiest or most successful means for the rehabilitation of character. Everywhere the attempt is made to approach more and more to the ideal of a Home, in the true sense. Blessings innumerable have, doubtless, during the past century, followed the efforts of the “lovers of the lost,” even when their methods were rigid, and lacking in enlightenment and generosity. The mere motive of compassion and the desire to save have borne fruit; but, like many other designs or institutions, approved and successful in their origin, their form of charity is worn out; it has fulfilled its office; it has tided over a period when nothing better could, perhaps, have been conceived or maintained. It has 85had its day, and has become effete. The victims themselves of our social impurity begin to feel a yearning for some more natural and generous dispensation towards themselves of the pity and charity which Christian hearts feel for them; and this yearning has something in it of the prophetical. “Give me work,” they ask sometimes; “if I may go straight to work, I shall do well;” and “why,” they naturally question, “why is a certain fixed period of quarantine required for us which is not required for sinners of the other sex?” There had indeed come to be something superstitious in the way in which the Penitentiary quarantine, as a necessity for women alone, is regarded by society. If a young son of your own were to fall into profligate habits, and you, hastening to the rescue, were planning, with deep concern and the best wisdom you could summon, the means most likely to restore him to virtue and set him forth once more on an honourable career, how would you act? Would you desire to place your young son in a walled establishment, where he must promise to remain for one year or two years, where he would see no one save male companions of his own age, whose antecedents were in every case very similar to his own, where certain employments would be assigned to him, in company with the other profligate youths in course of being reclaimed, and certain religious exercises enjoined? Possibly, in a case of dipsomania, some such forced discipline may be resorted to, when the unhappy subject becomes more of a patient than a criminal, and the restoring influence of a constant appeal to individual responsibility must be dispensed with. But in a 86case where the sin has been that of impurity, I believe that no parent would desire precisely such a discipline for his son as is commonly imposed upon the daughters of the people. It would be deemed by you safer and better to surround him with some homelike influences, with a prudent amount of external enjoyment, freedom, and exercise, and to give him constant and suitable work; you would strive to place him under the influence of good men and good women; above all, under some holy maternal influence; and you would seek to bring him in contact, while in the world (not secluded in an institution), with strong, virtuous, and honourable men, whose example and counsel would fence him round with safeguards. But industrial training, you will say, is required to fit the poor women for self-dependence and honest work. True; and such industrial training can often be had only in communities where a number of persons of similar age and position are assembled. The attainment of this object, however, is not incompatible with the essential elements of the home-life. It is, nevertheless, but imperfectly recognised as yet that the true idea of a home embraces more than the kindness and maternal influences which are seldom lacking in the modern refuge, more than the comparative freedom now allowed, and more than the sense of security and protection, valuable as all these are. When God set human beings on earth in families, he bestowed on them not only the happiest earthly conditions, but those most favourable for the development of unselfishness, mutual sympathy, and growth in moral character. In our homes, we are not all of 87one age and one condition; the old and young, the enfeebled through age, and the helpless infant, are placed together with the full-grown man and woman, and with the young man and the maiden. Every sweet and holy combination arises out of these differences; sympathies, duties, mutual help, and mutual dependence are created, which give to life so much of its holiness, its sweetness, and its strength. The family is God’s order. So far as we make social arrangements in which the family order is set aside, we lose just so much of the help and the comfort which Providence intended for our feebleness, and we just so far create artificial conditions which do not tend to the wholesome and natural development of what is best in the human being.

This begins to be felt to be true in regard to the work of rescue and rehabilitation. A wild and wayward girl, who has many a time been found to be little amenable to any motives of a direct spiritual nature, or to the influence even of a kindly matron set over her, has changed her whole character when entrusted with the care of a little child or of an aged man or woman. Some who rebelled against the restraint of the house of penitence have become as it were new creatures when called to some serious responsibility in regard to a fellow-creature even more erring or weak than themselves. Others, apparently unmoved and indifferent, have found their lives transfigured through an introduction to some active and holy office of tending the sick or the dying. The utmost scope should, when possible, be allowed, for the widely-differing capacities, desires, and gifts of these poor women. What may be an irksome or 88unsuitable task to one, may be, humanly speaking, the salvation of another. Skill in music or in some delicate art, or manual labour in the open fields, among gardens, and under the blue heavens, have in other cases been the means whereby the broken energies and dormant motives and tastes have been revived and encouraged, and through which soundness of mental health has been slowly regained.

