ON LAYING DOWN YOUR LIFE

I doubt if the best people live their own lives. They make themselves the shield and buckler of another’s life, or they are the foundations of peace and security upon which many lives are built.

What impresses me is that they seem to pass beyond the reach of any rewards. They lose the capacity to receive or to shine. If the most devoted mother survives the sacrifices she has made, it is with pathetically folded hands, as the spectator of the brilliant careers of her sons and daughters. I suppose mothers get some sort of half joy out of being merely present; but even that is sacrificial, for they are not puffed up over establishing these young ones; they are simply rejoicing in their success. Something has happened to them, they are tragically emptied of self and cannot share the lives they have made.

It is the same way with preachers, priests, prophets, all that class of men who spend themselves for others--they lose the capacity to live. They are those good, quiet shadows in the background everywhere, strangely contented with your fame or your prosperity, not neglected, but used up.

We are very good about making them the objects of our benefits. We get them out and show them off now and then for conscience’ sake, but they never really enjoy the parade except to be in our reflected glory. They are dead to themselves, which is being dead indeed.

Just practice laying down your life for others and see what happens to you! These others will take it, strengthened by you, and go on about their affairs. I have never seen that Scripture fulfilled in this world which reads, ‘For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake the same shall find it’; so it must be fulfilled in the world to come, which is a long way off and very mysterious, geographically speaking.

Sometimes when I am very low in my mind I get a feeling of terror about the Word. So many Scriptures read like laws every whit as merciless as those which control life in the natural world. All that lives has been and must be fertilized by that decay provided by death. Every flower fades, every leaf falls to enrich the soil for next year’s leaves and blossoms. Must we also lay down our lives forever and ever as living sacrifices that those who come after us shall be stronger and wiser to win what we missed of life and happiness? Is no mercy to be shown to the very good? Must they wait to be raised from the dust of all things to receive their rewards?

Such thinking makes me nervous and a trifle indignant about the way those people who do not lay down their lives seem to flourish more than we do who have served long sentences in that wearying position.

I do not know how it may be with women of other sections, but in this part of the country if you do your own work something goes out of you; not virtue--you are likely to multiply frightfully in virtues--but that bright, fluttering grace of the spirit more becoming to us than all the nobler attributes folds up and disappears. No matter how conscientious she is about setting aside a certain part of each day to improve herself and to keep up with her husband’s times--I never knew one to keep up her music--music is one of the things that go out of her--she cannot do it. She is so busy doing her duty she falls fatally behind his times if he is a man who marches with them. I do not know why this is so, but it is probably a feminine geographical phenomenon.

This is a blessed and glorified land; there is a fragrant inertia in our climate suitable more particularly for the production of the sweetly sitting inspirational woman. She does not need to know so much in the way of mere learning in order to be placidly wise. The dust down here is an alluvial soil, humanly speaking; it has been warmed and brightened for so many ages by the sun, the perfume of so many flowers has sunk into it, the sorrows and misfortunes of a great people have sanctified it. My feeling is that it has a cultural quality which must be got through higher education and the most poignant mental exercises in the other sections where it has been spewed up into hoarfrost for a corresponding number of ages, stauncher dust, but not by nature so pleasant when raised, say, into an able citizen, a strong ballot-bearing woman. Therefore it is not so important for our women to exercise these rights in order to save the country as it is for the abler types in other sections. All they need is two or three of the neater virtues, a prayer capacity in faith, a kind and forgiving heart--and the right look on their faces, effulgent, without being offensively intelligent. I am not one of these, I weep to confess, but I have known such women all my life, as one is acquainted with certain private blessings not shared by the world at large. But I have never known one of them who did all her own work--a noble service diminishing to such a woman.

No matter how correct the pattern of her frock is, or how good her manners are, or how sensible her conversation is, I have never been in the company of one who performed these tasks without becoming immediately aware of the fact, a sort of uneasiness, as if her shoe was pinching her foot. Her seams are too straight. Her draperies do not flow, however voluminous they are. Her eye has a measuring gaze. She feels like the two-edged sword of a just woman made perfect regarding me. Or at the very moment when I am about to confer the bright splash of a thought upon her, my light is put out by the realization that her mind has skipped back home to make sure she did not leave the top off the soda jar and did lock the kitchen door.

I am not complaining of her, you understand; I am endeavoring to compliment her upon her merits. She has all the virtues and you have only your grace in words, a fluttering heart and a mind that climbs her like a clinging vine in conversation. You must lean to her because she will not bend to you. She has lost some graceful elasticity of the spirit. You cannot clasp fingers with one of her thoughts and fly up on an idea and share opinions with her. She is pickling her opinions. You can frequently smell the vinegar of her mind boiling. At such moments I have become so enfeebled spiritually as to be momentarily deprived of my soul. I am of the earth earthy, due entirely, I suppose, to the effect her obvious worth has upon my stricken conscience.

But I am not alone in these sensations, only more vocative about them. I have observed her carefully; she is widely depressing.

I have known such a woman to go abroad, spend a year studying art in all the galleries of Europe, come home, deliver a lecture on the masterpieces she has seen and fatigue her audience to the brink of tears. One must be a person in order to entertain other persons, and she had lost that touch of Nature which makes us kin whether we are kind or not. She is a grammarian of duties, and a recitation of culture if she invades that field. Nothing illuminating sticks to her, nothing softening can happen to her mentally.

Some instinct for liberty warned me from the beginning to avoid the fate of these unfortunate best-of-all women. I have been very busy for forty years, but in my hardest circuit-rider days I never would do all of my own work; only so much of it as could not possibly be avoided. Even then I was careful not to put my whole mind on it. If I had to wash dishes, I always spat enough wit through the kitchen door at Lundy, even if he was in the uttermost parts of the parsonage, to draw his fire and thus divorce my attention from the clatter in the dish pan. Whatever else happens to me, I will never do my own work. If it comes to that, I will escape the disaster to my soul by having no works. Dishes and laundry are not mentioned in the Scriptures, therefore they are not obligatory. I will let my faith praise me rather than my doughnuts.

In recording this scandalous moral limitation I am simply exposing to view the kind of mind I have, knowing well how many better women will take a shot at it. Let them bang away. I would rather have my reputation as a domestic animal riddled than to have my dearer faculties destroyed by a flatiron or dishwater. No one was ever more reduced in poverty than I have been, not one a more considerate or obedient wife. But I managed to remain a wife, never the mere servant of my husband. If you must do it, make the business brief and forgetful. Give him a balanced ration and leave every man to iron his own shirt, would be my motto, even if I went to the field with him afterwards and ploughed a furrow by way of reciprocity. The idea is to keep in with your husband at whatever cost. It works out better in the long run than making a pig of him at the table and a tyrant of him in the house.

The disposition to do that is a senseless weakness in devoted women. Added to their domestic pride, it accounts for the enormous labor now necessary in the conducting of a home and the entertainment of guests.

I am writing this record, however, to prove that the keeping of virtues and those attributes becoming to what you think is your nobler nature is an expensive business, and places you within grasping range of everybody doing business with you who has no such vainglorious sense of himself to serve.

I have never found that it pays in any worldly sense to be outrageously and unscrupulously upright in my dealings. The question is whether the inward foundations one lays that cannot be swept away by earthly misfortunes make up for the losses one sustains. I do not know. I sometimes suffer a very strong temptation to take an inferior’s under-hold upon a person who thinks I am an easy mark and pull off the deal according to his standards in business, not mine, just to learn how it feels to win that way. This, however, is a puerile temptation. My habits are established. I have no practice in shrewdness; only cunning enough not to experiment with my too-long-buried talent.