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, who 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 my 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 spirit 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 barren 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 in 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.

“Yet show I unto you a more excellent way.”

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 home, 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 to 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 the 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 quaint 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 gift 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 meat 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 women 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 would 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 may 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 of 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 on 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.”

If 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 day 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 outcast 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 atmosphere 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 among 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 the 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 their 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 has 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 privately, 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 irreclaimability 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. It 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? Assuredly 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 hand, 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 whether 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 this 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 women 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. It 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 the 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 what 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.

Another 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 he 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 through 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 had 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 case 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 one 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 unsuitable 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 founded 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 might 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 evenings 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: for 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.

“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 pure, 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.