452. Words with Young Women

Words with Young Women

Christ, who took his text from a flock of birds flying overhead, saying, ’93Behold the fowls of the air,’94 and from the flowers in the valley, saying, ’93Consider the lilies of the field,’94 and from the clucking of a barnyard fowl, saying, ’93As a hen gathereth her chickens under her wing,’94 and from a crystal of salt picked up by the road-side, saying, ’93Salt is good,’94 will grant us a blessing if, instead of taking a text from the Bible, I take for my text this letter from Cincinnati, which is only one of many letters which I have received from young women in New York, New Orleans, San Francisco, London, Edinburgh, and from the ends of the earth, all implying that having some months ago preached the sermon on ’93Advice to Young Men,’94 I could not, without neglect of duty, refuse to preach a sermon on ’93Advice to Young Women.’94

It is the more important that the pulpit be heard on this subject at this time when we are having such an illimitable discussion about what is called the ’93New Woman,’94 as though some new creature of God had arrived on earth, or were about to arrive. One theory is that she will be an athlete, and boxing-glove and football and pugilistic encounter will characterize her. Another theory is that she will superintend ballot-boxes, sit in congressional hall, and through improved politics bring the millennium by the evil she will extirpate and the good she will install. Another theory is that she will adopt masculine attire and make sacred a vulgarianism positively horrific. Another theory is that she will be so esthetic that broom-handle and rolling-pin and coalscuttle will be pictorialized with tints from soft skies or suggestions of Rembrandt and Raphael.

Heaven deliver the church and the world from any one of these styles of new woman! She will never come. I have so much faith in the evangelistic triumph and in the progress of all things in the right direction, that I prophesy that style of new woman will never arrive. She would hand over this world to diabolism, and from being, as she is now, the mightiest agency for the world’92s uplifting, she would be the mightiest force for its downthrust.

I will tell you who the new woman will be. It will be the good woman of all the ages past. Here and there a difference of attire, as the temporary custom may command, but the same good, honest, lovely, Christian, all-influential being that your mother and mine were. Of that kind of woman was Christian Eddy, who, talking to a man who was so much of an unbeliever he had named his two children Voltaire and Tom Paine, nevertheless saw him converted, he breaking down with emotion as he said to her, ’93I cannot stand you; you talk like my mother,’94 and telling the story of his conversion to twelve companions who had been blatant opposers of religion, they asked her to come and see them also, and tell them of Christ, and four of them were converted, and all the others greatly changed, and the leader of the band departing for heaven, shouted, ’93Joyful! Joyful! Joyful!’94 If you know any better style of woman than that, where is she? The world cannot improve on that kind. The new woman may have more knowledge, because she will have more books; but she will have no more common sense than that which tried to manage and discipline and educate us, and did as well as she could with such unpromising material. She may have more health than the woman of other days, for the sewing-machine and the sanitary regulations and added intelligence on the subjects of diet, ventilation, and exercise, and rescue from many forms of drudgery may allow her more longevity; but she will have the same characteristics which God gave her in Paradise, with the exception of the nervous shock and moral jolt of the fall she got that day when not noticing where she stepped, she looked up into the branches of the fruit tree.

But I must be specific. This letter before me wants advice to young women.

Advice the first: Get your soul right with God and you will be in the best attitude for everything that comes. New ways of voyaging by sea, new ways of traveling by land, new ways of threshing the harvests, new ways of printing books, and the Patent Office is enough to enchant a man who has mechanical ingenuity and knows a good deal of levers and wheels, and we hardly do anything as it used to be done; invention after invention, invention on top of invention. But in the matter of getting right with God there has not been an invention for six thousand years. It is on the same line of repentance that David exercised about his sins, and the same old style of prayer that the publican used when he emphasized it by an inward stroke of both hands, and the same faith in Christ that Paul suggested to the jailer the night the penitentiary broke down. Ay, that is the reason I have more confidence in it. It has been tried by more millions than I dare to state lest I come far short of the brilliant facts. All who through Christ earnestly tried to get right with God, are right, and always will be right. That gives the young woman who gets that position superiority over all rivalries, all jealousies, all misfortunes, all health failings, all social disasters, and all the combined troubles of eighty years, if she shall live to be an octogenarian. If the world fails to appreciate her she says, ’93God loves me, the angels in heaven are in sympathy with me, and I can afford to be patient until the day when the imperial chariot shall wheel to my door to take me up to my coronation.’94 If health goes, she says, ’93I can endure the present distress, for I am on the way to a climate the first breath of which will make me proof against even the slightest discomfort.’94 If she be jostled with perturbations of social life she can say, ’93Well, when I begin my life among the thrones of heaven and the kings and queens unto God shall be my associates, it will not make much difference who on earth forgot me when the invitations to that reception were made out.’94 All right with God you are all right with everything.