A happy picture of what might be done is presented in some broken and fragmentary accounts I have seen of a work accomplished in France, after that country had been scourged and desolated by the long wars of the Fronde. The fathers and brothers and husbands of the poor population of some of the provinces had been almost destroyed by that sanguinary war. Villages were depopulated and families broken up; famine and pestilence succeeded; orphan girls and young widowed mothers wandered about barefooted and ragged, a prey to hunger and misery. One of the noble ladies of that period, while travelling to her chateau in the country, was penetrated with grief at the sight of so many forlorn girls and women; and when she observed that many of them were offering to sell themselves to any comer in order to obtain bread to allay the agonies of famine, she said to herself, “It is time that women who are raised above this terrible alternative should hasten to the rescue of these.” She asked of these girls, “Are you willing to work?” Willing, even eager, they all were. The laborious and humble beginnings of the enterprise which arose from this necessity it is not needful here to record. Suffice it to say, that an Industrial Colony was 89founded through the energy and perseverance of the men and women actuated by a desire to save these victims. The colony was situated in the country, remote from any large cities. Hundreds were gathered there. “Industry” was the motto of the community. After some years, the place had the appearance of a large and flourishing village; the sounds of busy labour, of the laughter of childhood, of singing and of praise, were heard by those who passed through it. The family life was truly realised here. Only while at work in the factory, which formed the main industry of the place, were the women assembled in one place. After work-hours they returned to their homes—little cottages with gardens, some standing alone, others in rows, facing the central green of the village, shaded by luxuriant trees; and to these cottage homes were brought from many parts the aged poor, and orphaned or deserted infants, to be cared for and ministered to, and in their turn to bless those who tended them. Many a poor Hagar turned her wandering feet with her starving child to this abode of industry and peace, leaving behind her the great wilderness of the city.

The mothers of this community lived in its midst, constantly and lovingly superintending, advising, and influencing, yet leaving abundant freedom to the citizens of this little colony. When some of these mothers—the ladies devoted to the work—were called away, others took their place. A place of worship arose in the midst, and a schoolhouse for the little ones. Every varied form of human ministration was here presented to the poor fallen ones, thus calling out such gifts of heart or mind as each 90might possess, while the alternation between the regular hours of industrial labour and the ministering of the cottage-home filled the affections and the mind, at the same time employing the hands in a degree hardly attainable under any other conditions. We catch a glimpse, in the broken record of this enterprise, of the happy evenings, when the girls, trooping back to their little cottages, would wrangle amicably for the first embrace of the baby or the tottering little ones who came forward to meet their adopted young mothers, clinging around them, chasing far away, with their pure sweet kisses and innocent talk, all memory of unholy and unwomanly act and thought. We see, in the happy scramble for the embraces of the babes, defeated candidates among the young girls pressing forward towards the cottage doors; one throws her arms gaily and tenderly around the silvered head of a stooping, feeble, aged man, saying, “This is my baby.” He was her special charge, and long did the hours seem to the aged man till his beloved nurse returned from her daily work to bring sunshine and gladness to the little room where he dwelt. She, once “a woman of the city and a sinner,” now poured forth all the womanly tenderness and abounding love of her poor heart on this old man, seeing, it may be, in him a father long dead, whom she seemed now to serve again, as in childhood. Another would be entrusted with an aged woman, in whom she found again the mother long ago grieved or dead. In some cases the patience and skill of the young women were tried and tested, but bore the trial. Some had an aptitude for teaching, and their 91evenings were spent in the school. A library was established; books were read and exchanged in the little homes. Convalescents from city hospitals were sent sometimes to recover in this happy valley, through which a pure stream danced and sang, and in which breezes from the south and west played freely.

Some of the cottages became convalescent homes for these pale visitors from the cities. The poor women who approved themselves by long service, or by devotion to the young, or sick, or aged, became promoted by degrees to the position of mothers of the colony. A preacher would sometimes visit the place, when a crowd of all ages and conditions would gather from many a porch of the industrial colony to hear the glad tidings of the gospel of peace preached under the open sky in the village green, whence hymns of praise ascended evening by evening. The products of the industry of the colony were sent to the nearest manufacturing city, and in the course of years the colony became more than self-supporting.

Those who have read of the work done by Rosa Govona, and of her happy industrial colony in the vale of Mondovi on the northern side of the Ligurian Apennines, will understand still better the favourable conditions realised by poor and friendless women thus gathered together. “Thou shalt live by the labour of thine own hands,” was Rosa Govona’s salutation to every new-comer, thus at once, and without any interval of prescribed quarantine, establishing them in remunerative labour, inspired with the principles of independence and self-respect: 92for this was one of the most cherished points in her creed.^[10]

In travelling over our healthful Yorkshire moors, or through some of the beautiful secluded parts of rural England, I have sometimes thought, “Is the realisation of such an enterprise as this an impossibility in our own time and country?” God grant that ingenuity and courage, as well as charity, may be brought to bear on this matter, so that thousands (now humanly speaking without a straw to catch at for life) may be withdrawn from that great gulf stream which is whirling them downward to destruction. Even in the heart of our cities, industrial enterprises might be established with success, where the principle of self-dependence and the home element might alike be secured. In work such as I have imperfectly recorded, women must be the chief agents; but they cannot accomplish so great a work unaided by men.

That portion of the mighty task appointed to us at this day, which is in danger of being again and again lost sight of, is the elevation of the moral standard of our sons and our brethren. If this is neglected, the work of rescuing women will continue to resemble the attempt to dry the bed of a river by turning away its waters, while the fountainhead continues actively to pour forth its ever-renewed floods. To you again, then, young men, I would turn. To you is allotted this high, difficult, and thrice-blessed work.

93“It is right that a moral stimulus so wholesome, an enthusiasm so real, as their participation in this social movement will furnish, should be permitted to young men.

“It is true that they must be chiefly engaged in preparation for the duties of active life. But this is a duty which they are imperatively summoned to discharge without delay or preparation, since the evil springs from among their own number. Any antagonism to this iniquity must be paralysed, if they do not strike the first blow for purity and justice. Let a young man, whose tacit compliance will otherwise be assumed, make a resolute protest against this human sacrifice, and he can liberate, it may be, more than one of the victims; while he will exercise upon others an influence for good which cannot easily be measured.”^[11]

Thrice happy you, young men, who have escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust, in whose breasts is no concealed memory of past shameful deed! Thrice blessed are you! Strength and joy be your portion! The blessing of the mothers of men rests upon you. Humble, modest, and watchful, I know many of you are; more humble often than your companions who might well feel a sense of humiliation in your presence; for experience in sin does not in itself induce humility, but too often pride: the heavenly light of God’s grace alone begets humility, alike in the fallen and in those who have been able to withstand temptation. “Let no man take thy crown,”—the crown of your noble youth and manhood. In the name of whatsoever things are 94pure, lovely, honest, and of good report, the invitation is this day made to you, England’s joy and pride, to join in the battle of the Lord against the mighty. May God open your eyes, young men, to see the noble rôle which lies before you. May you be filled with the unconquerable ardour of expectation, and with the irresistible enthusiasm which is possessed by reformers who hold a position which is absolutely impregnable. And let those who are baffled by temptation, or bruised by falls, or crushed by sin’s penalties, yet repentant now and resolute, arise together with you, and, strengthened by you, let them labour for the bringing in of the new era—that era when the unequal judgment of man on this fundamental question will cease to poison at the fountainhead the springs of human life.