Martin Luther, writing a letter of condolence to one of his friends who had lost his daughter, began by saying, ’93This is a hard world for girls.’94 It is for those who are dependent upon their own wits and the whims of the world and the preferences of human favor; but those who take the eternal God for their portion not later than fifteen years of age’97and that is ten years later than it ought to be’97will find that while Martin Luther’92s letter of condolence was true in regard to many, if not most, with respect to those who have the wisdom and promptitude and the earnestness to get right with God it is not so. For all such I declare that this is a good world for girls.

Advice the second: Make it a matter of religion to take care of your physical health. I do not wonder that the Greeks deified health and hailed Hygeia as a goddess. I rejoice that there have been so many modes of maintaining and restoring young womanly health invented in our time. They may have been known a long time back, but they have been popularized in our day’97lawn tennis, croquet, and golf, and the bicycle. It always seemed strange and inscrutable that our human race should be so slow of locomotion, when creatures of less importance have powers of velocity, wing of bird or foot of antelope, leaving us far behind, and while it seems so important that we be in many places in a short while, we were weighed down with incapacities, and most men if they run a mile are exhausted, or dead from the exhaustion. It was left until the last decade of the nineteenth century to give the speed which we see whirling through all our cities and along the country roads, and with that speed comes health. For good womanhood, I thank God that this mode of recreation has been invented. Use it wisely, modestly, Christianly. No good woman needs to be told what attire is proper and what behavior is right. If anything be doubtful reject it. A hoydenish, boisterous, masculine woman is the detestation of all, and every revolution of the wheel she rides is towards depreciation and downfall.

Take care of your health, O woman! of your nerves in not reading the trash which makes up ninety-nine out of one hundred novels, or by eating too many cornucopias of confectionery. Take care of your eyes by not reading at hours when you ought to be sleeping. Take care of your ears by stopping them against the tides of gossip that surge through every neighborhood. Health! Only those know its value who have lost it. The earth is girdled with pain, and a vast proportion of it is the price paid for early recklessness. I close this thought with the salutation in Macbeth:

Now Good Digestion Wait On Appetite

And Health On Both.

Advice the third: Appreciate your mother while you have her. It is the almost universal testimony of young women who have lost their mother, that they did not realize what she was to them until after her exit from this life. Indeed, mother is in the appreciation of many a young lady a hindrance. The maternal inspection is often considered an obstacle. Mother has so many notions about that which is proper and that which is improper. It is astounding how much more many girls know at eighteen than their mothers at forty-five. With what an elaborate argument, perhaps spiced with some temper, the youngling tries to reverse the opinion of the oldling. The sprinkle of gray on the maternal forehead is rather an indication to the recent graduate of the female seminary that the circumstances of today or tonight are not fully appreciated. What a wise boarding-school that would be if the mothers were the pupils and the daughters the teachers. How well the teens could chaperone the fifties. Then mothers do not amount to much anyhow. They are in the way, and are always asking questions about postage marks of letters, and asking, ’93Who is that Mary D.?’94 and ’93Where did you form that acquaintance, Flora?’94 and ’93Where did you get that ring, Myra?’94 For mothers have such unprecedented means of knowing everything’97they say ’93It was a bird in the air’94 that told them. Alas, for that bird in the air. Will not some one lift his gun and shoot it? It would take whole libraries to hold the wisdom which the daughter knows more than her mother. ’93Why cannot I have this?’94 ’93Why cannot I do that?’94 And the question in many a group has been, although not plainly stated, ’93What shall we do with the mothers, anyhow? They are so far behind the times.’94

Permit me to suggest that if the mother had given more time to looking after herself and less time to looking after you, she would have been as fully up-to-date as you, in music, in style of gait, in esthetic taste, and in all sorts of information. I expect that while you were studying botany and chemistry and embroidery and the new opera she was studying household economics. But one day from over-work or sitting up of nights with a neighbor’92s sick child or a blast of the east wind, on which pneumonias are horsed, mother is sick. Yet the family think she will soon be well, for she has been sick so often, and always has got well, and the physician comes three times a day, and there is a consultation of the doctors, and the news is gradually broken that recovery is impossible, given in the words ’93While there is life there is hope.’94 And the white pillow over which are strewn the locks a little tinted with snow, becomes the point around which all the family gather, some standing, some kneeling, and the pulse beats the last throb, and the bosom trembles with the last breath, and the question is asked in a whisper by all the group, ’93Is she gone?’94 And all is over.

Now come the regrets. Now the daughter reviews her former criticism of maternal supervision. For the first time she realizes what it is to have a mother, and what it is to lose a mother. Tell me, men and women, young and old, did any of us appreciate how much mother was to us until she was gone? Young women, you will probably never have a more disinterested friend than your mother. When she says anything is unsafe or imprudent, you had better believe it is unsafe or imprudent. When she declares it is something you ought to do, I think you had better do it. She has seen more of the world than you have. Do you think she could have any mercenary or contemptible motive in what she advises you? She would give her life for you if it were called for. Do you know of any one else who would do more than that for you? Do you know of anyone who would do as much? Again and again she has already endangered that life during six weeks of diphtheria or scarlet fever, and she never once brought up the question of whether she had better stay, breathing day and night the contagion. The graveyards are full of mothers who died taking care of their children. Better appreciate your mother before your appreciation of her will be no kindness to her, and the post-mortem regret will be more and more of an agony as the years pass on. Big headstones of polished Aberdeen, and the best epitaphs which the family put together could compose, and a garland of whitest roses from the conservatory are often the attempt to atone for the thanks we ought to have uttered in living ears, and the kind words that would have done more good than all the calla lilies ever piled up on the silent mounds of the cemeteries. The world makes applauditory ado over the work of mothers who have raised boys to be great men, and I could turn to my book-shelves and find the names of fifty distinguished men who had great mothers; Cuvier’92s mother, Walter Scott’92s mother, St. Bernard’92s mother, Benjamin West’92s mother. But who praises mothers for what they do for daughters who make the homes of America? I do not know of an instance of such recognition. I declare to you that I believe I am uttering the first word that has ever been uttered in appreciation of the self-denial, of the fatigues, and good sense and prayers which those mothers go through who navigate a family of girls from the edge of the cradle to the schoolhouse door, and from the schoolhouse door up to the marriage altar. That is an achievement which the eternal God celebrates high up in the heavens, though for it human hands so seldom clap the faintest applause. My! My! what a time that mother had with those youngsters, and if she had relaxed care and work and advice and solicitation of heavenly help, that next generation would have landed in the poorhouse, idiot asylum or penitentiary. It is while she is living, but never after she is dead that some girls call their mother ’93maternal ancestor’94 or ’93the old woman.’94

Advice the fourth: Allow no time to pass without brightening some one’92s life. Within five minutes’92 walk of you there is some one in a tragedy compared with which Shakespeare’92s King Lear or Victor Hugo’92s Jean Valjean has no power. Go out and brighten somebody’92s life with a cheering word or smile or a flower. Take a good book and read a chapter to that blind man. Go up that dark alley and make that invalid woman laugh with some good story. Go to that house from which that child has been taken by death and tell the father and mother what an escape the child has had from the winter of earth into the springtime of heaven. For God’92s sake make some one happy for ten minutes if for no longer a time. A young woman bound on such a mission, what might she not accomplish. Oh, there are thousands of these manufacturers of sunshine. They are ’93King Daughters’94 whether inside or outside that delightful organization. They do more good before they are twenty years of age than selfish women who live ninety, and they are so happy just because they make others happy. Compare such a young woman who feels she has such a mission with one who lives a round of vanities, card-case in hand calling on people for whom she does not care, except for some social advantage, and insufferably bored when the call is returned; and trying to look young after they are old; and living a life of insincerity and hollowness and dramatization and sham. Young woman! live to make others happy and you will be happy. Live for yourself and you will be miserable. There never has been an exception to the rule; there never will be an exception.

I have noticed on many of the railroads that the porter will go around and light the lamps while it is broad daylight and I am at first surprised, but I afterwards find that we are about to enter a tunnel and its darkness is thus illuminated. Oh, kindle a light for those who are plunging into financial or domestic or spiritual midnight.

Advice the fifth: Plan out your life on a big scale, whether you are a farmer’92s daughter, or a shepherdess among the hills, or the flattered pet of a drawing-room filled with statuary and pictures and bric-a-brac. Stop where you are and make a plan for your lifetime. You cannot be satisfied with a life of frivolity and giggle and indirection. Trust the world and it will cheat you if it does not destroy you. The Redoubtable was the name of an enemy’92s ship that Lord Nelson spared twice from demolition, but that same ship afterward sent the ball that killed him, and the world on which you smile may aim at you its deadliest weapon. Be a God’92s woman. This moment make as mighty a change as did a college student of England, He had neglected his studies, rioting at night with dissipated companions, and sleeping in the class-room when he ought to have been listening. A fellow-student came into his room one morning, before the young man I am speaking of had arisen from his pillow, and said to him, ’93Paley, you are a fool! You are wasting your opportunities. Do not throw away your life.’94 Paley said, ’93I was so struck with what he said that I lay in bed until I had formed my plan for life. I ordered my fire to be always laid over night. I rose at five and read steadily all day. Allotted to each portion of the day its proper branch of study and became the senior wrangler.’94 What an hour that was when a resolution definitely placed changed a young man from a reckless and time-wasting student to a consecrated man who stopped not until all time and all eternity shall be debtor to his pen and influence.

Young women! draw out, and decide what you will be and do, God helping. Write it out in a plain hand, not like the letters which Josephine received from Napoleon in Italy, the writing so scrawling and scattered that it was sometimes taken as a map of the seat of war. Put the plan on the wall of your room or write it in the opening of a blank book or put it where you will be compelled often to see it. A thousand questions of your coming like you cannot settle now, but there is one question you can settle independent of man, woman, angel, and devil, and that is that you will be a God’92s woman now, henceforth and forever. Clasp hands with the Almighty. Pythagoras represented life by the letter Y, because it early divides into two ways. Look out for opportunities of cheering, inspiring, rescuing, and saving all the people you can. Make a league with the eternities. I seek your present and everlasting safety. David Brewster said that a comet belonging to our system called Lexell’92s comet is lost, as it ought to have appeared thirteen times, and has not appeared at all. Alas! it is not only the lost comets, but the lost stars, and what were considered fixed stars. Some of the most brilliant and steady souls have disappeared.

The world wonders at the charge of the Light Brigade, immortalized by Tennyson. Only a few of the six hundred got back from the charge under Lord Cardigan, of the Muscovite guns; and all the havoc was done in twenty-five minutes. The charge beginning at ten minutes past eleven o’92clock, and closing at thirty-five minutes past eleven, and yet nothing left on the field but dying and dead men, dying and dead horses. But a smaller proportion of the men and women who go into the battle of life come out unwounded. The slaughter has been and will be terrific, and we all need God, and we need him now, and we need him all the time. And let me say there is a new woman, as there is a new man, and that is the regenerated woman made such by the ransacking, transforming, upbuilding, triumphant power of the Spirit who is so superior to all other spirits that he has been called for ages the Holy Spirit. Quicker than wheel ever turned on its axis; quicker than fleetest hoof ever struck the pavement; quicker than zigzag lightning ever dropped down the sky, the ransoming power I speak of will revolutionize your entire nature. Then you can start out on a voyage of life, defying both calm and cyclone, saying with Dean Alford:

One Who has Known in Storms to Sail

I have on board;

Above the Roaring of the Gale

I hear my Lord.

He Holds Me When the Billows Smile;

I shall not fall;

If Short ’91Tis Sharp, If Long ’91Tis Light;

He tempers all.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage