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 1 
 
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/ 
 
 The EDITH and LORNE PIERCE 
 COLLECTION 0/ CANADIANA 
 
 Slueen's University at Kingston 
 
/ '1 
 
 ^ 
 
 / 
 
 A. 
 
 o 
 
 V 
 
 I 
 
 tr*fHm i.airW*'.-* 
 
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 HMMhMMMI** 
 
 
^^ 
 
 Sermons out of Church, 
 
 \ ! 
 
.■*5*V 
 
 ' ■> . ". -C* '"' 
 
 
« c^ bill ht tone gn ntrtft u it <s In toini.'' 
 
 I \ 
 
 ^ermons out of (^hurch 
 
 BY THB AUTHOR OP 
 
 "JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN," Etc., Etc. 
 
 Toronto and Detroit : 
 
 BELFORD BROTHERS. 
 
 X876. 
 
■P .H.1S7L. ti I'bTA 
 
 # ■ • 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Sbrmon Paob 
 
 I. What is Self-Sacrifice ? 13 
 
 II, Our Often Infirmities 43 
 
 III. How TO Train up a Parent in the 
 
 Way he should Go 75 
 
 IV. Benevolence — or Beneficence? 113 
 
 V. My Brother's Keeper 139 
 
 VI. Gather up the Fragments 169 
 
 315^^.49 
 
■< 
 
 :S 
 
.t- 
 
 Swmon I. 
 WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 
 
I. 
 
 WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 
 
 I LATELY saw a drawing, not unknown to archae- 
 ologists, which, though it might shock some people 
 as painfully profane, struck me with just the con- 
 trary feeling, as being a solemn and touching con- 
 firmation, from the outside, of that internal truth 
 which we call Revelation. It was a copy of a 
 street caricature, found, not very long ago. on a 
 newly discovered wall — I think in Rome — where 
 it had been hidden for eighteen hundred years. 
 Evidently the work of some young ^dfww of the an- 
 cient world, and depicting man, after the most 
 primitive style of Art, with a round O for his head, 
 an oblong for l^is body, two lines for legs and 
 arms, and five-rayed fans for hands and feet. 
 This creature stood gazing in adoration upon a 
 similar man, only with an ass's head instead of a 
 human one, who hung suspended upon a cross. 
 Underneath was scrawled in rude Greek letters, 
 *'*' Alexatninos worships his God.'* 
 
 It set me thinking. " Alexaminos worships his 
 god." Not God, mind you, but his god : the 
 divinity of his own making, with an ass's head on. 
 How many excellent and earnest-minded people 
 do much the same! 
 
,4 
 
 ,[( 
 
 
 »4 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCIT. 
 
 To pull the ass's head off — to show how many 
 a ridiculous idol is esteemed divine ; how often a 
 so-called virtue is in reality a vice, or slowly cor- 
 rupting into one ; how the sutlimest and holiest 
 truths may be travestied into actual lies — this is 
 the aim of my Sermons out of Church. Out of 
 Church ; outside each and all of those numerous 
 and endlessly diversified creeds preached in build- 
 ings made with hands ; but not, I hope, outside of 
 that universal Church — God*s consecrated Temple 
 — built without hands, " eternal in the heavens." 
 
 Is this iconoclasm ? I can not think so. Is it 
 irreligious ? Surely not to those who believe that 
 the heart of all religion lies in the words I have 
 put on my title-page, "Thy will be done on earth 
 as it is in heaven." But to find out what that will 
 is, and — so far as the finite may comprehend the 
 infinite — Him who declares it, this, and this alone, 
 is real Christianity. 
 
 Let me begin, "at the very beginning," as child- 
 ren say — children, in their holy ignorance, often 
 so much wiser and nearer heaven than we. 
 
 In first planning this first sermon, I entitled it 
 " The Sin of Self-sacrifice ; " because I have notic- 
 ed, as one of the sad and strange things in life, 
 what folly, what misery, what actual wickedness, 
 result from the exaggeration of this particular vir- 
 tue, esteemed the highest of all, the very key-stone 
 and crown of our faith. Put considering the point, 
 and feeling that such a title might startle weaker 
 brethren, and give an impression that I meant 
 what I do not mean, and that my Sermons out pf 
 
WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 
 
 15 
 
 Church are also out of the pale of all Christianity, 
 I have abstained, and simply commence with the 
 open question. What is self-sacrifice? 
 
 The most obvious answer is this : Self-sacrifice 
 means the sacrifice of one's self, one's personal 
 ego, with its aims and desires, to something or 
 somebody else. Then, in this transaction, is the 
 most important element the self which is sacrificed, 
 or the object which it is sacrificed to ? In other 
 words, granted that self-sacrifice is a good thing, 
 which side is to reap the good? Or is there to be 
 a third consideration, more important than either — 
 its end and aim ? And what is its end and aim ? 
 
 A moralist might answer, " Absolute truth, ab- 
 solute right." A Christian, knowing how difficult 
 it is to define either, might reply, "God;" which 
 involves three necessities — the comprehension of 
 Him, the worship of Him, and the duty and delight 
 of obeying Him. Briefly, God and His will, so far 
 as we know it, must be the only right end of self- 
 sacrifice. 
 
 Then, what is its beginning? the passion from 
 which it takes its rise ? Usually, nay, universally, 
 that passion which is the heart of the universe — 
 love. The root of all true self-sacrifice is some 
 strong affection which makes the welfare of the 
 beloved of more importance to us than our own, 
 or an equally strong devotion to a principle, which 
 is merely an abstract form of the same emotion 
 Both these motives are noble — and ignoble like- 
 wise, sometimes : for the latter is often alloyed by 
 ambition, egotism, obstinacy, love of power ; while 
 
T\- 
 
 i6 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 f. . 
 
 the former is seldom free from that recondite but 
 very common selfishness, the hope of having our 
 self-sacrifice duly appreciated. Very few of the 
 most devoted of our lovers and friends would come 
 up to the standard I once heard given of true affec- 
 tion : " He might die for you, but he would never 
 let you know it.'* 
 
 Now most of your self-sacrificers take abundant 
 pains to let you know it. When they offer them- 
 selves up, it is with a lurking hope that not only 
 the object of so much devotion, but a select circle 
 of sympathizing admirers, may be present at their 
 immolation. The heroic self-control which " dies 
 and makes no sign " is a virtue of which very few 
 are capable. As I once heard commented by a 
 small but sage commentator on the poem of 
 " Enoch Arden : " " Yes, it was very good of 
 Enoch not to tell his story until he died ; but, 
 mamma, what a pity he didn't die and say nothing 
 at all!" 
 
 There is another view of martyrdom which de- 
 serves a word. It may be a very grand thing, 
 despite its pains, for the martyr, who has made his 
 choice, accepted his fate, and is prepared to go up 
 in a cloud of glory to heaven ; not unconscious, 
 perhaps, of the eyes that will be following him 
 thither. But what of those who have permitted or 
 exacted the sacrifice ? And suppose it has been 
 offered foolishly, rieedlessly ; perhaps even in some 
 bitter outburst of feeling not quite so holy as the 
 act appears ? Before we lay ourselves down before 
 Juggernaut, is it not as well to see if he is a god, or 
 
WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 
 
 ly 
 
 only an ugly idol ? And in preparing our suttee, 
 should we not pause to consider how far we are 
 really benefiting the affectionate friends who come 
 to assist thereat ? Possibly the rdle of victim which 
 we are so anxious to play may affix upon some one 
 else the corresponding title of murderer. 
 
 He who causes his brother to err is himself a 
 sinner. Now do you see what I mean by the sin 
 of self-sacrifice ? 
 
 A sin to which I fear women are much more 
 prone than men. It is apparently a law of the 
 universe that the male animal should be always 
 more or less a selfish animal. No doubt there is 
 some reason in this — some good reason; indeed, 
 we can almost trace that. A large ego is often- 
 times necessary, to enable a man to hold his own 
 in the hard battle of life, and the creed of " self- 
 preservation is the first law of nature/' which pre- 
 sents itself so forcibly to the mind of the ordinary 
 man, in all phases of society, from the savage to 
 the sybarite, may contribute a good deal to the 
 advantage of the species. Be that as it may be, I 
 am afraid it must be owned that, with some noble 
 exceptions, men are, as a rule, ignobly and incur 
 ably selfish. But it remains to be proved how far 
 they are so in themselves, or how far it is the 
 women's fault, who, by this exaggeration of unsel 
 fishness, this sinful self-sacrifice, helps to make 
 them what they are. 
 
 Despite all the fancies of lovers and poets 
 throughout life, women are the offenders, and men 
 the accepters of an amount of devotion which 
 
f; 
 
 n 
 
 H 
 
 \ 
 
 i8 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 would ruin an angel. They are the slaves who 
 manufacture the tyrants. 
 
 Yet how sweet and charming it is to be a slave — 
 at first. To a loving-hearted woman for love's 
 sake, to a weak one because it saves trouble, 
 lightens responsibility, and flatters that self-con- 
 scious vanity which, if we tear off its saintly robes, 
 underlies so much devotion, amatory as well as 
 religious, female devotion especially. 
 
 " He for God only — she for God in him." 
 
 So wrote Milton, and few men ever wrote a more 
 false or dan^rous line. Why — though it may be 
 less flattering to the man, less easy for the woman 
 — why should not she as well as he live " for God 
 only ? " Why — instead of seeing no medium be- 
 tween blind idolatry or childish subserviency, and 
 a frantic struggle after impossible "rights" — 
 should she not accept calmly her plain duty, to be 
 man's helpmeet, and assist him in doing Ats duty 
 before the world and before God ? 
 
 Instead, how many knowingly, or unknowingly, 
 - do their very utmost not to amend, but to destroy 
 the objects of their love ? For women will love men, 
 and all the philosophers in petticoats, or less grace- 
 ful habiliments, who aim at remodeling society, 
 free from the old-fashioned folly of wifehood and 
 motherhood, yrill never succeed in conquering this 
 amiable weakness. It is all very well to pretend 
 that women are the« adored and men the adorers — 
 so they are for a year or two, and toward one or 
 two women ; but at the beginning and end of life 
 
WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 
 
 ^ 
 
 and all through it, save during the brief courtship 
 time, it is the business of their womenkind — 
 mothers, sisters, wives, daughters — to worship 
 theniy to serve thenty to obey them. Every man in 
 his secret heart recognizes this fact, and is com- 
 placently satisfied that it should remain a fact 
 forever. 
 
 Well, let it be so! Perhaps, the "Whole Duty of 
 Woman " is man ; but it is in order that she may 
 be the agent for making him into a real man, ful- 
 filling all the noble aims of manhood. 
 
 Gay, in his " Acis and Galatea," has one fine 
 line — finer, perhaps, than he meant it should be. 
 The nymph, changing her dead shepherd into a 
 fountain, says, 
 
 " Be thou immortal, since thou art not mine." 
 
 And any woman who ever truly loved a man would 
 desire to make him so — not " hers," perhaps, but 
 " immortal ; " that is, what he ought to be in him- 
 self, and toward God and man. If, instead, she 
 thinks only of what he is to her, and what she 
 wishes to be to him, her love will prove, despite 
 all its passionate or affectionate disguises, not his 
 blessing, but his lifelong curse. 
 
 This, though she may have shown toward him 
 any amount of self-sacrifice and blind devotion. 
 If women's devotedness to men in any relation of 
 life teaches the latter to be selfish, lazy, exacting, 
 imperious, the act is not a merit but a sin, and 
 causes their beloved ones to sin. In the cant 
 phrase, which while I use I detest, they are 
 
so 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 " setting the creature above the Creator," and will 
 surely reap — and deserve — their punishment. Not, 
 as some theologians put it, in the divine revenge of 
 a jealous God, angry that any poor mortal is loved 
 beyond Himself, but as the inevitable result of that 
 perfect law — " The soul that sinneth it shall die." 
 It must ; for in all sin is the seed of death, and God 
 Himself, unless by changing His all-righteous 
 essence, could not make it otherwise. 
 
 Therefore, if a mother by overweening indul- 
 gence helps her son to become a thoughtless 
 scapegrace ; if a wife by cowardly subserviency 
 converts *he^ husband into a selfish brute; even 
 if a daughter — as in a late case of somewhat notable 
 literary biography — sets up a weak, luxurious, 
 unprincipled father as the idol of her life, and 
 expects every body to bow down and worship 
 him — all these foolish women have condoned sin, 
 and called vice virtue ; have left the truth, and be- 
 lieved, or pretended to believe, a lie. When their 
 false god falls, or turns into an avenging demon, 
 then they come to understand what means the sin 
 of self-sacrifice. 
 
 Sinful, in one sense, because it is often only a 
 disguised form of a rather ugly quality — self-will. 
 
 I heard the other day enthusiastic praises of 
 a sister in one of those Protestant communities 
 who are trying — and not unwisely — to emulate 
 the Roman Catholic sisters of mercy, by absorbing 
 into useful work the many waifs and strays of 
 useless spinsterhood, eating their hearts out in 
 lonely, aimless idleness in the midst of a strug- 
 
WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 
 
 91 
 
 gling and suflTering world. But this woman was not 
 lonely. She had a father, whom she paid a nurse 
 to take care of; married sisters, who would have 
 been thankful for her occasional help in their busy, 
 anxious homes; loving friends, to whom her in- 
 fluence and aid might often have been invaluable. 
 Yet she left them, one and all, and went to spend 
 her strength — not so very great — upon strangers. 
 She did expend it ; for she died, and was almost 
 canonized by some people ; but some others, with 
 a simpler standard of holiness, might question 
 whether this devoted self- sacrifice should not be 
 called by another name — self-will. She did the 
 thing she wished to do, rather than what seemed 
 laid before her to do ; and though it is always diffi- 
 cult to judge such cases from the outside without 
 being unjust to somebody, I think it is an open 
 question whether she did right or wrong. 
 
 The same doubt arises when one hears of soldiers 
 volunteering — not sent, but volunteering — on 
 dangerous expeditions, leaving young wives or help- 
 less children to endure at home the agony of 
 suspense over a risk which was not demanded by 
 duty; of missionaries quitting the unobtrusive, 
 useful work of a parish priest in trying to win poor 
 Hodge from his drink, or Black Jem from his 
 poaching, for the more exciting duty of converting 
 a handful of savages, at a cost of about three 
 hundred pounds per head, and at last making them 
 not so very much better Christians than either 
 Hodge or Jem, if theSe only had an equal chance 
 of spiritual instruction. 
 
,^^ 
 
 22 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 ! • 
 
 Lastly, I own that I have no ardent admiration 
 for those religious devotees of any sort — High 
 Church, Low Church, or no church at all — who, 
 obeying an often imaginary call, " Come out from 
 among them, and be ye separate," think that it is 
 " the will of the Lord " they should break the 
 hearts of parents, alienate fond friends, renounce 
 the plain duties of daily life — and all for what? 
 To "save their soul," as they term it ! As if the 
 saving of their own petty individual soul — what- 
 ever that phrase may mean — was a good worth the 
 cost of so much actual evil, and to so many other 
 souls ! 
 
 Understand me. I do not deny that there is 
 such a thing as conversion — nay, sudden conversion ; 
 that even in this noisy nineteenth century, as 
 once on the silent shores of Galilee, a man may 
 hear the voice, " Follow me," and, leaving all, may 
 follow Him, to wearing life - long work in East- 
 end parishes, or in scarcely less barbarous foreign 
 lands. But let him be quite sure first who it is 
 that calleth him, and let him take care that the 
 sacrifice offered is really to God, and not to his own 
 restless, excitable, unsatisfied imagination ; that, in 
 short, it is not a sacrifice to self, rather than a 
 self-sacrifice. 
 
 For such, alas ! are a great many of the immo- 
 lations I am dealing with ; especially among women. 
 Women, who are^ so strong in their capabilities of 
 loving, are, above all, liable to that guiltiness in 
 the form of loving which does incalculable harm 
 to its object. That is a short - sighted affection, in- 
 
 i 
 
WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 
 
 as 
 
 deed, which causes us to help another to do wrong 
 instead of right. When our unselfishness makes 
 others selfish ; when we submit to their injustice, 
 condone their offenses, call their errors follies, and 
 follies pretty " lovablenesses ; " then we love them 
 in a mean, unworthy way ; we are not devotees, but 
 idolaters. 
 
 There are women — sisters and wives — tied to 
 men so unworthy of the bond, that their only safe 
 course is, not obedience, but a little righteous 
 rebellion. There are men, beginning life as very 
 good men, who are seen slowly growing into the 
 bores, the torments, the laughing-stocks oftheir more 
 clear-sighted friends; eaten up with vanity, intoler- 
 able through self-assertion, just because their 
 women-kind love them — not rationally, but irra- 
 tionally; put them on a pedestal and worship 
 them, expecting every body else to do the same. 
 But every body does not, and so this self-devotion 
 only makes its object ridiculous, if not contempt- 
 ible, except to the poor enthusiasts, who go on 
 adoring him still, half from habit, half from fear. 
 
 For fear is the root of many a so-called self- 
 sacrifice. Weak natures find it so much easier to 
 submit to a wrong than to fight against it. Less 
 trouble also. Many lazy women prefer getting 
 their own way in an underhand, round-about 
 fashion, by humoring the weaknesses of the men 
 they belong to, instead of honorably and openly 
 resisting them, when resistance becomes necessary. 
 That is, using the right — the only honest " right " 
 — a woman has, of asserting her independent ex- 
 
24 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 istence before God and men as a responsible 
 human being, who will neither be forced to do 
 wrong herself, nor see another do wrong, if she can 
 help it. * 
 
 Yet how many women not only err themselves, 
 but aid and abet error, knowing it to be such 
 — under the compulsion of that weak fear of man, 
 which is called or miscalled ''conjugal obedience." 
 
 Here — I can almost see my readers shudder— 
 " What ! not obey one's husband ? What ! counsel 
 rebellion in our wives .'' " 
 
 Stop a moment. I never said so. On the con- 
 trary, I say distinctly — Wives obey your husbands, 
 as children your parents — " in the Lord." But 
 only " in the Lord." Yield as much as possible in 
 ordinary things; conquer your tempers, modify 
 your tastes ; give up every thing, in short, that is 
 not a compromise of principle. When it comes to 
 that, resist ! Whatever they may be to you, and 
 how great soever your love for them, resist them. 
 Never allow either father, husband, brother, son, 
 to stand between you and the clear law of right 
 and wrong in your own soul, which the God who 
 made you has put there. If you do, you fall into 
 that sin of which I speak, and will assuredly, soon 
 or late, earn its bitter wages. 
 
 For how sad it is to see wives whose husbands 
 are inclined to extravagance deny themselves not 
 only lawful luxuries, but needful comforts, in order 
 to make up silently for the willful waste against 
 which they had not the courage to protest ; when, 
 perhaps, a few words, tender as true, would have 
 
WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 
 
 25 
 
 brought the man to his right senses, and prevented 
 his friends from calling him, as of course they do 
 (behind his back), a selfish, pleasure-loving brute. 
 And why should other men, crotchety, worrying, 
 or bad-tempered, though not really bad fellows 
 at heart, slowly become the torment of a whole 
 household, because the mistress considers it her 
 bounden duty to force every body into yielding 
 to what she euphuistically terms " papa's little 
 ways ? " Can she not see that she is thereby de- 
 stroying all domestic comfort, and teaching both 
 servants and children to avoid, to fear, nay, actually 
 to dislike, one whom they ought to honor and 
 love ? A grain of moral courage on her part, an 
 honest appeal to that generosity which lies hid in 
 most men's hearts, would have helped the wife to 
 help^her husband, and by teaching him to restrain 
 himself, make him a far better and happier man 
 than if he had been tamely yielded to, and so con- 
 verted into a sort of family ogre, which, little as 
 they suspect it, a good many men really are in 
 private life. 
 
 And I think the ogre's wife in Hop-o'-my-Thumb 
 is a very good illustration of your meek, self-sacri- 
 ficing, self-devoted wives — who after all sometimes 
 end in assisting themselves, as she did, to become 
 happy widows. Meantime they "do their duty" 
 most obediently ; will even help in the fattening of 
 children for their lord's provender — other people's 
 children, certainly. But there are women who 
 consider it a point of duty to immolate their own. 
 
 How many stories one could record in which a 
 
IS 
 
 il 
 
 
 26 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHUR.CH. 
 
 wife, fancying herself a pattern of conjugal obedi- 
 ence, has sacrificed her children just as much as 
 Chaucer's " Griseldis" — detestable heroine ! — sacri- 
 ficed hers ; allowing her whole family to be wor- 
 ried, bullied, and otherwise evil-entreated, by him 
 whom the law presumes to be its guardian and 
 head. 
 
 A misery — which ends not even there. For in 
 such households brothers soon learn to treat sisters 
 as papa treats mamma, with rough words, ceaseless 
 grumblings, selfish exactingnesses. Daughters, 
 brought up to hush their voices or run away when- 
 ever the father's step is heard — papa, who generally 
 comes home cross, and requires to be coaxed and 
 " soothed " by mamma whenever she wants anything 
 — these girls, accustomed to be considered inferior 
 animals, who must get their own way by stratagem, 
 grow up into those designing young ladies who 
 owe their power over men to first flattering and 
 then deceiving them. 
 
 But what a future for the new generation ! How 
 many unhappy girls have paid dearly for the early 
 upbringing of their young husbands, who, the first 
 glamour of love passed, treat their wives as they 
 were allowed to treat their sisters, and as they saw 
 their fathers treat their mothers, carelessly, disre- 
 spectfully, with a total want of that considerate 
 tenderness which is worth all the passionate love 
 in the world. This — though they may pass muster 
 outside as excellent husbands, never doing any 
 thing really bad, and possessing many good and 
 attractive qualities, yet contriving somehow quietly 
 
WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE ? 
 
 91 
 
 to break the poor womanly heart, or harden it into 
 that passive acceptance of pain, which is more 
 fatal to married happiness than even temporary 
 estrangement. Anger itself is a safer thing than 
 stolid, hopeless indifference. 
 
 The best husbands I ever met came out of a 
 family where the mother, a most heroic and self- 
 denying woman, laid down the absolute law, " Girls 
 first." Not in any authority ; but first to be thought 
 of, as to protection and tenderness. Consequently, 
 the chivalrous care which these lads were taught to 
 show to their own sisters naturally extended itself 
 to all women. They grew up true gentlemen — 
 gentle men — generous, unexacting, courteous of 
 speech and kind of heart. In them was the pro- 
 tecting strength of manhood, which scorns to use 
 its strength except for protection ; the proud hon- 
 esty of manhood, which infinitely prefers being 
 lovingly and openly resisted to being "twisted 
 around one's finger," as mean men are twisted, and 
 mean women will always be found ready to do it ; 
 but which, I think, all honest men and brave 
 women would not merely dislike, but utterly de- 
 spise. 
 
 It seems, hitherto, as if of this sin of self-sacri- 
 fice women were oftenest guilty. Not always. 
 
 I have spoken of tyranny; there is nothing so 
 absolute as the tyranny of weakness. Sometimes 
 a really good man will suffer himself to be so vic- 
 timized by a nervous, silly, selfish wife, that he dare 
 not call his soul his own. By a thousand under- 
 hand ways, she succeeds in alienating him from his 
 
28 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 own family — breaking his natural ties, hindering 
 his most sacred duties ; putting a stop to his honest 
 work in the world — his rightful influence therein, 
 and all the pleasures that belong thereto. And 
 these being, to a man, so much wider than any 
 woman's, the loss is the greater, the pain the 
 sharper. 
 
 One can imagine a large-minded, honorably am- 
 bitious man actually writhing under the sacrifices 
 forced from him by a wife feeble in every way — 
 who destroys not merely his happiness, but his good 
 reputation. Since, when it is seen that her merest 
 whims are held by him of paramount importance 
 — that her silly, selfish yes or no is to decide every 
 action of his life, do not his friends laugh at him 
 behind his back, even though before his face they 
 may keep up a decorous gravity ? " Poor fellow ! 
 with such a goose for his wife ! " Yet the pity is 
 akin to contempt ; and something more than con- 
 tempt is felt — especially by his mother, sisters, or 
 critical female friends — toward that wife, who ex- 
 acts from him the renunciation of all his duties, ex- 
 cept those toward herself; in plain English, " makes 
 a fool of him," because in his devotion he has 
 offered every thing to her, and she has meanly 
 accepted the sacrifice. 
 
 He ought never to have made it. He ought to 
 have given her care, tenderness, affection — all that 
 man should give to women, and strength to weak- 
 ness ; but there it should have ended. No wife 
 has a right to claim the husband's whole life, its 
 honorable toil, its lawful enjoyments. If she can 
 
WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 
 
 39 
 
 ily 
 
 to 
 at 
 
 [fe 
 Its 
 
 In 
 
 not share, she should learn at least not to stand in 
 the way of either. And the man who submits to 
 be so tyrannized over, as weak women in their 
 small way can tyrannize, with that " continual 
 dropping that weareth away the stone," deserves 
 all he gets : his friends' covert smiles, his enemies' 
 unconcealed sneer. 
 
 We talk a great deal about the error of " spoil- 
 ing " our children ; may we not " spoil " our wives, 
 our husbands, not to speak of other less important 
 ties, quite as much, and as sinfully ? For life is a 
 long course of mutual education, which ends but 
 with the grave. If we are wise enough to recognize 
 this, and act upon it, nor be afraid of that acci- 
 dental attrition which only rubs off inevitable angles 
 — if, in short, our aim in all the dear bonds of ex- 
 istence is not so much to please either ourselves 
 or one another, but, to do right — which means 
 pleasing God — then all is well. But we shirk the 
 right, and accept the agreeable ; if we expect life 
 to be all holidays and no school, then we shall soon 
 begin to find out its utter weariness and worthless- 
 ness, to blame the faithless, ungrateful world — as 
 if good done with the expectation of gratitude were 
 ever worth any thing ! And we shall come to the 
 end of it all with a dreary sense of having renounced 
 every thing and gained nothing, except, perhaps, 
 the poor consolation of considering ourselves 
 martyrs. 
 
 And why ? Because we mistook the boundary 
 where virtue passes into vice — self-devotion into 
 blind and foolish, nay, sinful self-sacrifice. 
 
I 
 
 30 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 There is a point beyond which we have no right 
 to ignore our own individuality — that is, supposing 
 we have any. Many people have none. They get 
 the credit of being extremely self-denying, because 
 they really have no particular self to deny. Their 
 feeble nature is only capable of imitating others ; 
 and their stagnant placidity is no absolute virtue, 
 but the mere negation of a vice. Even as there are 
 many most " respectable " people, whom nothing 
 keeps from being villains, except one fortunate fact 
 — that they are such arrant cowards. 
 
 But to those born with decided tastes, feelings, 
 possibly talents, the exercise of all these is an act- 
 ual necessity. And lawfully so. If God has given 
 us our little light, what right have we to hide it 
 under a bushel, because some affectionate, purblind 
 friend dislikes the glare of it, or fears it will set 
 the house on fire .-* No ; let us put It in its proper 
 place, a safe candlestick, if it be a light, but let no- 
 body persuade or force us to put it out. 
 
 What bitter sacrifices one member of a family 
 gifted with a strong proclivity, perhaps even a 
 genius, for art, music, or literature, sometimes has 
 to make to the rest, who can not understand it ! 
 
 Now a one-sided enthusiast — a Bernard Pallissy, 
 for instance — makes a very disagreeable husband 
 and a still worse father of a family ; and a modern 
 Corinne, with her hair down her back, sitting play- 
 ing the iia p all tlay long, instead of going into her 
 kitchen, ordering her dinner, and looking after her 
 servants, would be a most aggravating wife for 
 any man to marry. But, on the other hand, a 
 
WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 
 
 31 
 
 gentleman with no ear for music, married to a wife 
 who is a born musician, may make a very great vic- 
 tim of that poor lady. And the pretty common- 
 place girl, whom a clever man of poetical nature 
 has idealized into an angel in the house, sometimes 
 succeeds in slowly but completely extinguishing in 
 him that higher life of heart and intellect — the 
 spiritual life, compared to which the worldly life is 
 mere dust and ashes, and even the domestic life, 
 sweet as it is, a body without a soul. 
 
 We ought always to be chary in allowing our- 
 selves to be forced into sacrifices which do not 
 benefit, but merely gratify the persons exacting 
 them. First, because a person who can be grati- 
 fied by a self-sacrifice is — rather a mean person ; 
 secondly, because to renounce any innocent taste 
 or pursuit is not merely foolish, but wrong. All 
 our talents were given us to use ; not to bury in a 
 napkin. If we do so bury them, to please even the 
 dearest friend on earth, we are guilty of not merely 
 cowardice, but infidelity to our trust ; and depend 
 upon it, the sacrifice will do no good to that other 
 person and great harm to ourselves. To say noth- 
 ing of the sneering comments of outsiders, and the 
 just condemnation of wiser folk, to which we ex- 
 pose — not ourselves : we are exalted into martyrs 
 — but those we love, if we love them so foolishly 
 as to suffer them to victimize us unnecessarily. 
 
 And very sad to see is the extent to which some 
 people are victimized in domestic life ; from bad 
 health, bad temper, acting and reacting upon each 
 other, and both equally blamable ; for miserable as 
 
I 
 
 3» 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 the sufferers are, the cause of their sufferings is 
 often nobody but themselves. To maintain a 
 sound mind in a sound body, so as to be a help in- 
 stead of a burden, not to say a nuisance, to our 
 family and friends, requires an amount of self-con- 
 trol of which not every body is capable. Some 
 people consider it "silly " to be careful of health, 
 and others find it so "interesting" to be ill — that 
 the amount of pain, worry, and anxiety which is 
 inflicted by those who allow themselves to fall 
 into absolutely preventable illness is very great. 
 Equally great is the self-sacrifice entailed upon 
 kindly peoplb, who can not stand by and see others 
 suffer, although deservedly, without coming to the 
 rescue with every help they can bring. 
 
 How often, too, do we see in a family, not other- 
 wise unamiable, one especial " root of bitterness," 
 a thoroughly ill-conditioned person, of whom all 
 the rest stand in dread, to whom they give up 
 every thing, and for whom they will do any thing 
 just for the sake of peace. Long habit has perhaps 
 half accustomed them to the torment ; they have 
 learned to walk pretty steadily under it, like a man 
 with a nail in his shoe — but what a torment it is ! 
 A person who takes every thing amiss, whose mood 
 you never can be sure of for a single hour, whom 
 you are obliged to propitiate, as the savages their 
 idols ; one whom you must be on your guard with, 
 and make perpetual apologies for, lest the world 
 outside should surmise anything wrong — with whom 
 you never can find any rest ; and though he or she 
 may be your nearest and dearest, ostensibly, you 
 
WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 
 
 33 
 
 are painfully conscious that the only relief is to get 
 away from him, or to get him away. 
 
 I have grave doubts whether in a case of this 
 kind, and we all know many such, though we are 
 too polite to say so, it is not the duty of a con- 
 scientious head of a family, or its members, to take 
 very strong measures. There are some people so 
 intolerable to live with that nobody should be 
 allowed to live with them. Every effort should be 
 made by the family which unhappily owns them, 
 to free itself from them, in any lawful way, and at 
 any cost of money or inconvenience. Some, who 
 are an absolute torture to their own relations, do 
 well enough with strangers ; the self-restraint they 
 then are obliged to exercise is a wholesome disci- 
 pline for them, and the people they afflict being 
 farther off are not so deeply afflicted as their own 
 kith and kin. 
 
 Would it not be worth while if, injjtead of lauding 
 to the skies the self-sacrifice of a family in thus 
 victimizing itself, we were to institute an Asylum 
 for Family Nuisances, to which could be removed 
 the cross-grained brother and sister, the cantan- 
 kerous aunt, the " difficult " relative of any sort, 
 whom, if not a relative, the other members of the 
 household would fly from as from something harm- 
 ful and hateful } Instead, they go on enduring and 
 enduring, till the harm becomes irremediable. 
 Which is the worst, to put a detestable thing or 
 person so far from you that you cease to feel any 
 thing toward him save a mild indifference ? or to 
 suffer yourself and others to be so tormented by 
 
li 
 
 34 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 him that the sanctimonious " If it would please 
 God to take him " — which is only an elegant form 
 of murder — ceases to appear wrong, only natural ? 
 
 Yet this is what your vaunted self-sacrifice leads 
 to when perpetrate^ ^or the sake of unworthy people. 
 
 But there are people, amiable, interesting, affec- 
 tionate (externally), to whom one sometimes sees 
 whole families sacrificing themselves, without the 
 slightest sense of the harm they are doing — I mean 
 the "ne'cr-do-weels." Not the people who do 
 actual evi!, but the people who never do good. 
 Of such is the weak, amiable, impecunious brother, 
 who always <3omes back and back to drain the last 
 half-penny from his hard-working sisters. Perhaps 
 he has no vices whatever, is of a pleasant and not 
 unaffectionate nature, only somehow he contrives 
 to let every thing slip through his fingers — money, 
 time, opportunity. And as he in reality thinks of 
 nobody but himself, of course he marries early and 
 rashly, and brings his wife and family to be kept 
 by his sisters, who go on impoverishing themselves 
 year by year, doing not only their duty — all sisters 
 must do that — but a great deal more than their 
 duty ; submitting to endless exactions, allowing not 
 only the feeble, who are a natural burden, but the 
 strong, the self-indulgent, the extravagant, to live 
 upon them, and drain the life-blood out of them, 
 till death comes in mercy to end the never-ceasing 
 sacrifice. A sacrifice which has done no good to 
 any body ; for it has Jeft the selfish selfish still, and 
 the extravagant as reckless as ever ; perhaps worse 
 than ever, from the long habit of receiving supplies 
 
WHAT IS SELF-SAC RTTICE ? 
 
 35 
 
 from others, instead of earning their luxuries, if 
 they must have them, for themselves. The life- 
 long devotion of a whole family to one unworthy 
 member has been no more than pouring water into 
 a sieve; it has never benefited him, and it has 
 ruined the rest. 
 
 Another, though rarer case, and less patent to 
 the world, we sometimes see, in which a number 
 of unmarried sisters hang around a kind brother 
 as their natural guardian ; which he is, within cer- 
 tain limits. But these limits the amiable, helpless 
 women do not see. He enters the flower of his 
 age, he passes it, yet still he can not marry — could 
 not possibly do it without turning his sisters out of 
 doors. He shrinks from that, shrinks, too, from 
 offering such an encumbered hand and heart to any 
 girl. And, besides, it is not every girl who in 
 marrying likes to marry a whole family. So time 
 slips on ; the more high-minded and generous the 
 man is, the more complete is his sacrifice. Perhaps 
 he gets habituated to it, and almost content in it ; 
 but it is none the less a sacrifice. He may be a 
 good and not unhappy old bachelor, but he would 
 have been much better and happier married, and 
 in a home of his very own. His sisters too, if, 
 though poor, they had ceased to be helpless, had 
 gone out into the world and earned their own liv- 
 ing ; or, if rich, they had made for themselves an 
 independent household, how much higher and 
 more perfect lives they might have led. 
 
 Of course, there are exceptions to every thing, 
 and sometimes a combination of sad destinies, 
 
36 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 mutual disappointments, strong fraternal attach- 
 ment, and great natural affinity, make thest house- 
 holds of unmarried brothers and sisters very peace- 
 ful and honorable substitutes for the better and 
 completer domestic life. One has seen more than 
 one such, which is more than a resting place — a 
 visible haven of refuge, not only to its inhabitants, 
 but to all around. Yet there are others upon which 
 standers-by look with pity not unmixed with in- 
 dignation. And the nobler, the more silent the 
 sacrifice, the greater is the sadness of it — even 
 though it can not quite come under the name of 
 sin. 
 
 Self-devotion — God forbid I should ever say a 
 word in condemnation of that ! It is the noblest 
 thing in all this world, and the rarest — No, not 
 rare ; few family histories are without some heroic 
 or pathetic instance thereof, continued throughout 
 whole lives with unflinching fortitude. And could 
 death open the locked records of many a heart, 
 how often would some secret be found there that 
 would furnish a key to all the history of the finished 
 life — some strong, one love — some eternal faithful- 
 ness — which all the chances and changes of exist- 
 ence could never shake, which was the impulse of 
 every thought, the motive of every action, the com- 
 pelling force of every line of conduct. A devo- 
 tion, not a passion, inasmuch as it was able to set 
 itself entirely aside — absorb itself in the well-being 
 of the other, whose good it sought, without reck- 
 oning any personal cost, through weal and woe, 
 pleasure and pain, requital or non-requital. This 
 
 \K I 
 
WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE? 
 
 37 
 
 is a sight — not to blame or weep over, but to re- 
 joice in; for it is not blind self-sacrifice; it is not 
 open-eyed self-devotion — blessed on both sides, 
 but to the giver and receiver. It has sharp agonies 
 sometimes — what deep emotion is without them? 
 but out of all come peace and content. It is 
 pleasing in God's sight as lovely in man's, because 
 there is no sin in it, no selfishness on either side ; 
 and in its very sadness — it must of necessity be 
 often sad — there is a sacredness beyond all mortal 
 oy. 
 
 Of all forms of self-devotion, the one which, even 
 when it amounts to absolute self-sacrifice, we can 
 not but regard with very tender and lenient eyes, 
 is the devo.ion of the young to the old, of children 
 to parents. No doubt there is a boundary beyond 
 which even this ought not to be permitted ; but the 
 remedy lies on the elder side. There are such 
 things as unworthy, selfish, exacting parents, to 
 whom duty must be done, simply for the sake of 
 parenthood, without regarding their personality. 
 " Honor thy father and thy mother " is the abso- 
 lute command, bounded by no proviso as to 
 whether the parents are good or bad. Of course, 
 no one can literally " honor " that which is bad — 
 still one can respect the abstract bond in having 
 patience with the individual. 
 
 But I think every high or honorable instinct in 
 human nature will feel that there is hardly a limit 
 to be set to the devotion of a child to a good 
 parent — righteous devotion, repaying to failing 
 life all that its own young life once received of 
 
38 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 iin I 
 
 I : 
 
 care and comfort and blessing. And no good, 
 or even moderately good parent is ever likely to 
 allow this devotion to pass into self-sacrifice. 
 Surely, as long as consciousness and reason lasted, 
 all true fathers and mothers would prevent, in all 
 possible ways, the complete absorption of the 
 younger life into theirs ; nor allow their poor ex- 
 piring flame to be kept alight a few years, a few 
 months, by the vital breath of a far more valuable 
 existence. 
 
 But if such a case does happen — the child alone, 
 and no outsider, has a right to decide upon the 
 due extent of the sacrifice, and how far it is nec- 
 essary or beneficial, even to the aged sufferers them- 
 selves. There may be a point beyond which the 
 most affectionate child has no right to go, but must 
 pause and judge whether a duty which inevitably 
 overrides all other duties, has not in it something 
 amiss ; even as a love which destroys all other loves 
 can not fail to deteriorate the whole being. 
 
 And here, reasoning in a circle, we come round 
 to the point from whence we started — " He that 
 loveth father or mother " — or any other — " more 
 than me " — that is, he who allows his love for them 
 to make them err against me — " is not worthy of 
 me." Therefore, all self-sacrifice, made solely for 
 the love of man, or for the gratification of some 
 merely human ambition, is not a righteous but a 
 sinful thing — and, as sin, will assuredly find its 
 punishment. * » " 
 
 This furnishes, apparently, a solution to the 
 great mystery why so many noble self-sacrifices 
 
WHAT IS SELF-SACRIFICE ? 
 
 39 
 
 are so futile, so aimless, so positively injurious. 
 " I am the Lord thy God — thou shalt have no other 
 gods before me." If we make to ourselves idols 
 of any sort — that is, if we allow love to conquer 
 right, and set aside what we ought to do in favor 
 of what we like to do, we suffer accordingly ; and 
 God Himself, who is justice as well as mercy, can 
 not save us from suffering. And this is what I 
 meant when I first called this sermon the Sin of 
 Self-sacrifice. 
 
Sbnmon M. 
 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 
 
II. 
 
 OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 
 
 Does it ever occur to those of us who are no 
 longer young — who begin to feel this wonderful 
 machine a little the worse for wear, while its spirit- 
 ual inmate is as fresh and strong as ever — how low 
 apparently is the standard of health in this present 
 generation ? How seldom among our friends and 
 acquaintances can we point out a thoroughly healthy 
 person ? I will not even say a robust person, but 
 one who has sufficient vitality of body to keep up 
 the daily requirements of his mental work, or any 
 sort of work, without complaining, without having 
 continually to resort to extraneous helps, medical 
 or hygienic, wherewith to bolster up his failing 
 powers, and make him capable of his necessary 
 duties. 
 
 We do not need to reach the first half century 
 of life in order to see our compeers, and alas ! too 
 often others much younger in the race, drop out 
 of it one by one — sink into miserable valetudina- 
 rians, or growing old before their time, slip from 
 the active enjoyment of life into the mere endurance 
 of it. How many among us who only yesterday, as 
 it were, seemed ready for an eternity of youth and 
 Ubor — to whom three-score years and ten appeared 
 
44 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 all too short for what they had to do — now con- 
 sciously or unconsciously echo the pathetic words 
 of one whose name I this day write with tears, for 
 Charles Kingsley only yesterday " fell on sleep : " 
 
 " Men must work, and women must weep, 
 And the sooner it's over the sooner to sleep." 
 
 Nay, all have not even strength to work, and some 
 scarcely enough strength to weep, but drop into 
 helpless silence and a weary looking forward to 
 that death-slumber which is to them the only pos- 
 sible rest. I have heard people say they do not 
 even want to " go to heaven ; " they only want to 
 go to sleep J They are " so tired." 
 
 Why so ? Why, in an age supposed to be thus 
 civilized — over-civilized indeed; which takes such 
 exceeding care of itself, mentally and physically ; 
 writes cart-loads of medical books and makes 
 speeches by the hour on sanitary subjects — is the 
 old-fashioned health of our forefathers a thing al- 
 most unknown ? True, we are said to live longer 
 than they did, but what sort of life is it ? Do we 
 enjoy the full vigor of a sound mind in a sound 
 body, to be used both for the service of God and 
 manj good at work, good at play ; able to make the 
 very most of every hour ? Are we wholesome trees 
 bearing fruit to the last, and still keeping " strong 
 and well-liking ? " Or do we immediately after our 
 first youth, often before it is ended, begin to fade 
 and fail, to grumble at our work, to weary of our 
 pleasures, to be pestered ourselves, and, worse to 
 pester all our friends, with our " often infirmities ? " 
 Not actual sicknesses, but infirmities ; small su^er- 
 
OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 
 
 45 
 
 ings of all sorts, and a general sense of incapacity 
 for the duties of life, which entirely takes away its 
 happy normal condition — not to think about one's 
 self at all. 
 
 When a man makes a habit of dwelling upon his 
 sins, depend upon it he has a good many sins to 
 dwell on ; and he who persists in " investigating his 
 own inside " will very soon fall, if he have not al- 
 ready fallen, into a thoroughly diseased state. Even 
 as truly good people are good without knowing 
 it, so really healthy people never notice their health. 
 The perfect life is the child's life of absolute un- 
 consciousness. 
 
 But this is a condition so rare nowadays, what- 
 ever it was in days past, that the question of our 
 often infirmities, to borrow an apostolic phrase, de- 
 serves a sermon quite as much as many topics 
 which are discussed in pulpits, where it is mostly 
 the fashion to attend to the soul first and the body 
 afterward. 
 
 Not very long ago I heard a clergyman seriously 
 proclaim that " the Gospel " must first be given to 
 the starving, si.ming, suffering denizens of London 
 courts and alleys — the Gospel first, and food, 
 clothes, soap and water, and decent dwellings after- 
 ward. It is one of the trying things of going to 
 .hurch that hatever a man says one must hear 
 him.; one can not stand ui and contradict him; 
 else I should like to have suggested to this well- 
 meaning but narrow-vip'onod preacher how much 
 a man's moral nature d' pends upon his surround- 
 ings. Diogenes might rot have been a cynic if he 
 
'Ww 
 
 •4i 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 had not lived in a tub ; and I doubt if the noblest 
 man alive, if compelled to inhabit a pig-sty, would 
 long remain much better than a swine. 
 
 Therefore it behooves us to take heed that the 
 corporeal habitation into which our spirit is put — 
 for this life at least — is dealt with as kindly as cir- 
 cumstances allow, carefully* cherished, swept and 
 garnished, and made the most commodious resi- 
 dence possible, so as to allow free play to its im- 
 mortal inhabitant. 
 
 It is true — too true, alas ! that in many instances 
 this desirable end is neutralized by hereditary weak- 
 nesses — the sins of the fathers inevitably visited 
 upon the children — and by our own early faults 
 ignorantly committed, and the unalterable circum- 
 stances in which our lot is placed. We can not 
 care for ourselves without sacrificing more than 
 ought to be sacrificed by any human being to his 
 own individuality. But there is a medium course 
 always possible ; and sore let and hindered as we 
 may often be, I think some of us very often create 
 our own hindrances and add weight to our natural 
 burdens by the want of a certain respect for the 
 body, as a faithful servant, out of whom we must 
 get a good deal of work before we have done with 
 it. 
 
 We generally begin by working it a great deal 
 too hard. We rejoice in our youth ; we exult in 
 our strength ; we use both recklessly, boastfully, 
 as if they were wholly our own to do as we liked 
 with, and could never possibly wear out. So in a 
 thousand careless ways we squander vitality, never 
 
OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 
 
 47 
 
 thinking that we have only a certain quantity given 
 us to last till death, and that for every atom of 
 wasted health — heedlessly wasted — nature, that is 
 God, will assuredly one day bring us to judgment. 
 
 Still we are not wholly to blame. I believe 
 many feeble men or delicate women of to-day 
 owe the helplessness of their lives to the ignorance 
 of sanitary laws of the parents of forty or fifty years 
 ago. Even as fifty years hence our children may 
 have to reproach us for that system of overfeeding, 
 and especially overdrinking, which many doctors 
 now advocate for the young generation. I doubt 
 if even the calomel powders, jalap and gin, brim- 
 stone and treacle of our tormented childhood, were 
 worse than the meat three times a day, the brandy 
 and the daily glass of wine, poured into innocent 
 little stomachs, which naturally would keep to the 
 infant's food of bread and milk, and almost nothing 
 besides. Certainly, not stimulants. 
 
 This is neither a medical treatise nor a teetotal 
 essay ; yet, as he is a coward who does not openly 
 advance his colors, I do not hesitate to say that I 
 believe half the bodily and spiritual ailments of 
 this world spring from that much misinterpreted 
 and not by any means inspired sentence of St. 
 Paul, " Drink no longer water, but use a little 
 wine for thy stomach's sake and thine often in- 
 firmities." How often do we hear it quoted. But 
 nobody considers that the advice was given be^ 
 cause ofxYit "often infirmities," the origin of which 
 we, of course, do not know. That which is most 
 valuable as a medicine, is poison when taken as a 
 
Ill -i 
 
 ill: 
 
 5 f 
 
 !i' 
 
 
 4^ 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 food. To accustom a child or a youth to strong 
 drinks is to institute a craving after them — a 
 necessity for them — almost more dangerous than 
 the temporary good, if it be a good, effected by 
 their use. 
 
 Most children have an instinctive dislike to 
 alcohol in any shape ; unless, indeed, there be an 
 hereditary predisposition toward it — of all predis- 
 positions the most fatal. Any one who knows the 
 strong pureness of a constitution which has received 
 from two or three temperate generations an absolute 
 indifference to stimulants, can hardly overvalue the 
 blessing it is to a child, boy or girl, to bring it up 
 from babyhood in the firm faith that wine, beer, 
 and spirits are only medicines, no;: drinks ; that 
 when you are thirsty, be you man, woman, or child, 
 the right and natural beverage for you is water, and 
 only water. If you require it, if you have been so 
 corrupted by the evil influences of your youth or 
 the luxurious taste of your after-years that you 
 "can not drink water," either there is something 
 radically diseased in your constitution, or you will 
 soon bringy ourself to that condition. Long before 
 you are middle-aged you will have no lack of 
 "often infirmities." 
 
 I could write pages on the folly — the absolute 
 madness of parents in allowing unlimited beer to 
 growing lads, daily glasses of wine to overworked, 
 delicate girls. Nay, descending to the very root of 
 things, I would implore all parents who wish their 
 sons to have the strength of a Samson to remember 
 Manoah's wife, and suffer neither doctors nor old 
 
OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 
 
 m 
 
 )f 
 
 women to persuade them that strong drinks are 
 essential to even a nursing mother ; but that that 
 mother is specially wise, specially blessed — aye, 
 and her children will rise up and call her so — 
 who has had the self-restraint and courage to make 
 them, before their birth and after, in the solemn 
 language of Holy Writ, "Nazarites from their 
 mother's womb." 
 
 To " drink no wine nor strong drink," to be ab- 
 solutely independent of the need for it or the temp- 
 tation to it — any young man or woman brought up 
 on this principle has not only a defense against 
 many moral evils, but a physical stronghold always 
 in reserve to fall back upon, when accidental sick- 
 ness and the certain feebleness of old age call for 
 that resource, which I do not deny is at times a 
 most valuable one. But the advice I would give 
 to the young and healthy is this : Save yourselves 
 from all spirituous drinks, as drinks, as long as ever 
 you can ; even as you would resist using a crutch 
 as long as you had your own two legs to walk upon. 
 If you like wine — well, say honestly you take it 
 because you like it, that you prefer indulging your 
 palate at the expense of your health; but n./er 
 delude yourself, or suffer others to delude you, that 
 alcohol is a necessity, any more ..an stays or 
 ofthopoedic instruments, or stioi g medicinal poi- 
 sons, or other sad helps which nature and science 
 provide to sustain us in our slow but sure decay. 
 
 Still, to retard that decay as much as possible, to 
 keep up to the last limit the intellectual and phys- 
 ical vigor which is such a blessing, not only to 
 
i 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 i 
 
 ourselves but to those about us, this is the religion 
 of the body — too often lost sight of — but which I for 
 one count it no heathenism both to believe in and 
 to preach. A religion, not a superstition ; the rev- 
 erence and care for the physical temple of the 
 divine human soul, without in the least sinking to 
 that luxurious Greek philosophy which considered 
 the body only as worth regarding. 
 
 On the contrary, if we must be either Sybarites 
 or Spartans, better be Spartans. The harsh and 
 rough upbringing of our grandmothers probably 
 did less harm than the present system of mingled 
 overcare and carelessness. If they thought too 
 little of children, made them often poor miserable 
 victims to their elders, we nowadays see ourselves 
 victimized to the younger generation rather too 
 much. They also suffer ; in fact, to use the com- 
 mon phrase, are " killed with kindness." Parents 
 will not see that a child is safer turned out to play 
 in all weathers than shut up from the least breath 
 of wind in nurseries so ill- ventilated that the air 
 is actually fetid. And people who would shudder 
 at the idea of their boys and girls running about 
 barefooted, take them (in low-necked, sleeveless 
 muslin frocks, which leave exposed the most sensi- 
 tive region, the chest and upper arms, or velvet 
 tunics that do not reach to the shivering little 
 knees) — take them to children's parties, where 
 they must necessarily encounter chills, which to 
 the young are absolute death, and eat food which 
 to their tender stomachs is all but poison. There 
 they stay in a heated room or in draughty pas- 
 
OUR OFTIN INFIRMITIES. 
 
 51 
 
 sages, sitting up till their innocent eyes are shut- 
 ting with sleep, or blazing with feverish and prema- 
 ture excitement, till ten, eleven, and even twelve 
 o'clock, and then are carried off to bed. Next 
 morning th6 parents wonder that poor little Tommy 
 is cross, or Mary ill, or that Lucy and Charlie can 
 not attend to their lessons as they ought to do. 
 How should they ? Wholesome amusement — and 
 plenty of it — is essential at all age " and children's 
 society most beneficial to children ; but that pitiful 
 imitation of the " show " society now cultivated by 
 fashionable elders, which is slowly drifting down- 
 ward to corrupt the children, ought to be resisted 
 by wise parents with all their might. Not merely 
 on moral, but on simply physical grounds. Any 
 person who gives or goes to ordinary " children's 
 parties " of this sort is, I think, guilty of a wholesale 
 massacre of the innocents. Worse than massacre 
 — slow murder; for such entertainments lay the 
 foundations of half the infirmities of which I write, 
 which sap the very springs of life, and embitter all 
 its enjoyments. 
 
 If our parents sin against us in our childhood, 
 how often do we sin against ourselves in youth — 
 that daring youth, which thinks it will always last, 
 and resents the slightest interference with its 
 whims or its privileges ? It will have what it likes, 
 at any cost. What an endless and thankless task it 
 is to represent to a young girl the common-sense 
 fact that to put on her warm jacket or water-proof 
 cloak, a sensible hat for her head, and a stout pair 
 of boots for her feet, and go cheerily out, even on 
 
h!n 
 
 Sa 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 the wettest or coldest day, will do her no harm, 
 but good; bring the roses to her cheeks and the 
 sunshine to her spirit ; whereas to cower over the 
 fire in a warm woolen dress, and then undress 
 herself for a ball — to dance till she is heated and 
 exhausted, and then go and sit on the stairs or by an 
 open window to cool herself — is more than folly 
 — it is insanity. But you, poor mother or aunt, 
 might talk yourself hoarse; she will not listen. 
 The one thing she likes, the other she does not 
 like ; and therefore she does the first, and will not 
 do the second. 
 
 Young men, also, they will go their own way ; 
 sow their wild oats — and reap them. I do not 
 speak of extreme cases of reckless dissipation, upon 
 which retribution follows only too swift and sure, 
 but of small dissipations, petty sins. A young 
 fellow will dance till four in the morning several 
 times a week, when he knows that every day in the 
 week he must be at his office at nine — and is, 
 being an honest fellow who wishes to get on in the 
 world. But he does not consider how much he 
 takes out of hiiuself in life and health and strength ; 
 and sometimes but of his master's pocket too; for, 
 with the best intentions, he can not possibly do 
 his work as well as it ought to be done. But he, 
 too, does what he likes best to do, and deludes 
 himself that it is the best ; and all the arguments 
 in the world will never convince him to the contrray. 
 
 No more will they convince those other sinners 
 — whose sin looks so like virtue — the clever men 
 who kill themselves with overstudy ; the ambitious 
 
OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 
 
 53 
 
 men who sacrifice every thing to the mad desire 
 of getting on in the world; of being — not better 
 or wiser or greater — but merely richer than their 
 neighbors. 
 
 To do work for work's sake, moderately, levelly, 
 rationally, so as to preserve the power of doing it 
 for the longest term that nature allows — this, the 
 noblest aim a man can start with, becomes often 
 swamped in the ignoble one of working merely to 
 be superior to somebody else. Thus many a man 
 who has earned, or is earning, enough to live com- 
 fortably, and bring up his children well — and suffi- 
 ciently well off, too, to begin with a fair start where 
 their father did — goes on slaving and toiling, his 
 wife aiding and abetting him, in order to maintain 
 them in the luxury to which he has risen. A pater- 
 nal devotion which has its touching phase; and 
 yet it is as blind as it is foolish. The children 
 would be much better left to make their own way, 
 and earn their own bread, like their father before 
 them. And the father himself, by the time he has 
 accumulated the thirty, forty, or fifty thousand 
 which he has gradually learned to consider essen- 
 tial to happiness — she, sly jade ! has slipped away 
 from him. He catches her, but she is like the 
 crushed butterfly that his boys catch under their 
 caps; all her beauty is gone. Utterly worn out 
 with work, he can neither enjoy life himself nor 
 give enjoyment to other people. The strain of 
 occupation gone, his weariness becomes intolerable. 
 The irritability that an overtasked body and mind 
 superinduces in most men, makes him, not a de- 
 
54 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 !!!■' 
 
 l! 
 
 11 
 
 light, but an actual nuisance in his family. Those 
 "often infirmities" which he had once no time to 
 think much about, now rifje up like ghosts of the 
 murdered to torment him wherever he goes. His 
 handsome house, his country leisure or town pleas- 
 ure, his abundance of friends, and his flourishing 
 family, are to him no comfort, no resource. He 
 has burned the candle at both ends, and now there 
 is no light left in it ; it just flickers awhile, and then 
 — drops out. 
 
 I ask earnestly. Is this picture overdrawn ? Do 
 I not paint th^ likeness — not of one, but of hun- 
 dreds — of rich men among ou.' ^qv^intances in 
 this " golden age ? " Midas huA. n - uld not have 
 more bitterly applied the word. The old king of 
 fable, whose touch turned every thing to gold, was 
 not more wretched than some of our would-be mil- 
 lionaires. 
 
 For what is the use of money? Simply to be 
 used; to gain a certain amount of bodily comfort, 
 for which the poor failing body is, as it gets older, 
 only too thankful ; and an equal share of intel- 
 lectual pleasures and tastes, which money only can 
 fully supply. Beyond that no man can spend, or 
 ought to spend, upon himself. And even this, care- 
 fully employed, will always leave a large margin 
 for the keenest pleasure of all — the money that 
 is spent upon other people. 
 
 Idleness may be a great folly, but overwork, to 
 no nobler end than to get rich, is a great crime. 
 And the men who commit it, and the women who 
 encourage them in it, deserve all they get, in the 
 
 
OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 55 
 
 secret miseries that underlie all their splendors. 
 What these are they know. The indigestions of 
 their dinner-parties, the weariness of their balls, 
 the worry of their servants, the rivalries of their 
 neighbors. Who that looks at them as sitting, 
 pallid and cross, in their grand carriages, or 
 watches the discontent into which their bland din- 
 ner-table face falls the moment the smile is off it, 
 or notices the scarcely veiled relief of the polite 
 adieu with which such an entertainment is ended — 
 " and a good thing it's over," say both host and 
 guest in their secret hearts — who that takes quiet 
 heed of all this can help feeling that such magnif- 
 icence has cost very dear ? Le jeu ne vaut pas la 
 chandelle. The paradise may be fair enough out- 
 side, but " the trail of the serpent is over it all." 
 
 This, without any complaints about " this poor 
 dying world," or the wickedness of the people that 
 are in it. It is a good world, a happy world. God 
 meant it to be happy. It is man only who makes 
 it miserable. For one half — perhaps nearly the 
 whole — of these often infirmities which torment us 
 so, Nature is not accountable; Nature, always a 
 wise and tender mother to those who follow her 
 dictates in the simplest way. For instance, who 
 will deny that a number of those illnesses which 
 we suffer from year by year, are absolutely pre- 
 ventable illnesses? 
 
 The common answer to that commonest of 
 moans, " I have such a bad cold " — " Dear me ! 
 How did you catch it ? " — often makes us cross 
 enough. As if it could be any consolation to our 
 
S6 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 Ill t. ! 
 l. ( 
 
 sufferings to investigate how we got them. But 
 the remark is not so ridiculous as it seems. It 
 would be a curious and useful register of personal 
 statistics if we were to count how many of our ill- 
 nesses we bring on ourselves by neglect of those 
 common sanitary laws which can never be broken 
 with impunity. Men of science, half of whom 
 allege that nature is all benign, the other half that 
 she is wholly cruel, seem to be both right and both 
 wrong. She is neither kind nor cruel ; she is only 
 just. She — or a higher Power through her — lays 
 down laws, which, so far as we see, are laws for the 
 general good ;^ they must be obeyed, and by all, or 
 all suffer ; and neither God nor nature can prevent 
 this suffering. 
 
 Thus some illnesses are not preventable. They 
 come to us apparently " by the visitation of God,'* 
 from no cause at all ; that is, from recondite causes, 
 too remote for us either to detect or guard against, 
 but no doubt also the result of broken laws. We 
 can but try to discover these laws, so as to obey 
 them better another time. But a large number 
 of our lesser ailments are entirely our own fault. 
 We can trace in them cause and effect as plainly as 
 that two and two make four. That severe bron- 
 chitis which attacked us, because in the brilliant 
 March sunshine and fierce east wind we put off 
 our slightly shabby winter jacket in favor of more 
 spring-like attire. That horrible sick headache, 
 which we know as well as possible will follow after 
 eating certain foods or drinking certain wines ; yet 
 we can no more resist either than our infant boy 
 
OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 
 
 57 
 
 ir 
 It 
 
 can resist clutching at the lighted candle, or our 
 drunken cabman at the gin bottle. We call the 
 child an "ignorant baby," the drunkard " a fool; " 
 yet in what are we better than they ? For the sake 
 of petty vanity, or still more petty table-indulgence, 
 we have punished ourselves, and tormented our 
 whole family. The sickness which comes direct 
 from heaven deserves all sympathy and tender- 
 ness ; that brought on by mere folly or weak self- 
 indulgence, though it is obliged to be nursed and 
 cared for, is done so with a compassion bordering 
 on contempt. 
 
 Yes, even though we call our errors by grand 
 names, and almost boast of them — " I never take 
 care of myself;" "I can't be bothered with my 
 health ; " " What does it matter to me if I am ill ? " 
 are the remarks one constantly hears, especially 
 from the young, just old enough to shirk authority 
 and resent interference, but still seeing only in the 
 dim distance that dark time which must come, 
 sooner or later, when for every ill usage it has 
 received the body avenges itself tenfold. 
 
 Does it not matter indeed? — the extra labor 
 thrown on a whole family when one member is ill ? 
 the heart-ache of parents, the perplexity and dis- 
 tress of friends, the serious annoyance — to put no 
 stronger word — that invalids always are in a house- 
 hold ? If, as to our would-be suicides, the law of 
 the land, even when it saves them from the river 
 half drowned or cuts them down half-hanged, sen- 
 tences them to remorseless punishment, should not 
 there be found also some fitting condemnation for 
 
58 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 those who commit the slow suicide of ruined health, 
 for no cause but their own gratification ? 
 
 One of the worst forms of these is so counte- 
 nanced by society that he is a bold man who would 
 lift his voice against it ; I mean the present system 
 of dinner parties. And yet there can be no doubt 
 that if it does not kill wholesale, it injures the 
 average constitutions of what we call the " better 
 classes," and causes them dyspeptic and other 
 torments to an extent worse perhaps than even 
 the hunger or the half-feeding which the poor have 
 to fight against. Nobody likes to be called a glut- 
 ton or a gourmand, yet the ordinary dinner-giver 
 or diner-out of the present day will find consider- 
 able difficulty in preventing himself from becoming 
 a little of both. 
 
 Now a good dinner is an excellent thing. A 
 really elegant dinner, well cooked, well served, with 
 tasteful accompaniments of every kind, and with a 
 moderate number of pleasant people to enjoy it, is 
 a most delightful thing. It is right that those who 
 can afford it should give such, replete with " every 
 delicacy of the season : " the best food, the best 
 wine, the most artistic and beautiful table arrange- 
 ments, and in sufficient quantity to satisfy the 
 guests. Sufficient time also should be allowed 
 fairly to enjoy the meal ; taking it leisurely, and 
 seasoning it with that cheerful conversation which 
 is said to help digestion. In truth there can not 
 be a pleasanter sight than an honest, honorable 
 man, at the head of his own hospitable board, 
 looking down two lines of happy-looking friends. 
 
OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 
 
 59 
 
 t ; 
 
 whom he is sincerely glad to welcome, and who are 
 glad in return to give him, according to the stereo- 
 typed phrase, " the pleasure of their company," 
 which really is a pleasure, and without which the 
 grandest banquets are weariness inexpressible. 
 But the diuiier should be subservient to the guests, 
 not the guests to the dinner ; and every meal, be it 
 simple or splendid, is worthless altogether unless 
 eaten, as a good Christian has it, " in gladness and 
 singleness of heart." Such a meal, taken among 
 friends and neighbors, with the faces of those you 
 love or like, or even only admire, gathered around 
 you, not too many of them, nor for too long a time, 
 and moving early into the drawing-room, to pass a 
 social evening in conversation or music — such a 
 feast is truly a feast : the ideal dinner-party, which 
 does no harm to any one, and to many a great deal 
 of good. 
 
 But the ordinary " dinner-party " is eighteen or 
 twenty people chosen at random, without any re- 
 gard to their suiting one another, sitting down to 
 eat and drink without intermission for from two to 
 three hours, say from half-past seven or eight till 
 nearly ten. A " feed " lasting so long that how- 
 ever small may be the bits you put into the unhap- 
 py stomach, it is kept working on at the process of 
 digestion till its powers are thoroughly exhausted. 
 And, eating over, drinking begins. 
 
 I beg pardon — nobody ever " drinks " nowadays. 
 And, of course, nobody is so vulgar as to overeat 
 himself. That enormity is left to the workhouse 
 boy over his Christmas plum-pudding, or the charity 
 
6o 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 girl at a school tea. Nevertheless one sometimes 
 sees, even in elegant drawing-rooms, gentlemen 
 enter with fishy eyes, and talk, not too brilliantly, to 
 ladies with flushed cheeks and weary smiles. Some- 
 times one would like to whisper, " My dear friends, 
 you don't know it ; but have you not both eaten 
 and drank a little more than was good for you ? 
 You would have felt much better and happier after 
 a simple, short dinner, which — instead of the fif- 
 teen minutes that you stand sipping your tea, and 
 wondering if your carriage is come — left you an 
 hour or two to spend a pleasant, sociable evening. 
 Has it been pleasant ? Have you really enjoyed 
 yourself ? How do you feel after it ? And how 
 do you think you will feel to-morrow morning? " 
 
 Ah, that to-morrow morning ! especially to those 
 who have to work with their brains, and in London 
 apart from the wholesome country life, which neu- 
 tralizes so many evils. " I can't dine out," has 
 said to me more than one learned or literary man, 
 or agreeable homme de socUti whom dinner-givers 
 would give the world to get. " It is absolute death 
 to me — or dyspepsia, which is only a slow death to 
 all one's faculties and perhaps one's moral nature 
 too, for your dyspeptic is usually the most ill-tem- 
 pered and disagreeable fellow going. And yet I 
 am neither a glutton nor a wine-bibber. I like a 
 good dinner, and I like to eat it in company with 
 my fellow-creatures. But according to the present 
 system of dinner-parties, I can't do it without ab- 
 solute injury to myself: hindering my work, affect- 
 ing my health, and bringing on all sorts of infirm- 
 
OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 
 
 6i 
 
 ities that a man likes to steer clear of as long as he 
 can." 
 
 Yes, if he have the strength of will to do it. But 
 not every man has, or woman either. Few people 
 practice that golden rule of health — I think it was 
 Luigi Cornaro's — " Always rise from table feeling 
 that you could take a little bit more." Yet if we 
 did practice it, with another very simple rule — to 
 eat always regularly, at the same hour and as near- 
 ly as possible the same quantity of food — not doub- 
 ling the quantity because it happens to be " nice " 
 — we should soon lessen amazingly our often in- 
 firmities. 
 
 Prevention is better than cure, and in most small 
 ailments there can not be a safer physic than ab- 
 stinence. Abstinence from overfood, overwork. 
 How persistently we shut our eyes to the beginnings 
 of disease, beginnings so trilling that we hardly 
 notice them, until they end in that premature decay 
 which seems now only too common among our best 
 and greatest men, and those whom the world can 
 least spare. People rush to doctors to cure them ; 
 they never think of curing themselves by putting 
 a stop to exciting causes of ill-health. As a wise 
 old woman said to a very foolish young one, who 
 brought her a heap of feeble manuscripts to look 
 over and try to sell, on the pitiful plea that she 
 must have money in order to pay for her medicine 
 and her wine : " My dear, stop the wine and stop 
 the medicine, and then you will be able to stop the 
 writing also, which will be much the better for both 
 yourself and the public," 
 
' f 
 
 M SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 The selfishness of people who will not stop, who 
 go on indulging their luxurious, careless, or studious 
 habits, until they make themselves confirmed in- 
 valids, an anxiety and a torment to those about 
 them, can not be too strongly reprobated. Aye, 
 even though it takes the form of a noble indiffer- 
 ence to self, in pursuit of knowledge, wealth, am- 
 bition ; any of the pretty disguises in which we 
 wrap up the thing we like to do, and make believe 
 to other people, often zilmost to ourselves, that it 
 is the very thing we ought to do. » ' 
 
 And here I must dwell a moment on a case in 
 point, the rignt and wrong of which is sometimes 
 exceedingly difficult to define — how far it is allow- 
 able to run risks of infectious diseases. , 
 
 Formerly very good people regarded plague and 
 pestilence as coming direct from the hand of God, 
 which it was useless — nay, worse, irreligious — to 
 fight against. I have heard sensible and excellent 
 persons say calmly, as a reason for going, quite 
 unnecessarily, into a fever-stricken house, " Oh, I 
 am not afraid ; if it is the will of the Lord for me 
 to catch it, I shall catch it; if not, I am safe." 
 
 Most true ; in fact the merest truism, like pious 
 folks' habit of writing D.V., Deo volente, about any 
 thing they intend to do, as if they could possibly 
 do it without the will of God ! But is it the will of 
 God that infection should be spread from house to 
 house by these well-meaning individuals, who may 
 indeed escape themselves, but can never tell how 
 much misery they are bringing on other people } 
 
 Modern science has found out that, like many 
 
OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 
 
 63 
 
 Other physical woes, epidemic or contagious disease* 
 are principally owing to ourselves, our own errors 
 or carelessnesses, not the will of God at all ; that 
 he has provided certain antidotes or remedies 
 against them, and those who neglect or refuse these 
 lay themselves under the lash of his righteous, 
 punishments, nor can they complain of any suffer- 
 ing that follows. 
 
 Infectious diseases may be almost always put 
 under the category of preventable evils, and it is 
 the duty of all truly religious persons to help the 
 Almighty, so to speak — that is, to make themselves 
 His instruments in stamping out evil wherever they 
 find it. Aye, even though it may be after His own 
 mysterious way, as we sometimes see it, or fancy 
 we do, of sacrificing the few to the many. 
 
 Disease must be stamped out, and its circle of 
 misery narrowed as much as possible, even at cost 
 of individual feeling. The primary thought of 
 every person attacked by an infectious illness ought 
 to be, " Let me harm as few people as I can." 
 There is something particularly heroic in the story 
 of the East-end clergyman "vho, discovering that 
 he had caught small-pox, resolutely refused to go 
 home, would not even enter a cab which was 
 brought to take him to the hospital, but, hailing a 
 hearse passing by, crept into that, and so was 
 carried safely to the safe hospital door. 
 
 He was a noble instance, this man, of that pru- 
 dence which is compatible with the utmost courage, 
 5he deepest self-devotion, that benevolent caution 
 f^hich sees other people's rights as clearly as its 
 
u 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 own. How different from a certain affectionate 
 mother who, when another mother hesitated to 
 enter a railway carriage full of children because 
 her little boy was recovering from measles, answered, 
 " Oh, how kind of you to tell me ! for my little 
 folks here have only just got through scarlet-fever, 
 and suppose they had caught measles on the top 
 of that ?*' But it never occurred to her to prevent 
 somebody else's little boy from catching scarlet- 
 fever on the top of measles. 
 
 Absolute justice, beyond even sympathy, and 
 far beyond sentimental feeling of any kind, should 
 be the rule of all who have to do with infection ; 
 their one prominent thought how to narrow its fatal 
 work within the smallest possible bounds. Doctors, 
 nurses, and those friends and relations who are 
 naturally in charge of the sick, must take their 
 lives in their hands, do their duty, and trust God 
 for the rest. And happily there is seldom any lack 
 of such : brave physicians, who, having voluntarily 
 entered a profession which involves so much risk 
 to them and theirs, carry it out unflinchingly; 
 nurses, who to their own people or to strangers, for 
 love or for charity, which means for God, devote 
 themselves open-eyed to a righteous self-sacrifice. 
 But there it should end. 
 
 Every one who heedlessly or unnecessarily, for 
 bravado or through thoughtlessness, or even from 
 mistaken pious zeal, goes in the way of infection, 
 or helps in the spread of it, commits a crime against 
 society, which society can not too strongly protect 
 itself from. 
 
 
OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 
 
 65 
 
 St 
 
 When I see rabid religionists carrying handfuls 
 of tracts into reeking, typhus-doomed cottages, 
 where they ought first to have carried food and 
 clothes, or, better still, have leveled them with the 
 ground and built up in their stead wholesome 
 dwellings ; > -hen I hear clergymen with young 
 families, and going daily into other families and 
 schools, protest that it is " their duty " to enter 
 infected houses in order to administer spiritual 
 consol? ion to ■ ?oplc dying of small-pox or scarlet- 
 fever, I look u ; n them much as I would upon a 
 man who thoight it *' his duty " to carry a lighted 
 candlf. ir>t.o a coal-ni.iie. Nothing may happen; 
 but it any thing does happ n, what of him who 
 caused the disaster by his fatal folly — misnamed 
 faith ? As if " salvation " did not mean a saving 
 from sin rather than from punishment ; and, there- 
 fore, though men's souls may be in our hands 
 during life, they must be left solely in God's when 
 death comes— and after. These so-called religious 
 persons are apparently much more bent upon doing 
 their own will in their own way than the Master's 
 in His way. For the will of God, so far as we can 
 trace it through His manifestation of Himself in 
 His Son, seems to be the prevention and cure of 
 not only moral but physical evil by every possible 
 means, prior to its total extinction. ; 
 
 Either Christ's doctrine is true or it is not ; but 
 even those who aver that it is not true often 
 mournfully acknowledge that it ought to be — that 
 we should be better if it were true. And He did 
 not despise the body. He held i* to be the 
 
66 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 " temple of the Holy Spirit." Asceticism was as 
 far from Him as was luxurious living. He went 
 about, not only teaching, but doing good — practical 
 good. Before He attempted to preach to the mul- 
 titude, He fed them, remembering that " divers of 
 them came from far." When He raised from the 
 dead Jairus's daughter, He "commanded that 
 something should be given her to eat." And in 
 revisiting His forlorn disciples, His first tender 
 words were, " Children, have ye any meat .''" In 
 no way. from the beginning to the end of His 
 ministry, does he disregard or despise those bodily 
 infirmities which we may conclude he shared, 
 though how much or how little we can never know. 
 
 One fact, hov^ever, is noteworthy — Henever com- 
 plained of them. At least the only record we have 
 of any murmur from His lips was made solely to 
 His Father : " Let this cup pass from me " — fol- 
 lowed quickly by the acceptation of it — " Not my 
 will, but Thine be done." A lesson to us, who are 
 so prone to grumble over the most trifling of our 
 infirmities, the least of our aches and pains; so 
 ready to blame every body for them, except our- 
 selves ; to rush for cure to every doctor we hear 
 of, instead of trusting to our own common-sense, 
 self-restraint, and, when all else fails, that quiet 
 patience which at least never inflicts its own suf- 
 ferings upon its neighbors. 
 
 Christ did not — not to the very end. When 
 dying the most torturing of deaths, it was His 
 mother and His brethren that He thought of, not 
 Himself. And so it is with many a sick and dying 
 
OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 
 
 «t 
 
 >.^ • 
 
 ^hen 
 His 
 not 
 
 lying 
 
 person, who in life has been a humble follower of 
 Him. 
 
 Strange how in these sermons, professedly " out 
 of Church " — holding up the banner of no set 
 creed — appealing especially to those who say they 
 believe none, and refuse to accept any foregone 
 conclusions, or take any thing granted in the 
 " science of theology " so called— as if any finite 
 being could learn the Infinite as he learns astro- 
 nomy or mathematics! — it is strange, I say, how 
 continually I find myself recurring to Christ and 
 His teaching ; which, whatever be the facts or mis- 
 representations of His personal history, shines out 
 clearly after the mists of nearly nineteen hundred 
 years as the only perfect righteousness the world 
 ever saw : a standard which, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously, all righteous souls instinctively recognize. 
 
 It is easy for people to say they do not believe 
 in Christianity — that is, in its corruptions ; but the 
 spirit of it has so permeated our modern world that 
 many a fierce skeptic is a good Christian without 
 knowing it. He can deny, but he can not get away 
 from the influence of that divine morality which 
 Christians recognize as their Sun of Righteousness. 
 It may not shine — mists may obscure it, so that one 
 is prone to doubt its very existence ; but without 
 it, daylight would not be there. 
 
 I am wandering a little from my subject, and yet 
 not far; since what comfort is there, except in 
 such thoughts as these, when the dark time comes 
 which must come to us all — when our infirmities 
 are not " often," but continual ? How shall we 
 
 / 
 
68 
 
 SERMONS OUT OP CHURCH. 
 
 !1 
 
 bear them ? How shall we meet that heavy season, 
 when — as I lately heard one lady answer to another 
 who was saying she felt better than she had done 
 for years — " Ah, my dear, but / shall never feel 
 better any more." 
 
 Not very wonderful, considering the sufferer was 
 seventy-six; yet she evidently felt it a great hard- 
 ship, a cruel wrong. Even then she could not re- 
 concile herself to old age, to the gradual slipping 
 off of the worn garment, meant tenderly, I think, 
 as nature's preparation for the putting of it off alto- 
 gether, and being clothed afresh with something, 
 we know not what, except that it will be altogether 
 new. 
 
 A hard time this to many : when all the sins they 
 ever committed against their bodies — and you may 
 sin against your body just as fatally as you against 
 sin your soul — rise up in judgment against them. 
 The season when we begin to feel that we are really 
 growing old, and that every body sees it, but is too 
 polite to say so, or tries to gloss it under the un- 
 meaning remark, " How young you look!" — indi- 
 cating that we can not reasonably be expected to 
 look young any longer. This is as painful a phrase 
 as any our life goes through — more painful, I 
 think, than absolute old age, which gradually be- 
 comes as conceited over its many years as youth is 
 over its few ones. 
 
 Still I can not believe but that it is possible, by 
 extra care at the 'beginning of decay, to avoid its 
 saddest infirmities, and to make senility a compara- 
 tively painl«?ss thing— free from many of those 
 
OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 
 
 69 
 
 i,by 
 
 I its 
 
 ara- 
 
 ose 
 
 weaknesses and unpleasantnesses which cause so 
 many unselfish people to say honestly they never 
 wish to live to be old. 
 
 For instance, how few recognize the very simple 
 and obvious truth, that as the machinery of diges- 
 tion begins to wear out, it is advisable to give it a 
 little less work to do. A meal from which a young 
 man would rise up hungry is quite sufficient for the 
 needs of a man of seventy, and better for him than 
 more. The healthiest, most active, and most 
 happy-minded of old people, I have always found 
 to be those who were exceedingly moderate in their 
 food ; eating less and less every year, instead of, 
 according to the common fallacy, more and more. 
 
 And they who have longest retained their hold 
 on life and its enjoyments have been those who in 
 all their habits have gradually gone back to the 
 simplicity of childhood. Indeed, it seems as if 
 nature, when we do not foolishly resist her or 
 interfere with her, would fain bring us back quietly 
 to all the tastes, pleasures, and wants of our earliest 
 youth — its innocent interests, its entire but not 
 necessarily painful or humiliating dependence; 
 would give us, in short, a little tender rock in our 
 second cradle before she lays us in the grave. 
 
 And this, if we could only see it, is good for us, 
 and equally good for those who have to do it for 
 us. It is well for the younger generation to see 
 how contentedly we can loose our hold upon that 
 world which is slowly sliding from us. Though, 
 unlike them, we can no longer work all day and 
 dance all night ; though we require every year more 
 
7© 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 care, more regularity of hours and meals, more 
 sleep — at all events more rest ; can by no means 
 play tricks with ourselves, for any excuse either of 
 amusement or labor ; are perhaps obliged to spend 
 one half the day in peaceful seclusion, or equally 
 peaceful endurance of pain, in order to qualify our- 
 selves for being cheerful with those we love for the 
 other half; still life is not yet a burden to us, and 
 we try to be as little of a burden as possible to 
 those about us. We have had our day ; we will not 
 grudge them theirs. 
 
 I can npt imagine an old age like this to be a 
 sad or undesirable thing. Infirmities it may have 
 — must have ; but they need not be overwhelming, 
 if the failing body has been treated, and is still 
 treated, with that amount of respect which is its 
 due. And at worst, perhaps bodily sufferings are 
 not harder to bear than -the horrible mental strug- 
 gles of youth, with its selfish agony of passion and 
 pain ; or than the vicarious sufferings of middle 
 age, when we groaned under the weight of other 
 people's cares, mourned over sorrows that 've were 
 Vtterly powerless to cure, and looked forward with 
 endless anxiety into an uncertain future, not con- 
 sidering how soon it would become the harmless 
 past. 
 
 Now all that is over. The old never grieve 
 much ; at least, not overmuch. Why should they ? 
 It is strange to notice how, even after a loss by 
 death that a few years before would have utterly 
 crushed them, they seem to rise up and go on their 
 way — only a few steps more — quietly, even cheer- 
 
 
OUR OFTEN INFIRMITIES. 
 
 7' 
 
 fully; troubling no one, complaining to.no one, 
 probably because it is only a few steps more. 
 Suffering itself grows calm in the near view of 
 rest. 
 
 Thus it is with people of restful and patient 
 mind. For others there is still something left. 
 " I have had all I wanted," said to me one of the 
 most unquiet spirits I ever knew, keenly alive still, 
 even under the deadness of seventy-odd years. 
 " Life has been a long puzzle to me, but I am com- 
 ing to the end of it now. There is one thing more 
 — I want to find out the great secret, and I shall 
 — before long." 
 
 One can quite well imagine some people, to 
 whom the after-life was neither a certainty nor 
 even a hope, looking forward to death as a matter 
 of at least curiosity. But for us, who believe that 
 death is the gate of life, it is quite a different feel- 
 ing. Putting it on the very lowest ground, to have 
 all our curiosity gratified, to know even as we are 
 known, to feel nearer and nearer to our hands the 
 key of the eternal mystery, the satisfying of the 
 infinite desire; this alone is consolation, in degree, 
 for our own failing powers and flagging spirits; 
 nay, even for the slowly emptying world around us 
 — emptying of the wise and the good, the pleasant 
 and the dear, whom one by one we see passing " ad 
 "major es.'' 
 
 *' If I could only get rid of my body, I should 
 be all right," sighed once a great sufferer. And 
 there are times when even the most patient of us 
 feel rather glad that we do not live forever, Re- 
 
 f 
 
 n 
 

 
 72 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 spect our mortal tabernacle as we may, and treat 
 it tenderly, as we ought to do, we may one day be 
 not so very sorry to lay it down, not only with all 
 its sins, but with its often infirmities. 
 
 
 1 
 
 ft 
 
 y 
 
I treat \ 
 lay be 
 ith all 
 
 Sermon Ui. 
 
 HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT IN 
 THE WAY HE SHOULD GO. 
 
/ . 
 
 III. 
 
 HO W TO TRAIN UP A PARENT IN THE 
 WA Y HE SHO ULD GO. 
 
 "Oh dear ! I'm afraid I shall never manage to 
 bring up my mother properly," was the remark 
 once made by a rather fast young lady, to whom 
 the old-fashioned institution of " mothers " was no 
 doubt a rather inconvenient thing. 
 
 " My friend," said an old Quaker to a lady who 
 contemplated adopting a child, " I know not how 
 far thou wilt succeed in educating her, but I am 
 quite certain she will educate thee." 
 
 Often when I look around on the world of parents 
 and children, I think of those two contradictory 
 speeches, and of the truth that lies between them. 
 
 The sentiment may be very heretical, but I have 
 often wondered how many out of the thousands of 
 children born annually in England alone come to 
 parents who at all deserve the blessing. Not one 
 half, certainly — even among the mothers. Halve 
 that again, and I believe you will come to the right 
 percentage as regards the fathers. 
 
 It is sometimes said that children of the present 
 day are made too much of. Perhaps so. They 
 but follow the fashion of the age — any thing but 
 a heroic or ascetic age. No doubt they are a little 
 
7« 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 > I 
 
 i 
 
 " spoiled." So are we all. But the errors of the 
 parents, from which theirs arise, are a much more 
 serious matter. How to train up the parents in 
 the way they should go is a necessity which, did it 
 force itself upon the mind of any school-board, 
 would be found quite as important as the education 
 of the children. 
 
 When we think of them, poor helpless little 
 creatures ! who never asked to be born, who from 
 birth upward are so utterly dependent upon the 
 two other creatures to whom they owe their exist- 
 ence — a debt for which it is supposed they can 
 never be sufficiently grateful — do not our hearts 
 yearn over them with pity, or grow hot with indigna- 
 tion ? This even without need of such stories as 
 we are continually hearing — I take three at random 
 from to-day's newspaper — of the drunken father 
 who amused himself with dashing his three-years- 
 old child against the table till he accidentally 
 dashed out its brains ; of the woman who thrice in 
 one afternoon tried to drop her baby among the 
 horses and carriages in High Holborn; of the boy 
 of four and a half flogged almost to death by a 
 school-board teacher for not doing his sums and 
 not answering when spoken to ; which case the 
 magistrate — doubtless himself a father — curtly 
 dismissed, saying, " If discipline were not main- 
 tained, what was the education of boys to come 
 to .> " 
 
 However, putting aside these public facts, let 
 us come upon our own private experience, and ask 
 ourselves honestly how many people we know who 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT. 
 
 77 
 
 are — or are likely to prove — really good fathers 
 and mothers? wise, patient, judicious? firm, watch- 
 ful, careful and loving? Above all things, just; 
 since, so deeply is implanted in the infant mind 
 this heavenly instinct, that if I w^re asked what 
 was most important in the bringing up of a child, 
 love or justice, I think I should say justice. 
 
 To be just is the very first lesson that a parent 
 requires to learn. The rights of the little soul, 
 which did not come into the world of its own 
 accord, nor indeed was taken into consideration in 
 the matter at all — for do any in marrying ever think 
 of the sort of fathers or mothers they are giving 
 to their offspring? — the rights of this offspring, 
 physical, mental, and moral, are at once most obvious 
 and least regarded. The new-born child is an 
 interest, a delight, a pride ; the parents exult over 
 it, as over any other luxury or amusement ; but 
 how seldom do they take to heart the solemn 
 responsibility of it, or see a face divine, as it were, 
 looking out at them from the innocent baby-face, 
 or ponder the warning of Christ Himself — " Whoso 
 shall offend one of these little ones which believe 
 in me, it were better for him that a millstone were 
 hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned 
 in the depth of the sea." 
 
 There could hardly be a stronger expression of 
 the way in whi^h God — the Christian God — views 
 the relations between parents and children. Yet 
 most young parents, who until now have been 
 accustomed to think only of themselves or of one 
 another, take the introduction of the unconscious 
 
7« 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 third as their natural possession, never doubting 
 that it is wholly theirs to bring up as they please, 
 and that they are quite capable of so doing. 
 
 Constantly one hears the remark, " Oh ! I would 
 not take the responsibility of another person's 
 child." Does that imply that they feel at liberty to 
 do as they like with their own ? I fear it does; and 
 that law and custom both appear to sanction this 
 delusion. Nobody must "interfere" between 
 parent and child, at least not till the case comes 
 within a degree or two of child-murder. The slow 
 destruction of soul and body which, through ignor- 
 ance or carelessness, goes on among hundreds of 
 children, not only in humble, but in many respect- 
 able and well-regulated households, society never 
 notices. I suppose even the most daring philan- 
 thropist would never venture to bring in a bill for 
 claiming the children of unworthy parents, and 
 snatching them from ruin by annihilating all 
 parental rights and making them children of the 
 State. Yet such a proceeding would benefit the 
 new generation to an incalculable degree. 
 
 "Train up a child in the way he should go," is 
 the advice in every body's mouth, but who thinks 
 of training the parents ? Does not every body 
 strictly hold that the mere fact of parenthood 
 implies all that is necessary for the up-bringing of 
 the child ? — all the love, all the wisdom, all the self- 
 denial ? Does it ever occur to the average young 
 man and young woman, bending together over the 
 cradle of their first-born, that the little thing, whose 
 teachers they are proudly constituting themselves 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT. 
 
 79 
 
 IS 
 
 cs 
 
 es 
 
 to be, is much more likely to be the unconscious 
 agent in teacliing them? 
 
 And the education begins at once. How amusing 
 and at the same time how satisfactory it is to see a 
 young fellow, who throughout his bachelor days 
 has been a selfish egotist — most young bachelors are 
 — obliged now tothinkof something and somebody 
 besides himself; to give up not a few of his own 
 personal comforts, and find himself forced to play 
 second fiddle in his own home — where the one 
 important object, for the time being, is " the baby." 
 
 I have spoken of rights. This is the only instance 
 I know in which ihey are not mutual, but entirely 
 one-sided. The new-born babe owes absolutely 
 nothing to the parents beyond the physical fad 
 of existence. All moral claims are on its side 
 alone. The parents are responsible for it, soul and 
 body, for certainly the first twenty years ; nor even 
 after that is it easy to imagine circumstances which 
 would wholly set them free. The most sorely tried 
 father and mother could hardly cast adrift their 
 erring offspring without a lurking uneasiness of 
 conscience as to how far these errors were owing 
 to themselves and their upbringing. For, save in 
 very rare cases, where far-back types crop out 
 again, and are most difficult to deal with, there is 
 seldom a black sheep in any family without the 
 parents having been to blame. 
 
 "Why, I brought up my children all alike," 
 moans some virtuous progenitor of such. " How 
 does it happen that this one has turned out so 
 different from the rest?" 
 
8o 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 Just, my good friend, because you did bring them 
 up all alike. You had not the sense to see that 
 the same training which makes one mars another; 
 or else that in training them, it was necessary to 
 train yourself first. Meaning to be a guide, you 
 were only a finger-post, which points the way to 
 others, but stands still itself. . v* 
 
 The very first lesson a parent has to learn is that 
 whatever he attempts to teach, he must himself 
 first practice. Whatever he wishes his child to 
 avoid, he must make up his mind to renounce ; and 
 that from the very earliest stage of existence, and 
 down to the rpinutest things. In young children 
 the imitative faculty is so enormous, the reasoning 
 power so small, that one can not be too careful, 
 even with infants, to guard against indulging in a 
 harsh tone, a brusque manner, a sad or angry look. 
 As far as is possible, the tender bud should live in 
 an atmosphere of continual sunshine, under which 
 it may safely and happily unfold, hour by hour and 
 day by day. To effect this there is required from 
 the parents, or those who stand in the parents' 
 stead, an amount of self-control and self-denial 
 which would be almost impossible had not Heaven 
 implanted on the one side maternal instinct, on the 
 other that extraordinary winning charm which 
 there is about all young creatures making us put 
 up with their endless waywardness, and love them 
 all the better the more trouble they give us. 
 
 That is — mothers do. When I said " maternal 
 instinct " I spoke advisedly and intentionally. Of 
 paternal instinct there is almost none. A man is 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT. 
 
 / 
 
 H 
 
 proud of his sons and daughters because they are 
 /lis sons and daughters — bound to carry down his 
 name to posterity ; but he rarely takes the slightest 
 interest in any body else*s children, and in his own 
 only so far as they contribute to his pleasure, 
 amusement, or dignity. The passionate love a 
 woman often has for another woman's children, and 
 for the feeblest, naughtiest, ugliest of her own, is 
 to men a thing entirely unknown. Two-thirds of 
 paternal love is pure pride, and the remaining third, 
 not seldom, pure egotism. 
 
 Therefore for the first seven, nay, ten years of a 
 child's life, it should in most cases be left as much 
 as possible to the care of women. Not that every 
 woman as the motherly heart; but the fatherly 
 heart is a rarer thing still. 
 
 Besides, men's work in the world naturally 
 unfits them for the management of children. It 
 is very hard for a man, who has been worried in 
 business all day long, to come home and be pestered 
 by a crying child ; even though the poor innocent 
 can not help itself — is probably only tired or sick 
 or hungry. But the father will not see this ; he 
 will only see that the child annoys him, and must 
 therefore be "naughty." 
 
 " And when naughty, of course it must be pun- 
 ished," I heard a middle-aged father once say with 
 virtuous complacency. " My boy is only eleven 
 months old — yet I assure you 1 have whipped him 
 three times." 
 
 Whipped him three times ! And the mother 
 allowed it — the young mother who sat srnijinj^ 
 6 
 
8a 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 and beautifully dressed at the head of the table. 
 Why had she not the sense to lock her nursery 
 door against the brutal fool ? But what is the' good 
 of calling names ? the man was simply ignorant. 
 For all his grand assumption of parental authority, 
 he had not the wit to see that for the first year, 
 perhaps two years of our life, there can be no such 
 thing as moral "naughtiness." Existence Is so 
 purely physical that if we only take care of the 
 little body, the mind will take care of itself; or, at 
 worst, it is so completely a piece of white paper that 
 it will show nothing save what we write upon it. 
 Any body Who has had much to do with young 
 children must acknowledge that in spite of the 
 doctrine of original sin, nearly every childish 
 fault is a reflected fault, the copy of something 
 seen in other people. If any one will take the 
 trouble to notice his own faults or peculiarities — 
 which we are all rather slow to do — it may account 
 for a good many "naughtinesses" which he pun- 
 ishes in his offspring. 
 
 It is often strange and sad to see how hard 
 grown-up people — especially men — are upon chil- 
 dren : expecting from five — or say ten years old 
 — an timount of patience, diligence, self-control and 
 self-denial, which they themselves at fifty-odd have 
 never succeeded in attaining to. But I repeat, so 
 few men are by temperament, circumstances or 
 habits, in the least fitted for the management of 
 children, that the advice I give to all sensible wives 
 and capable mothers concerning their little ones 
 is this — Save their fathers from them, and save 
 them from their fathers. 
 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT. 
 
 Not but what there are fathers true and tender, 
 firm as a man ought to be, unselfish, and patient 
 as, happily, most women are ; to whose breast the 
 youngest child runs in any trouble — " Oh, it's always 
 papa who comforts us " — and of whom the elder 
 ones say fondly, " We mind one look of papa*s 
 more than twenty scoldings.** But such are the 
 exceptions. The average of men and fathers are, 
 I solemnly believe, quite unfitted, both by nature 
 or habit, for the up-bringing of children. Thus, 
 necessarily, the duty falls on the mother. And why 
 not ? What higher destiny ? 
 
 There is a class of women who consider that they 
 have a higher destiny ; that to help in the larger 
 work of the world, to continue their own mental 
 culture, is far more important than to bring up the 
 next generation worthily. 
 
 Both duties are excellent in their way, but there 
 are plenty of unmarried, childless women, and 
 women with no domestic instincts, to do the former 
 — mothers alone can do the latter. True, it exacts 
 the devotion of the entire life : a real mother has 
 no time for gay society, nor intellectual develop- 
 ment, except such as she is always gaining through 
 her children ; she must make up her !huid to the 
 fact that they and her husband compose her whole 
 world and fill up her life. 
 
 And what better world .? what nobler life .? Even 
 if she is worn out, " like a rose-tree in full bear- 
 ing," and drops off when her destiny is done? No 
 matter, she has fulfilled it, and she is and she will 
 be blessed. ' 
 
6IFM0NS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 Not, however, unless she has thoroughly fulfilled 
 it. The mere fact of bringing eight or ten children 
 into the woild does not in the least imply true 
 motherhood. If she leaves them to nurses and 
 governesses ; if she shirks any of the anxious cares, 
 perpetual small worries, and endless self-abnega- 
 tio'^s which are her natural portion, the underside 
 to her infinite blessings, she does not deserve these 
 last. Not every mother is born with the mother's 
 heart , I have known many an old maid who had 
 it, and I have heard of mothers of many children 
 who owned to " hating '* every child as it came, 
 and only learning to love the helpless innocent 
 from a sense of duty. But duty often teaches love, 
 and responsibility produces the capacity for it. 
 Many a light-minded, light-hearted girl, who has 
 danced and flirted and sentimentalized through 
 her happy spring-time, finds the sweet compulsion 
 of nature too strong for her ; very soon she forgets 
 all her follies and settles down into the real mother, 
 whom love instructs in all things necessary ; who 
 shrinks from nc trouble, is tqusl to all duties; is 
 to her children nurse, companion, playfellow, as 
 well as doctress, seamstress, teacher, friend — every 
 thing in short. The father may be more or less 
 to the child, as his occupation and his own peculi- 
 arities allow ; but the mother must be all in al), or 
 G od help the children ! 
 
 Granting that the mother-love is there, is love 
 sufficient ? Not always. It will not make up for 
 the lack of common-sense, self-control, accurate 
 and orderly ways : 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT. 
 
 '* The reason firm, the temperate will ; 
 Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill." 
 
 H 
 
 Nor does the mere fact of parenthood by a sort 
 of divine right constitute all parents infallible, as 
 they are so apt to suppose, and by their conduct 
 expect their children to believe. 
 
 The child will «<?/ believe it , not after the very 
 first, unless the parent prove it : and this by some- 
 thing stronger than bare assertion or natural 
 instinct. It may be a dangerous thing to suggest, 
 but I am afraid the idea of some mysterious 
 instinctive bond between parent and child is a 
 mere superstition. No doubt the feeling is there, 
 but it may be exercised equally with or without the 
 tie of blood. Suppose, unknown to these tender 
 young parents, another infant, a " changeling child," 
 were to be secretly popped into the cradle over 
 which they bend so fondly? They would feel 
 toward it exactly the same sensations. Also, if any 
 aunt, grandmother, or even ordinary stranger, 
 should fulfill toward that child all the duties of a 
 parent, the love won, and deserved, would be a true 
 filial affection. The instinct of blood, as people 
 call it, acts admirably as a cement to other ties ; 
 but of itself, save in poetical fancy, it has no 
 existence whatever. Nothin ; l>ut the wildest 
 imagination could have made George Eliot's 
 " Spanish Gipsy," tenderly reared and betrothed to 
 the man she loved, elope at once with her Zingaro 
 father, whom she had never seen in her life before. 
 And nothing but the most extraordinary moral twist 
 Gould make people condemn, as I have heard t)^- 
 
ii 
 
 1:1111; 
 
 1 f 
 
 i \ 
 
 I 
 
 ]1! 
 
 SERMONS OUT OP CHURCH. 
 
 demned, Silas Mamer's beloved Eppie, because, 
 placed between her adopted father, to whom she 
 owed every thing, and her flesh-and-blood father, 
 to whom she owed nothing but her birth, she never 
 hesitated in choosing the former. 
 
 A parent, unlike a poev, is not born — he is made. 
 There are certain things which he has at once to 
 learn, or he will have no more influence over his 
 child than if he wjre a common stranger. First, 
 he must institute between himself and his child 
 that which is as important between child and parent 
 as between man and God — the sense, not of abso- 
 lute obedience, as it is so often preached, but of 
 absolute reliance, which produces obedience. To 
 gain obedience, you must first set yourself to 
 deserve it. Whatever you promise your little one, 
 however small the thing may seem to you, and 
 whatever trouble it. costs you, perform it. Never 
 let the doubt once enter that innocent mind that 
 you say what you do not mean, or will not act up 
 to what you say. Make as few prohibitory laws 
 as you possibly can, but, once made, keep to them. 
 In what is granted, as in what is denied, compel 
 yourself, however weary or worried or impatient, 
 to administer always even-handed justice. " Fiat 
 justitia, ruat coelum," is a system much more likely 
 to secure your child's real affection than all the 
 petting and humoring so generally indulged in, 
 to give pleasure or save trouble, not to your little 
 ones, but to yourself. 
 
 A very wise woman once consoled an over- 
 tender mother, who was being blamed for " spoil- 
 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT. 
 
 87 
 
 . »» 
 
 ing " her little girl — " Never mind. Love never 
 spoiled any child. It is the alternations, the kiss 
 on one cheek and the blow on the other, which 
 ruin." 
 
 And this is what I often notice in extremely well- 
 meaning parents : their love is not a steady love, 
 but continually 
 
 " Roughened by those cataracts and breaks. 
 Which humor interposed too often makes." 
 
 They can not keep that sweet, level calm which 
 above all things is necessary for the government 
 of children. The same playful wiles which amuse 
 one day irritate the next. Not that the child is 
 different, but they are in a different mood them- 
 selves, which important fact the poor little thing is 
 expected at once to recognize, and act accord- 
 ingly. 
 
 And here the second great mistake is made. 
 We expect too much from our children. We exact 
 from them a perfection which we are far from carry- 
 ing out in ourselves ; we require of them sacrifices 
 much heavier, comparatively, than those of any 
 grown-up person. And they soon find that out. 
 A child's eyes are very sharp. Any flaw in one's 
 argument, any lapse in one's conduct, is caught up 
 by them and reproduced with alarming accuracy. 
 
 " Mr. A. ? is that the Mr. A. whom papa dislikes 
 so ? " said an innocent enfant terrible before a whole 
 dinner-table. The papa, who had let his pre- 
 judices run away with him, so as to speak a great 
 deal more strongly than he meant of harmless Mr. 
 A., felt that after this there would be some diffi- 
 
 i '-i 
 
m' 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 r 
 
 culty in teaching his child to obey the ninth com- 
 inandment and bear no false witness against its 
 neighbor. 
 
 The intense truthfulness and straightforward- 
 ness of children, when not crushed by fear or cor- 
 rupted by precocious deceit, is a perpetual lesson 
 to elder people, who have learned to disguise their 
 feelings ; as, I suppose, we all must in degree. 
 
 " Mamma, I don't like that gentleman ; when is 
 he going away?" observed the same painfully 
 candid child concerning a morning visitor, who 
 had the grace to say politely, " My dear, I am going 
 away directly;" and disappear. But then it was 
 necessary to take the matter in hand. And never, 
 perhaps, did the mother feel so strongly that court- 
 esy is Christian virtue, and Christian charity the 
 basis of all good breeding, than when she had to 
 explain to her little daughter that it was not 
 " kind " to make such a remark ; that whether we 
 like people or not, whether they are agreeable or 
 disagreeable, we are equally bound to show them 
 civility, since by incivility, we disgrace not them 
 but ourselves. And this, without advocating any 
 insincerity or hypocrisy, or even " company man- 
 ners," which no child is ever likely to assume 
 except in imitatioi of its elders. 
 
 To be perfectly true, perfectly just, perfectly 
 loving to our childien, is the only way of teaching 
 them to be the same to other people. The very 
 tone of voice, the turn of phrase, the trick of man- 
 ner of their eiders and (so-called) superiors, are 
 oft(ni imitated by them with such a frightful ac- 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT. 
 
 89 
 
 curacy that it is necessary to be continually on our 
 guard. One sees one's own reflection in these 
 awful little people as startlingly as if one were 
 living in a room of looking-glasses. And therein 
 lies the continual education which, whether or not 
 the parent gives to the child, the child uncon- 
 sciously gives to the parent. Happy he who is 
 clear-sighted enough to read the lesson, and wise 
 enough to profit thereby. 
 
 On this head let me suggest that, if the children 
 miss much, the parents miss more, by the fashion — 
 exacted, I suppose, by our ever-growing luxurious 
 habits — of keeping children so much in the nursery 
 and under an array of nursemaids. Yet I have 
 heard very sensible mothers advocate this ; declar- 
 ing that ft " rests " the little brain to be left to the 
 company of servants. 
 
 The French people think differently. In French 
 domestic life — provincial life, for France is more 
 distinct from Paris than England is from London 
 — in that cheerful, affectionate, happy home-life 
 which is, I believe, far commoner with them than 
 with others, one of the brightest and most whole- 
 some elements is the children. They have no 
 nursery, and, after the very earliest infancy, they 
 have no bonne. The little people are always with 
 the big people — father and mother, grandfather 
 and grandmother — for the French household is 
 often made up of several generations. As soon 
 as they can sit at table, they take their place there ; 
 ih the salon they are as welcome as in the salle-h- 
 manger; and thus, unconsciously brought int0 
 
m 
 
 x> 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 'Ml 
 
 
 ¥ 
 
 training by the good manners of those about them, 
 they learn to be little ladies and gentlemen almost 
 before they can speak. 
 
 "But," I have heard people argue, "how can 
 you possibly have children always beside you ? 
 As babies you might, if you could put up with the 
 trouble of them ; but when they grow older it would 
 be so very awkward. For their own sakes even, 
 you ought not to let them hear their elders* con- 
 versation." 
 
 What an admission ! Does it occur to any of 
 these arguers that, except in very rare and solemn 
 instances, the talk which is unfit for the ears of 
 children ought never to be talked at all? For 
 what does it usually consist of? Criticising one's 
 neighbors ; sneering at one's friends ; ridiculing 
 behind their backs those whom we praise to their . 
 faces ; telling secrets which ought never to be told ; 
 making bitter or equivocal or ill-natured remarks, 
 which we are afraid to hear repeated. If so, to 
 keep our children always in the room with us would 
 be a very wholesome discipline, making us much 
 better folks than some of us are now. 
 
 Not that I by any means wish to take a senti- 
 mental or picturesque view of the rising generation, 
 It is often a very aggravating generation indeed 
 Without any actual naughtiness, the restlessness 
 which is natural to a child — indeed, a portion of its 
 daily growth — is most trying to elder people, who 
 have come to feel the intense blessedness of mere 
 rest. And when it "becomes worse than reckless- 
 ness — actual willfulness and mischievousness — 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT. 
 
 M 
 
 even the strongest opponents, theoretically, of cor- 
 poral chastisement, will at times feel their fingers 
 tingling with an irresistible inclination to box their 
 darling's ears. 
 
 The more reason, therefore, that they should 
 restrain themselves, and not do it. For punish- 
 ment is not for the good of the punisher, but the 
 punished ; and no punishment inflicted in a moment 
 of irritation can ever be of the smallest good to 
 either side. 
 
 And this brings us to a widely discussed ques- 
 tion — whether corporal punishment should ever be 
 inflicted on children. For me, I answer decidedly. 
 Never ! 
 
 My reasons are these : To the very young — the 
 eleven-months-old infant, for instance — such a 
 chastisement is simply brutal ; to a child o'.i 
 enough to understand the humiliation of it, a whip- 
 ping can rarely do good, and may do incalculable 
 harm. Besides, the degradation rests not alone 
 with the child. A big creature beating a little one 
 is always in a position very undignified, to say the 
 least of it. Also, there is a certain difficulty in 
 making the victim comprehend that the same line 
 of conduct which his parents exercise toward him 
 is utterly forbidden him to exercise toward his 
 younger brothers and sisters. 
 
 It is possible, I grant, that there may be cases of 
 actual moral turpitude — lying, theft, and the like 
 — when nothing short of physical punishment will 
 affect the culprit, and the parent has to stand forth 
 as the stern administrator of justice ; but it must 
 

 
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 23 WIST MAIN STRIET 
 
 WEBSTER, N.Y. 14580 
 
 (716) •72-4503 
 

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 V 
 
SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 i 
 
 be clearly shown to be justice, not revenge. I 
 have known men so self-controlled, so tender, and 
 withal so unswervingly just, that the inevitable 
 whipping being inflicted, and submitted to, with a 
 mournful solemnity, the instant it was over the 
 boy's arms were around the father's neck, and both 
 wept together. But such cases are so exceptional 
 that they can not be taken as a guide. The ordi- 
 nary rule is, that when a child is bad enough to 
 deserve a whipping, the infliction of it will likely 
 only harden him ; and if he does not deserve it, his 
 whole nature will revolt in fury at the punishment. 
 
 I shall nevejT forget once seeing a small boy of 
 ten, the inheritor of his father's violent temper, 
 whom that father for some trivial fault seized and 
 struck. The little fellow raised himself on tip-toe. 
 and, doubling his small flst, with all his might ana 
 main struck back again ; a proceeding which so 
 astonished the father — who, like all tyrants, was 
 rather a coward — that he shrank back, and retired 
 from the field. He hated his boy ever after, but he 
 never more attempted to thrash him. 
 
 You will perceive I hold that, in the training of 
 the young, example is every thing, precept almost 
 nothing. Half the good advice we give, certainly 
 more than half of our scoldings, just " goes in at 
 one ear and out at the other." The continual re- 
 proach of "You naughty child!" the seldom-ful- 
 filled threat of " I'll punish you ! " come in time to 
 fftU quite harmless upon hardened ears. But a 
 ehild to whom fear is absolutely unknown -^ft« 
 tfhknown as punishment — whose naughtin^eM ii 
 
ttOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT. 
 
 H 
 
 met solely by silence, feels this silence alone to bt 
 the most terrible retribution for ill -doing. The 
 withdrawal of the parent's smile is to it like the 
 hiding of God's face. " Oh, mamma, don't look 
 so! I can't bear it. It kills me! "^is the cry of 
 such a child, falling on its bended knees in an 
 agony of contrition and tears. 
 
 It is not the preaching, not the teaching, not the 
 continual worry of " Don't do that ! " " Why 
 didn't you do this ? " which makes children what 
 we call " good '* children — ^that is, honest, truthful, 
 obedient ; troublesome, perhaps — all children are 
 troublesome — ^but guilty of no meanness, deceit- 
 fulness, or willful mischievousness. It is the constant 
 living example of those they are with. They get 
 into the habit of being " good," which makes this 
 line of conduct so natural that they never think 
 of any other. 
 
 And here we come upon another moot question 
 — whether or not there should be exacted from 
 children blind obedience ? Sometimes, perhaps ; 
 there may be cases where such is the only safety. 
 But ordinarily speaking, while, as I have said, a 
 child should be first trained into that implicit reli- 
 ance on the parent which of necessity induces 
 obedience, I think the parent ought to be exceed- 
 ingly cautious how he exacts this obedience without 
 giving a sufficient reason for it. At an incredibly 
 early age the reasoning powers of a child can be 
 developed, if the parent will take a little trouble to 
 do it ; and how very much trouble it saves after- 
 wards he will soon find out. Three words of gentlt 
 
/ 
 
 94 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 explanation — " Don't do that, my child> because, **^ 
 etc., etc., — will give him a stronger influence, a 
 completer authority over the little mind than any 
 harshly iterated, unexplained prohibitions. And 
 the good of this works both ways ; while it gives 
 the child confidence in the parent, it teaches the 
 parent his most diflicult part, to exercise authority 
 without tyranny. That barbaric dictum, " Do this, 
 because I choose it," becomes softened into the 
 Christian command, " Do this, because I wish it," 
 or the still higher law, " because it is right." I 
 have never yet known a child " naughty " enough 
 deliberately to refuse to do a thing when asked 
 to do it simply on the ground " that it was right.** 
 
 This, again, feads us to a point upon which I 
 think many, nay, most parents grievously err — the 
 system of rewards and punishments. It is like 
 bringing into innocent child-life that terrible creed 
 which makes religion consist, not in the love of 
 God, and the obeying Him because we love Him, 
 but in finding out the best and easiest way to take 
 care of ourselves — to keep out of hell and get into 
 heaven. 
 
 A principle which, put thus into plain English, 
 we start at, yet whether or not believing in it our- 
 selves, we practice it fatally with our children. 
 "Do this, and I'll give you such and such a thing." 
 " Dare to do that, and I will take from you so and 
 so, which you delight in.*' A method which, like 
 some forms of theology, may be convenient and 
 effective at the time, but which afterward is most 
 ruinous, inasmuch as it entirely abrogates that 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT. 
 
 95 
 
 doctrine upon which I base the whole mutual train- 
 ing of parents and children — the doctrine of 
 absolute right for right's sake. 
 
 For how, if you have brought up young creatures 
 on the principle of " Behave well, and you shall 
 have a sweetie*' — "Behave ill, and I'll whip you 
 or send you to bed," can you follow it out by 
 teaching your growing boy or girl to " eschew evil 
 and do good " purely for the love of good and the 
 hatred of evil ? How, above all, can you put into 
 their hearts the love of God, when in after life He 
 hides His face in so many dark ways — when His 
 teachings seems often so mysterious, nay, cruel — 
 except by saying, "Love Him, because He is 
 perfect Love ; adore Him, because He is absolute 
 Justice?" 
 
 Next to that of justice, which is, I believe, a 
 heavenly instinct with almost all young children, 
 their strongest need, and the most powerful influ- 
 ence with them, is sympathy. And this the wise 
 parent will give at all times and under all circum- 
 stances. A child accustomed to find in the mother's 
 bosom a perpetual refuge, to bring there all its 
 little woes — so small to us, to it so large — to get 
 answers to all its questions, interest in all its 
 discoveries, sympathy in all its amusements — over 
 a child so trained the influence of the mother is 
 enormous, nay^ unlimited. What a safeguard to 
 both ! not only in childhood, but in after-years. To 
 feel that she is an absolute providence to her phild 
 — that from babyhood it has clung to the simple 
 belief that mamma must be told every thing, , and 
 
$6 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 can right every thing. What an incalculable bless- ' 
 ing ! lasting till death, and after — the remembrance 
 of a mother from whom the child has never received 
 any thing but love. 
 
 Love, the root of sympathy, is the most powerful 
 agent in the bringing up of children. Not mere 
 caresses ; yet these are not to be despised, as being 
 " the outward and visible sign of an inward and 
 spiritual grace." The earliest development of our 
 nature is so entirely objective rather than subject- 
 ive, practical rather than ethical, that a kiss or a 
 cuddle at all times is a much more potent agent 
 in moral education than stern elder folk believe. 
 Love, not in word only, but in action ; love^ ever 
 at hand to remove small evils, to lessen great ones ; 
 to answer all questions, and settle all difficulties ; 
 to be a refuge in trouble, a sharer in joy, and a 
 court of appeal where there is always certainty of 
 sympathy if not redress ; this is the sort of thing 
 which gives to parents their highest, noblest influ- 
 ence — beginning with birth and ending only with 
 the grave. 
 
 An influence which alone can knit anew the 
 parental and filial tie at the time — and this time 
 comes in all lives — when it is so apt to loosen ; I 
 mean when the child, which at first had seemed a 
 mere mirror reflecting the objects placed before it, 
 develops into an individual character, sometimes a 
 character as different as possible from both father 
 and mother. » 
 
 This is a hard crisis, common though it be. 
 Fathers, who see their boys growing up without 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT. 
 
 97 
 
 a single habit or taste resembling their own; 
 mothers, who perplexedly trace in their young 
 daughters some type of womanhood totally distinct 
 from, and perhaps very distasteful to themselves, 
 are surely much to be pitied. But so are the chil- 
 dren, especially those who with their originality, 
 impetuosity, and passionate impulses after unknown 
 good, have all the ignorance of youth concerning 
 the known good — the patience, the wisdom, the 
 long-suffering, which is, or ought to be, the strong- 
 est characteristic of parents. 
 
 It has been learned by them through years of 
 sore teaching. That perpetual self-denial, which, 
 as I have said, begins at the very cradle — that 
 habit of instinctively thinkings in all things great 
 and small, not of their own pleasure, not even of 
 their child's pleasure, but of that child's ultimate 
 good, has been in all parents who really deserve the 
 name a training they can never forget. It helps 
 them now, in this difficult time which, I repeat, 
 comes soon or late in almost all families ; when 
 there is a grand clashing of rights and conflict of 
 duties, occasionally ending in a general upbreaking 
 of both. 
 
 A child's first rights are, I have said, plain 
 enough: as plain as the parents' duties. After- 
 ward they become less clear. The extent to which 
 a parent should put up with a child, or a child 
 withstand a parent, is most difficult to decide. 
 Equally difficult is it to say how far both are right 
 or both wrong in the sad season when one side 
 becomes exacting and the other careless; wheui 
 
 1 
 
98 
 
 •IRMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 despite all outward show of respect and afTection, 
 the father feels indignantly that his influence over 
 his boys is almost nothing, and the mother, with a 
 sharp pang at her heart, which she vainly tries to 
 hide, is conscious that her young daughter, who for 
 twenty years has been the delight of her eyes, prefers 
 being the delight of other eyes, and, though very 
 kind to her, finds her — ^just a little uninteresting. 
 
 The time — it must come to us all — when we cease 
 to be a sort of lesser providence to our children, 
 who cease in their turn to look up to us and lean 
 all their jtroubles upon us ; when they begin to 
 think and act for themselves, and, quite uncon- 
 sciously perhaps, put us a little on one side as old 
 and odd and out of date ; unquestionably this is a 
 bitter climax to our years of patient love. Yet it 
 is but a portion of the training — usually the highest 
 and best training we ever get — which God gives to 
 us through our children. And it is not impossible 
 to be passed through, and safely, too, on both sides ; 
 especially in families which have been brought up 
 on the principle I have before upheld — of absolute 
 right, to be followed without regard to either benefit 
 or injury, pleasure or pain. 
 
 The doctrine with which I started — of the child's 
 claims upon the parent being far stronger than 
 those of the parent upon the child — teaches us, 
 to the very last, at least tolerance. If our sons 
 resist us in choosing a career, or, still worse, in 
 choosing companions that we believe will ruin that 
 career ; if our daughters will go and fall in love 
 with the last man in the world we would have 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARKNT. 
 
 99 
 
 desired for their husbands — well, why is this? 
 These young souls were given to us apparently an 
 absolute blank page, upon which we might write 
 what we chose. We have written. It is we who 
 have formed their characters, guided their educa- 
 tion, governed their morals. Every thing they are 
 now we have or are supposed to have made them ; 
 at least, we once thought we should be able to make 
 them. If they turn out well we shall assuredly 
 take the credit of it ; if they turn out ill — what 
 say we then ? That it is their fault, or ours ? 
 
 As a general rule, if, as soon as time has enabled 
 our sons and daughters to escape out of our 
 authority, they escape out of our influence also — 
 if, having ceased to rule, we have no power to 
 guide — there must be something wrong somewhere ; 
 somebody has been to blame. Can it possibly be 
 ourselves ? 
 
 The system that prevention is better than cure 
 is infallible with little children — no one doubts 
 that. Any parents who for want of rational precau- 
 tion allowed their children to fall into the fire or 
 the water, or to do one another some serious bodily 
 harm, would be stigmatized as either wicked or 
 insane. Yet, when the young people are growing 
 up — and just at the most critical point of their 
 lives — how often do these parents shut the stable- 
 door after the steed is stolen ? 
 
 "Sir," said a shrewd old gentleman, when 
 questioned as to the character of one of his guests 
 — " Sir, do you think I would ever let a young man 
 inside my doors who was not fit to marry my 
 daughter V 
 
too 
 
 9BRMON8 OUT OP CHURCH. 
 
 And the same principle might apply to tons : 
 not only as to their marriage — which is a later 
 afiatr, and one which after all they must settle for 
 themselves — but as far as possible with regard to 
 their ordinary associates and associations. Even 
 as a wise mother makes her nursery one of the 
 cheerfullest rooms in the house, a wise father will 
 in after-years try to make his house one of the 
 pleasantest places in the world to his grown-up sons 
 —a home from which they will never care long to 
 stray, and to which they will look back, amid the 
 storms of ^he world, as a happy haven, where was 
 neither dullness nor harshness ; where the reins of 
 authority were prudently and slowly relaxed, until 
 nothing remained of the necessary absolute control 
 of childhood, save the tender reasoning — "for 
 your own good, my boy " — which boys so seldom 
 fully prize until they have it no longer. 
 
 Girls too, who may have lovers in plenty, but 
 have only one mother; perhaps some of them 
 think, or have once thought, that a mother's sym- 
 pathy and advice is the most intolerable thing 
 imaginable in love affairs, which generally between 
 parents and children are one long worry from begin- 
 ning to end. This, even when the end is happy 
 marriage. But how often do we see parents looking 
 irritably or anxiously upon a long string of unmar- 
 ried,daughters, wondering mournfully what in the 
 world is to become of them by and by. 
 
 And here I 'must give utterance to another 
 heresy. I think there are too many parents who 
 donot take half enough trouble to marry their 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARINT. 
 
 itn 
 
 children — that is, to give them fair opportunity ai 
 marriage. They are so apt to consider them exclu- 
 sively their own property, and to feel personally 
 aggrieved when they wish to strike into new ground, 
 or form new ties for themselves. Or else they are 
 weary and lazy ; life is not to them what it once 
 was — what it now is to their children ; they prefer 
 to sit at ease by the fireside ; visitors rather trouble 
 them ; they grudge their young people the society 
 they naturally crave, and in which, rationally guided, 
 they would find their best chance of choice. 
 
 Consequently our sons often make rash mistakes 
 in marriage, and our daughters not unfrequently do 
 not marry at ail. This is no dire misfortune. Any 
 thing less than a thoroughly happy marriage is to 
 women much worse than celibacy ; but still it is a 
 sad thing to parents to watch a family of girls 
 " withering on the virgin thorn," with no natural 
 outlet for their affections ; themselves a little soured 
 and their elders just a little disappointed ; for no 
 doubt there is a certain dignity in "my married 
 daughter," perhaps as being an unconscious tribute 
 from the son-in-law to the parent of his wife, never 
 attained by the mother of unappreciated old 
 maids. . 
 
 If foreign parents are to be blamed for the " ar- 
 ranged" or compelled marriages which we so 
 strongly condemn, I think we are also to blame 
 when we either deliberately stand in the way of 
 our children's happiness, or tacitly let it slip by, 
 giving them no opportunity of making a rational 
 choice in marriage. Surely it is the bounden duty 
 
lot 
 
 91RMON8 OUT OP CHURCH. 
 
 of wise elders not to ignore nature, but to accept 
 the inevitable cares of " pairing-time," when the 
 young birds, fully fledged, will desire to leave the 
 nest, however soft it is made ; when that overpower- 
 ing instinct before which the warmest filial love 
 sinks cold and colorless will assert itself, aye, and 
 guide itself too ; unless we have strength and self- 
 denial — ah, no end to parental self-denial! — to 
 forget our personal pain, and throwing ourselves 
 heartily into the young folks' place, succeed in 
 guiding it a little also. 
 
 At best this love-season is a sad one, since few 
 love affairs kre perfectly smooth and happy, and to 
 see our children suffer is sharper than to suffer our- 
 selves; especially when we can no longer help 
 [ them. While they are babies, there is a certain 
 , omnipotence about parenthood ; but when the time 
 ., comes that the child's unfailing shelter is no longer 
 the mother's heart, when the father's strong right 
 arm of guidance and protection sinks absolutely 
 , powerless — then things grow hard. 
 ^ Harder still when, :is sometimes happens, the 
 . parents' will pulls one way and the child's another. 
 One side or other must yield. It is the last and 
 sorest lesson in the parents* training, to feel that in 
 . most cases it is they who will have to yield. 
 
 I do not uphold marriages against the consent of 
 parents. I believe they never happen without 
 something a little wrong on both sides ; and when 
 they do happen, they always bring with them their 
 punishment — to both. This even when things 
 smooth down, as they most often do, But the act 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT. 
 
 105 
 
 itself remains, and the result of it — even as I heard 
 a young daughter lately protest, when her lover 
 was interdicted the house — "Why do yqu blame 
 me, mamma ? You married papa in direct 
 opposition to your parents." 
 
 And this must sometimes be done. Both the 
 laws of our country, and the honest moral sense 
 thereof, allow it. Abroad, it is more difficult. But 
 here, after the age of twenty-one, any young man 
 or woman may deliberately walk out of the father's 
 house and into the nearest church, and be married 
 to whom he or she pleases. But, I think, the only 
 permissable way of so doing lies in doing it thus 
 openly and deliberately, and after all rational sub- 
 mission and persuasion have failed. Such a mar- 
 riage can not be a happy thing ; it will be a sore 
 thing in many ways to all parties, as long as they 
 live. But it may be a necessary and not unrighteous 
 thing, and it may turn out a portion of that salutary 
 training which is given us, not by our children, but 
 by Heaven through them. 
 
 Looking at things in this light, we can better 
 learn to bear the griefs and perplexities of that 
 troublous time to which I am referring. It may 
 be lightened, if we take care to keep for our grown- 
 up sons and daughters the same key which unfail- 
 ingly unlocked the baby-heart — sympathy. A 
 broken doll — a broken heart — has not the mother's 
 heart balm for both } That is, if we still have 
 strength not to think of ourselves first, but of our 
 children. Above all, not to be vexed or irritated, 
 as we sometimes are, even at their happiness. For 
 
104 
 
 SIRMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I 
 
 t 1 
 
 1 
 
 f 
 
 under the most favorable circumstances, what son 
 ever brought to his mother a daughter who she 
 really considered worthy of him ? And what father 
 ever gave his consent to the addresses of the most 
 unexceptionable of sons-in-law without a secret 
 wish to shut the door in his face ? 
 
 Yes, there may be wounds — there must be; but 
 they will not be poisoned wounds, if the parents 
 have done their duty. And by and by the reward 
 will come, if reward ever does come as a complete 
 thing, or is ever meant to do so in this world. 
 Certainly not parental reward. If parents work 
 for that they Will fail. " Take this child and nurse 
 it /cr me '* — is God's command concerning every 
 little soul put into life. How few parents either 
 hear, believe, or obey it, He knows. 
 
 Yet the truth remains a truth still, and likewise a 
 consolation. Even as a young mother sees, and will 
 often have to see, her little one turn from her to 
 some more amusing person, who perhaps is less 
 strict, less wise, merely thinking of her or his own 
 pleasure with the child, and not the child's real 
 good ; so many a mother, well on in years, may 
 have to be taught the sad but wholesome lesson 
 that her children were not merely her children, 
 made exactly after her pattern, and bound to 
 minister solely to her comfort and carry out her 
 wishes, but were also meant to be, so to speak, the 
 children of heaven. If they continue such, living 
 out their life in righteous and honorable fashion, 
 even though it may not be her life, nor carried out 
 after her fashion — still she will accept the will of 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARSNT. 
 
 105 
 
 Heaven, and learn to be content. The mental 
 training has been gone through ; she has educated 
 her children, and they have educated her ; all may 
 not be perfectly smooth and happy, but still all is 
 well. 
 
 Every mother must be in degree a sort of Hannah. 
 She may bring her son his little coat — she may 
 come up to ^ see him yearly in the Temple; but 
 with all that she must give him to God. To 
 give our children up to God, to end with a training 
 totally different from that with which we began, to 
 be obliged to recognize our own powerlessness, 
 and learn to sit still with folded hands, resigning 
 them and their fortunes into their own hands — or 
 rather into higher hands than either theirs or ours 
 — this is no easy lesson for parents. And yet we 
 must learn it — the sharpest and the last. 
 
 No, not quite the last. As said a little girl of six 
 — whose only idea of death was of " going up 
 into the sky," and being made perfectly happy and 
 lovely and good — after being taken to see an old 
 woman of ninety-nine, " Oh, mamma, please don't 
 live to be ninety-nine. You'll be so ugly ! " 
 
 Alas, there comes a time when we know we 
 must be " ugly,'* more or less ; physically, and 
 perhaps morally too ; when the worn-out body will 
 not respond to the mind, or, may be, even the mind 
 is wearing out, so that by no possibility can we give 
 pleasure, and may give much pain, even to our best 
 beloved. 
 
 This is a hard time; nor is it wonderful that 
 parents and children sometimes succumb to it, and 
 
io6 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 the relation, once so sweet and easy, becomes a 
 heavy burden. But there are parents who make it 
 much heavier than it need to be by their extreme 
 selfishness, their utter want of recognition of the 
 fact that the most duteous child that ever was born 
 can not live forever in a sick-room or beside an 
 arm-chair. The younger life has to last long after 
 the elder one is ended. To blight it, even for a 
 time, by any unnecessary suffering, is a cruelty, 
 which not even the sternest upholder of filial duty 
 can ever justify. 
 
 I have seen parents, not intentionally selfish, 
 who, when old age came upon them, grew so 
 exacting, fretful, irritable, compelled such constant 
 s^ttendance, and insisted on such incessant sacri- 
 fices, as literally to take the life — or at least all 
 that life was worth — out of their children, whom 
 every body but themselves saw were being " killed 
 by inches," as the phrase is. Only fancy ! living 
 till one's best friends say with bated breath, " If it 
 would but come to an end " — that is, our life ; as 
 the only means of saving other and more precious 
 lives. 
 
 But this need not be — it ought never to be. A 
 little self-control at the beginning, a steady, per- 
 sistent recognition of the fact that the young are 
 young, and we are old ; they blooming, we fading ; 
 they going up the hill, and we down it — that this is 
 God's will, to be accepted placidly and cheerfully, 
 and made as little trouble about as possible, and 
 we need not fear ever becoming very "ugly." 
 Especially since, as the mother answered that little 
 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PAHEKT. 
 
 r^"»*f 
 
 girl, we need not have much fear of living till 
 ninety-nine. 
 
 But before the " ugly " time there is another, 
 which must be rather sweet than sad — the silent 
 time " between the lights " — when the labor of the 
 day is over, and the rest of the night not yet come ; 
 when the house is empty of little feet and noisy^ 
 tumultuous voices, and the parents, who once 
 thought they would have given any thing in the 
 world for quiet, now have quiet enough ; only too 
 much perhaps. All the obstreperous young flock 
 are grown up and gone away, some into married 
 homes, some into the work of the busy world, some 
 into a silenter world, where earthly work is over. 
 And these, 1 think, are the only children parents 
 keep forever. The others come and go, returning 
 to the old home merely for a little while ; but ^till 
 it is plain to see — often they allow it to be seen a 
 little too plainly — that the parents* house is their 
 real home no more. \ * 
 
 And so the two old folks — fortunate if there are 
 still two — must learn to sit together by their silent 
 fireside, remembering that they have but gone the 
 way which their parents did before them, and their 
 children must follow after ; that all is quite natural, 
 quite right, and there is nothing to complain of — 
 only, sometimes, it feels just a little hard. 
 
 Or it would feel hard had we not strength to 
 take in that consolation which I have spoken of — 
 that our children are God's children as much as 
 ours — lent, and not given. " Inasmuch as ye have 
 done it unto the least of these, ye have done it 
 unto me." 
 
.1^ 
 
 I > 
 
 1 08 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 And He never denies us the reward. It comes, 
 in a certain degree, from the very first ; for amid 
 the endless trouble they give, the almost unbear- 
 able trials to patience and temper that they bring, 
 every child brings its own blessing likewise. A 
 daily blessing — refreshing, soothing, cheering — 
 for the companionship of an ordinarily good and 
 intelligent boy or girl is often better than that of 
 any grown-up person. And the love of a child, its 
 absolute unshaken trust — when it has always met 
 trust for trust and love for love — how sweet both 
 are ! How, perfect is the delight, the perfection 
 of all human delights, of those years when parents 
 have their little flock around them, and watch them 
 grow up day by day, like the Holy Child of 
 Nazareth — " in wisdom and in stature, and in favor 
 with God and man." 
 
 There is a joy, greater than even the joy of a 
 mother over her first-born, or the exultation of a 
 man over the baby-son to whom he hopes to 
 bequeath his honor, his worldly goods, and his 
 unblemished name ; and that is, to have arrived at 
 old age and seen this child, from its own day of 
 birth to its parents' death-day, living the life they 
 would have it live, carrying out the principles they 
 taught it, and being in every way what I have 
 called " the child of heaven " — God's child as well 
 as theirs. Then all the training, bitter and sweet, 
 which they have undergone, and made their child 
 undergo — for no parents are worth the name who 
 have not strength sometimes to wring their own 
 hearts, and their child's too, for a good end — will 
 
HOW TO TRAIN UP A PARENT. /"^lO^ 
 
 t 
 
 have been softened down into permanent peace. 
 A peace enduring even amid all the trying weak- 
 nesses of old age, all the probable sufferings of the 
 failing body and worn-out mind ; lasting even to < 
 the supreme moment, when the aged, dying head 
 rests on the still young breast, and the child kisses 
 the closed eyes, which, through all anxiety, pain, 
 even displeasure, never lost their look of love — 
 never till now. And now it is all ended. No, not 
 ended — God forbid. 
 
 There was a parent I knew — one who had been 
 both father and mother to his children (as some 
 fathers can be, and are, thank God !) for nearly half 
 a century. Passing away, in the ripe perfectness 
 of a most noble life, he was h^ard to whisper 
 feebly, " Adieu, ma fiUe ! " She sobbed out, " Non, 
 non, mon-p^re ! " He lifted himself up in the 
 bed, and with the old gleam in his eyes, the old 
 force in his voice, to an extent of which those pre- 
 sent had hardly believed a dying man capable, 
 exclaimed, " Non, non. Pas adieu ! — Au revoir ! " 
 
 And surely if there are any meetings, any reunions 
 granted in the other world, they will be granted to 
 parents and children. 
 
 " Train up a parent in the way he should go " 
 was the queer title I gave to this sermon. You 
 may have begun it with a smile ; perhaps you 
 will have ended it, as I do, with something more 
 like a tear. That is just what I meant. Farewell. 
 
p 
 
 i^ecmon iV. 
 
 BENEVOLENCE-OR BENEFICENCE? 
 
/T. 
 
 IV. 
 
 BENEVOLENCE— OR BENEFICENCES 
 
 " I DO believe that one half the so-called * charity ' 
 going is, in its results, worse than an error — an 
 actual crime. Suppose you were to write an essay 
 upon ' The Crime of Benevolence ! * " 
 
 The arch-heretic who suggested this had been 
 spurred on thereto by a recent visit to a very 
 " benevolent " parish, probably one of the richest 
 and most charitable parishes in Great Britain. It 
 possessed — possesses still, for aught I know — 
 within a very moderate area, not too densely 
 populated, three churches, one chapel, and two 
 iron rooms for mission services. It had clothing 
 clubs, coal clubs, blanket clubs, provident and 
 work societies. At its parish school an admirable 
 education could be got for threepence a week. 
 Its penny readings for the men, its mothers'- 
 meetings for the women, gave every opportunity 
 of mental and moral improvement to that class 
 which we patronizingly term " our poorer brethren." 
 In short, every thing was done that could be done 
 to make poverty unnecessary and vice impos- 
 sible. 
 
 Yet, my informant confessed, both abounded. 
 Public-houses stared you in the face at every 
 
 8 xxj 
 
li 
 
 "4 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 \l 
 
 corner, and were always full — of women as well as 
 men. Consequently wretched homes, neglected 
 children, young women, whom no wise mistress of 
 a house ever thought of taking into her service, 
 middle-aged women, whom to employ as laund- 
 resses, seamstresses, or even charwomen was hope- 
 less : their characters were so bad. Even the 
 long-suffering clergymen's wives, and district 
 visitors, trying continually to do good, were as 
 continually baffled. Nobody, having once employed 
 the objects of their hopeless compassion, ever did 
 it again. Cjharity these people were always open 
 to receive, but the best kind of charity — work — it 
 was useless to give, if the giver wished it to be any 
 thing better than a disguised form of almsgiving. 
 And yet this place was an El Dorado of benevo- 
 lence; where the poor not only got their daily 
 bread, but got it buttered on both sides. An oppor- 
 tune death or fortunate accident would bring to 
 the spot half-a-dozen clergymen with prayers and 
 purses; half-a-dozen ladies following with tracts 
 and clothes; until the sufferers, becoming quite 
 important people, realized fully the advantage of 
 being " afflicted," and continuing to be. One story 
 I heard of a laborer's household, which, deprived 
 suddenly of its drunken head, found itself " assisted" 
 so much, that, when it went to church next Sunday 
 in its new clothes, a shrewd neighbor declared it 
 reminded her of Mrs. Hofland's tale, " The Clergy- 
 man's Widow, ancl her Young Family." And the 
 youngest child being met afterward "Yes, ma'am," 
 said the mother, in a whining tone, " I've just been 
 
 
BENIYOLKNCI'-^R BENIFICSNCI ? 
 
 "$ 
 
 taking Bobby to the doctor, and he orders hun 
 wine," with a glance that, meeting no response, 
 dropped immediately. But the habit of begging 
 was too strong to be resisted. " Do you think, 
 ma'am," with an additional whine of humility, 
 " you've got such a thing as a pot of strawberry 
 jam for Bobby to take his physic in ? " 
 
 It is these sort of people who harden one's heart, 
 and incline one to rank our benevolent friends 
 with two other classes, equally injurious — I was 
 going to write obnoxious — the folk who pride 
 themselves on the fact that, if they have a fault, it 
 is being too "tender-hearted;" and those weak 
 fools, the scourge and torment of society, who are 
 politely said to be " nobody's enemy but their own." 
 
 To call benevolence a crime ! To say that be- 
 nevolent people actually injure those they attempt 
 to aid ! It seems a curious paradox ; but does not 
 experience prove it to be very near the truth? 
 And why ? 
 
 This question is best answered ' by another — 
 What is benevolence ? Literally, the word means 
 " wishing well ; " and I suppose we must take for 
 granted that all benevolence realLy wishes well to 
 its object : that is, it would rather do good than 
 not, provided the thing costs little trouble. Beyond 
 that — well, let any one of us try honestly, as honest- 
 ly as if we all lived in the Palace of Truth, to 
 analyze the motive of his next act of charity : say 
 the next sixpence he gives to a street-beggar. 
 
 Why does he give it ? First, probably, to save 
 himself pain. It is decidedly painful to look upon 
 
ii6 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 distress, and troublesome to be followed down the 
 street with whining petitions for aid. Also, a kind 
 action gratifies our self-love, and makes us generally 
 comfortable ; and to be thanked is more than com- 
 fortable — agreeable. So he extracts the coin from 
 his pocket, throws it to the beggar, and goes his 
 way ; but of the various complex motives of this 
 benevolent action, almost all concern, not the 
 object of it, but his own self. Except, indeed, the 
 natural motive of all benevolence, for which we 
 ought in justice to give all benevolent people the 
 credit, a general kindly feeling to their species, 
 and a wish to benefit them rather than do them 
 harm. But the question — ^just as I argued in rela- 
 tion to self-sacrifice — whether the important 
 element in a gift is the advantage of the donor or 
 the recipient, does not occur to them. 
 
 Not when the good deed is private and small, 
 like the eleemosynary sixpence referred to; still 
 less when the benevolence is public : say, a church 
 collection when the churchwarden, our neighbor 
 and friend, is holding the plate ; or a subscription 
 to a charity, in which every body will see our 
 name, and the sum appended thereto. 
 
 Now I do not mean to be severe upon the many 
 rich people in rich England, whose purses are 
 always open to public or private charity. They 
 do their duty. Society expects it of them, and they 
 know it does. Besides, they really like to do 
 good, and the easiest way of doing it is through 
 their pockets. Any other way takes such a world 
 of trouble ; and they dislike trouble — most people 
 
BENEVOLENCE — OR BENEflCENCE ? 
 
 '«; 
 
 do. They give — to any body or any thing — of what 
 costs them nothing, and which they never miss. 
 They enjoy all the credit of doing a generous 
 action, and the burden of really doing it falls upon 
 other people. What matter ? they argue ; it is only 
 division of labor. So others do the work, and 
 they the magnificence. It is so easy to be magnifi- 
 cent, when one is either a spendthrift or a million- 
 aire. The difference looks very small; only a 
 word, or a few letters in a word ; yet if we examine 
 it, it is enormous. It is the difference between 
 Benevolence and Beneficence. 
 
 An extravagant person may be as extravagant 
 in his charities as he is in his luxuries; for charity 
 is, in truth, a sort of luxury. Many a man called 
 benevolent is simply wasteful, and the cause of 
 waste in others ; for to give away money without 
 considering how far the recipient has a right to 
 it, or will benefit by it, is no more an act of benevo- 
 lence than is throwing down a handful of coppers 
 to be scrambled for in the street. 
 
 Another of the most dangerous and difficult sort 
 of benevolent people are those who are always 
 willing to do every thing for every body, who go 
 about with a long string of prot^gis^ whom they are 
 ready to foist upon us on the smallest excuse. 
 These general accepters and protectors of waifs 
 and strays are very troublesome folk. In the first 
 place, because so evenly is desert and deserving 
 apportioned, even in this life, that I believe few 
 people remain waifs and strays permanently with- 
 out there being some inherent cause for that 
 
■ 
 
 iHi: 
 
 Its 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 condition. Trouble comes alike to all ; but some 
 deserve it — others do not. Some rise out of it 
 — have the faculty to rise out of it ; others never 
 rise, and apparently have no care or wish to rise. 
 And your carelessly benevolent people refuse to 
 draw the distinction. Even if you draw it for 
 them, they meet you with an avalanche of texts, 
 such as " He maketh His sun to shine upon the just 
 and the unjust," etc., etc. 
 
 They forget that they are not Providence. Be- 
 sides, according to them, their proUg^s are never 
 bad, only unfortunate. Their geese are always 
 swans — in their eyes, simply because they patronize 
 them. Patronage is so pleasant, and to be followed 
 by a little crowd of admirers is so soothing to the 
 benevolent mind. So they annoy us unbenevolent 
 people at their pleasure, by supplying the best of 
 characters to incompetent servants, offering as 
 candidates for important situations persons who 
 have no recommendation whatever for the position, 
 except the need of it, and so on. These are they 
 who entreat us to get published feeble manuscripts 
 on the feebler plea that the authors " wish to add 
 a little to their income," or have experienced re- 
 verses, or would like to earn something for a 
 benevolent purpose. As if these were any reasons 
 for trying to do what they can not do, or for othei's 
 aiding them therein ; since, as a rule, good work 
 deserves good pay, and will get it ; bad work should 
 get nothing, however great the need of the doer of 
 it. 
 
 But our short-sighted, kindly meaning friends 
 
BENEVOLENCE — OR BENEFICENCE ? 
 
 119 
 
 can not see this. They still keep urging us to 
 employ unsuitable servants, who want our place 
 so badly; to send our children to a particular 
 school, or to deal at some special shop, not because 
 it is the best school or the best shop, but because 
 " the poor things are so ill off, you see ; it is quite 
 a charity." 
 
 Why are they so ill off? Is there not a cause 
 for it ? Accidental misfortune will happen to all ; 
 but, as I have said, and the observation of life 
 forces me to believe it more firmly every year, no 
 one ever remains unfortunate without there being, 
 generally speaking, some recondite reason, some 
 ** screw loose " somewhere, accounting for the fact. 
 It may be a hard saying, but I fear it is only too 
 true, that nobody ever becomes a permanent " object 
 of charity " without having ceased to d -"serve it. 
 
 This rule especially applies to the large class of 
 which all of us know so many, who are said to live 
 "from hand to mouth,*' the mouth being usually 
 their own, and the hand that of their friends ; or 
 rather the acquaintances who successively acquire 
 and renounce the title. 
 
 " Neither a borrower nor a lender be, 
 For debt oft loses both itself and friend." 
 
 Itself, because the borrower seldom becomes such 
 till he is in circumstances which make repayment 
 at least doubtful ; the friend, because two friends 
 who have been placed in that position together 
 rarely recover the old relation entirely. A gift, 
 out and out, is often a real pleasure, an exceeding 
 
 I 
 
 T 
 
 i 
 
'; :i 
 
 1 20 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 boon ; but a loan, if ever repaid, or very long of 
 repayment, always places both parties in a false 
 position. There is a sense of humiliation on the 
 one side, of being made use of on the other, which 
 creates reserve at any rate, even between sincere 
 friends ; and if there has been in the transaction 
 the slightest insincerity, is fatal in its results. You 
 pity, you pardon ; you regret, you apologize ; but 
 you two are never quite as you were before. Of 
 course there is no rule without exceptions ; still, 
 ordinarily speaking, they are the wisest people 
 who follow Polonius's advice, and as long as 
 possible preserve themselves from being either 
 borrowers or lenders. 
 
 But there is a form of borrowing and lending 
 which becomes, on both sides, an error so great as 
 to be little short of an actual crime : in the borrow- 
 er, who borrows without hope or intention of 
 repayment ; in the lender, who does what he is 
 asked to do from no sense of kindness or justice, 
 or even charity, but just " to get rid of the fellow," 
 or from being himself " a fellow that can't say No." 
 Worse sometimes, a fellow who from some business 
 or worldly reason concerning the borrower and 
 himself, is afraid of the consequences of saying 
 No. Therefore he allows himself to pay a sort of 
 black -mail to the unworthy levier thereof; hating 
 and grudging, but still paying it, and flattering him- 
 self that it looks like benevolence. 
 
 The cowardice of such conduct is only equaled 
 by its folly. If my friend, so-called, writes to me 
 again and again, " lend me Ave pounds to save me 
 
BENEVOLENCE — OR BENEFICENCE ? 
 
 i2i 
 
 from ruin," the only rational reply is, " If only five 
 pounds stands between you and ruin, you had better 
 be ruined, and have done with it." To be perpetu- • 
 ally stopping up a hole, which yawns the next day 
 wider than ever, is the act, not of generosity but ' 
 of stupidity. Many a man has gone to ruin, the 
 real ruin he first made a pretense of, because some 
 weak, foolish relative or friend to whom he applied 
 for money had not the sense to refuse it at once ; 
 absolutely, remorselessly, at all cost of pain and 
 wounded feeling between himself and his would-be 
 debtor. Better a passing coolness than an enmity 
 for life. 
 
 They who, for any of the motives here named — 
 motives, you will observe, which affect their own 
 personality more than the borrower's — continue 
 lending to unfortunate people, simply because they 
 are unfortunate, are guilty on three counts : first, 
 toward themselves, for a pretense of generosity 
 which is only egotistic selfishness ; secondly, toward 
 the person they attempt to benefit, whom they do 
 not benefit, but rather injure ; thirdly, toward 
 other and worthier persons, whom they lose the 
 power of helping, by having helped unworthy 
 ones. 
 
 For the really deserving neither beg nor borrow 
 — they suffer silently ; while the loud-complaining, 
 ever-greedy applicants for aid always get the best 
 of what charity is going. I often think that much 
 of the benevolence in this world is poured out like 
 pig-wash ; the pig who makes most noise, or who 
 succeeds in getting his two feet in the trough while 
 
laa 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 the others have but one, is the animal who swallows 
 most and fattens fastest. 
 
 That before-mentioned sixpence thrown to a 
 mendicant, only to be converted into gin or beer, 
 that five pounds lent to a needy acquaintance, who 
 always has been needy and always will be, because 
 he has not the slightest sense of the value of money, 
 nor the least conscience in obtaining it or spending 
 it ; these, with a hundred similar cases, are speci- 
 mens of what I call the crime of benevolence. 
 The donors err, not only in what they do, but in 
 what they leave undone. They may be benevolent 
 in vague intention, but of true beneficence they 
 have not the slightest idea. 
 
 The difference is this : Benevolence consists in 
 mere kind feeling ; doing good certainly sometimes, 
 but in a vague and careless way, and more for its 
 own pleasure than for another's benefit ; giving, 
 because to give is agreeable, but taking little pains 
 to ascertain what has been the result of the gift. 
 The donor has done his part, and that is enough. 
 It may be another heresy, but I am afraid the 
 reason that our charitable institutions are so 
 numerous, and- our subscription-lists so easy to fill 
 up, is because, of all modes of benevolence, giving 
 of money is the one which involves least trouble. 
 
 But beneficence does cost trouble. It requires 
 in the individual some rather rare qualities ; powers 
 of administration and patient investigation ; clear 
 judgment and capJacity for work; a kind heart, and 
 a cool head — aye, and a hard head, too. The power 
 of saying No, and the will to say it, with a steady, 
 
BENEVOLENCE — OR BENEFICENCE ? 
 
 123 
 
 Strong, unvarying justice, are as necessary as quick 
 sympathy and ready help. 
 
 Though, in the main, true beneficence aims less 
 at helping people than at enabling them to help 
 themselves, there will always be in the world a 
 large amount of those who can not possibly help 
 themselves : the sick, the aged, the young, the 
 hopelessly feeble and incapable. It is the more 
 necessary that any body who can do any thing 
 should be left to do it, or taught to do it, for Bene- 
 ficence is always more of a teacher than a preacher. 
 She would be more prone to set up a cookery-school 
 than a soup-kitchen ; and would consider the 
 building of a row of workmen's cottages, well- 
 arranged, well-drained, well-ventilated, of rather 
 more importance than the erection of the finest 
 church imaginable. 
 
 I think it is an open question how far real bene- 
 ficence has to do with charity, /. e.f giving of money, 
 at all. Secondarily, of course, it must, but primarily. 
 I was once talking with a lady whose name is 
 sufficiently well known, though I will not give it 
 here, and who has done more good in ameliorating 
 the condition of the London poor than all the 
 philanthropists, religious and otherwise, who have 
 flooded the metropolis with their bounty, and left 
 it, people say, especially at the East-end, rather 
 worse than they found it — in a condition of expect- 
 ant pauperism, which is forever crying, " Give, 
 give, give." Now this lady told me that during all 
 the years of her dealings with the poor — the very 
 poor — whom she has slowly lifted from the con- 
 
124 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 dition of savages, the savagery of London courts 
 and alleys, into intelligent human beings — during 
 all these years, she said, she had never given, in 
 mere charity, one single shilling. Fair payment 
 for fair work was the principle she invariably went 
 upon. She planned houses, with every comfort 
 that a working man's family could require, but she 
 exacted from her tenants the weekly rent, and 
 when they did not pay she turned them out ; she 
 found employment for all that would do it, but if 
 not done it was not paid for ; she assisted the 
 women in their efforts to become good housewives, 
 taught them to cook, to sew, to make clothes ; she 
 went from house to house, leaving behind her plenty 
 of good advice and kindly sympathy, but never 
 either a tract or a half-penny. She took endless 
 trouble, ran no end of risks, and exerted an influ- 
 ence, almost miraculous, over her rough community; 
 but from first to last, she said, her experience was 
 this, " Help the poor to help themselves. Give 
 them advice, instruction, work — mixed with plenty 
 of sympathy. Sometimes, in very hard cases, 
 money's worth, such as clothes or food, but never 
 under any circumstances give them money.'* 
 
 Yet this lady is one of the very few philanthropists 
 who have really met their reward, and seen the 
 work of their hands prosper. Her little kingdom, 
 which she rules with a kindly though most firm 
 hand, is full of subjects who not only obey but 
 love her. She enters fearlessly into courts and 
 alleys of the lowest class, known hitherto only to 
 the inspector of nuisances and the police detective ; 
 
 •V, 
 
BENEVOLENCE — OR BENEFICENCE ? 
 
 "5 
 
 she commences her reforms, and by and by the 
 wild inhabitants are found as decent folk, living in 
 decent dwellings, amenable to law, common-sense, 
 and kindly feeling. 
 
 Moreover, she succeeds in what almost all 
 charities fail in — she actually makes it pay. She 
 has gained a small percentage on the money em- 
 ployed, of which she has been so long the wise 
 administrator. And this fact is confirmatory of 
 another axiom of hers, proved by her own experi- 
 ence, that no charity effects so much permanent 
 good as one which is, or soon can be made, self- 
 supporting. In short, such is the necessary mutual 
 relation between the helped and the helpers, the 
 poor and the rich, that the former cease to value 
 what they can get for nothing, and the latter soon 
 find that while they think they are assisting the 
 poor, they are only sinking them from honest in- 
 dependence to weak dependence, from mere poverty 
 into absolute pauperdom. 
 
 I can not more clearly describe what I mean by 
 benevolence and beneficence than by putting 
 this lady's work — the work of a lifetime — side by 
 side with that in the " charitable " parish I have 
 mentioned — also anonymously — where money was 
 poured out like water, and the needy had but to 
 ask and to have. Here, on the contrary, nothing 
 was done from charity, every thing from justice : 
 the common justice between man and man, which 
 makes the laborer worthy of his hire, the rent-payer 
 deserving of a decent house to live in — as good a 
 house of its kind for a mechanic as for a gentleman ; 
 
196 
 
 81RM0NS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 |i ' 
 
 but at the same time exacting from the poor man, 
 in proportion to his means, precisely the same 
 honesty, sobriety, and conscientiousness that is 
 exacted in the class above him. 
 
 Until " gentlefolk " believe this, and cease to 
 regard their servants, clerks, etc., as inferior beings, 
 from whom nothing is to be expected but a hand- 
 to-hand struggle between rich and poor, employer 
 and employed, as to who shall have the best of it ; 
 until they give up the system of treating their de- 
 pendents as mere machines, out of whom as much 
 work is to ^be got as possible*; or as brute beasts, 
 for whom no training answers but whipping or 
 feeding, and to whom they may throw their charity 
 as they would throw a bone to a dog, with as little 
 care for the result of it ; until this state of things 
 ends, there must be always that secret enmity 
 between class and class, that half-concealed, half- 
 acknowledged diFerence in morals, feelings and 
 principles, which constitutes the main difficulty of 
 those who would fain have but one law of right for 
 all, and look upon every man who fulfilled it as " a 
 man and a brothpr." 
 
 There is another phase of the crime of benevo- 
 lence, unconnected with money, which ought not 
 to be passed over : that is the leniency with which 
 some very well-disposed people get to look on 
 moral turpitude. Some do it through mere laziness 
 or indifference. " It is not my business ; why 
 should I give myself any trouble about it ? " So 
 they shut their eyes to wickedness — in their rich 
 neighbor, whom they ask to dinner, though th«y 
 
BENEVOLINCE — OR BENEFICENCE ? 
 
 197 
 
 are not quite sure he was too honest in that business 
 transaction of last week ; in their poor domestic—^ 
 say, their coachman — who they know gets drunk 
 every Saturday night and beats his wife ; but the 
 lodge is too far off to hear her cries, and, the 
 carriage not being out on Sundays, John can not 
 drive his master into a ditch. So, since John is a 
 good servant, and knows his business well, the 
 master ignores the whole matter of the drunken- 
 ness ; to notice it would be so very inconvenient. 
 And Mr. Blank, whose acquaintance it would be 
 so awkward to give up, is smiled upon blandly ; 
 until some day he happens to be taken up for 
 forgery. 
 
 Others take their stand upon the divine saying, 
 " I came not to call the righteous but sinners to re- 
 pentance ; " and obeying it in their imperfect, finite 
 way, gradually cease to take interest in any except 
 sinners. All the drunkards of the parish, the un- 
 wived mothers, the scapegrace children, come to 
 them, and by canting phrases of oft-repeated con- 
 trition, and voluble promises of never fulfilled 
 amendment, coax out of them the benefits that 
 honest people never get. The greater the sinner 
 the greater the saint, is either really or ostensibly 
 their permanent creed. They take up with all the 
 scamps in the parish, while the respectable work- 
 ing man — thank Heaven, there is still many a one 
 in England, as honorable as any working gentle- 
 man, and often as true a gentleman at heart ! — has 
 with them no chance at all. 
 
 True, ..these so-called Christians have always 
 
laS 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 i 1 
 
 r' 
 
 plenty of arguments on their side ; especially the 
 parable of the Prodigal Son, and the "joy in 
 heaven over one sinner that repenteth." But they 
 forget that the prodigal when his father met him 
 was no longer a prodigal : he had forsaken his evil 
 ways, never to return to them more. Also, that the 
 " joy " is supposed to be over a repentant sinner, 
 not a sinner vrho still remains in sin. Christ, in 
 His divinest charity, never does more for offenders 
 than to pardon them, until they cease to offend. 
 " Go,'* He says ; " go and sin no more. Jest a worse 
 thing happen unto thee." But for those who con- 
 tinue to sin, there is, even according to the quoters 
 of Holy Writ — often so egregiously twisted and 
 misapplied — a worse thing ; even as in the parable 
 of the fig-tree : " Cut it down ; why cumberetl; it 
 the ground ? " And sometimes the kindest, wisest, 
 most Christian act is — to let it be cut down. 
 
 For instance, every one who gives money to a 
 confirmed drunkard or profligate, thereby en- 
 couraging him in his vices ; every one who, for any 
 reason, however compassionate, speaks what is 
 called " a good word " for a person whom he knows 
 to be bad, condones sin, and is guilty of the result 
 that follows. His lazy laxity allows these cum- 
 berers of the ground to take the life from whole- 
 some trees. And, even as a man who sits with his 
 hands folded, and allows his humble neighbors to 
 wallow in dirt like pigs, saying, " I can't help it ; it 
 is not my affair," may one day have to see ghastly 
 fever, bred in those back slums, stalk in at his own 
 front door, and carry off his best-beloved chil^ ; so 
 
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BBNBVOLBNCB— OP BBNBFICBNCE ? 
 
 139 
 
 lit 
 
 $0 
 
 any one who laughs at error as mere " folly," and 
 puts a plaster upon ugly sin, connives dangerously 
 at both. He has shirked what was unpleasant ; he 
 has been too lazy to take trouble ; he has done his 
 benevolence in the easiest way. He may yet have 
 to pay for his mistaken mercy by being ground 
 under the ever -moving wheel of an unerring 
 justice ; justice which, though it does not always 
 reward, assuredly knows the way to punish. 
 
 He is punished, this pseudo-benevolent person. 
 He is eaten up by grasping, needy, ravenous de- 
 pendents. He has often to stand helplessly by 
 and watch the widening spread of evils which he 
 might have stepped at once if he had only had the 
 courage to take hold of vice and slay it with a 
 strong, firm hand. He thinks himself bitterly 
 wronged, and accuses the world of shameful in- 
 gratitude ; it does not strike him that the world 
 really owes him nothing, since what he did was 
 done to please himself. 
 
 This especially applies to certain people, who for 
 a time may gain much outside credit, which is 
 indeed the thing they most desire — those who de- 
 light in what they call " magnificence." They it is 
 who always give a cabman half-a-crown when a 
 shilling is his right fare; who distribute money 
 right and left in gratuities to servants ; who always 
 make the handsomest of presents (especially to 
 their rich friends,) and like to head every sub- 
 scription list far above the rest. They never think 
 that the cabman they overpay will grumble at the 
 next person who pays him his right fare and no 
 
130 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 more ; that nothing so degrades or even offends a 
 good servant as to be requited in money for a 
 siwtple kindness ; that the worth of a gift is noth- 
 in^lr-the spirit of it every thing ; and that to see 
 your neighbor's name down in a charity-list for a 
 \s^%pr sum than either he or you can afford, is much 
 mar(B apt to make you close your purse strings than 
 optEi them. 
 
 Your " magnificent " people are in some things 
 worse than the merely lavish, who give recklessly 
 of that which costs them nothing ; they give de- 
 liberately,' for the mere credit of giving, and for 
 thoir own glorification. The praise of men is 
 mostly their sole aim. That " cup of cold water " 
 wj^ich the Divine Master named so tenderly would 
 b^: a« drink quite too mean, too discreditable (to 
 themselves) to offer unto any body. It must be 
 the b«st of wine, in a jeweled goblet, or must not 
 b««oifered at all. 
 
 Their notions of a present, too, and they give a 
 g^ed many of them, is the handsomest thing that 
 nvoney can purchase. A much handsomer thing 
 thi^i^ any body eise has given, and something that 
 will make people cry out, "Whose gift is that? 
 What a very generous person he must be!" But 
 tK& suitableness of the present, and whether the 
 recipient needed it or wished for it, is quite another 
 thing, And unless the said recipient, whether pleas- 
 ed or not, pretends to be so, and overwhelms him 
 wJAh gratitude and delight, our " magnificent " 
 friend is exceedingly offended. 
 
 Speaking, of this matter of giving presents, it i» 
 
BENEVOLENCE — OK BBNEFICBNCI ? 
 
 131 
 
 curious how few V now how to bestow or to accept 
 one, whether it be a kindly benefaction, from him 
 who does not need to him who does, or a cadeau^ 
 as the French term it, in their nice distinction of 
 language, a " keepsake " between two people who 
 are equals, if not friends. 
 
 I remember being much astonished (it was in the 
 simple days of youth, when a good deal astonished 
 one that does not astonish now) by hearing a con- 
 rersation between a husband and wife, who had 
 just received a present from a near relative whom 
 they did not very much care for. They criticised 
 it, they found fault with it ; they speculated as to 
 what was the person's intention in sending it, and 
 what was to be sent back in return. 
 
 " Of course we must send something, and im- 
 mediately," said the gentleman, who was of the 
 " magnificent " order ; " I wish we could find out 
 exactly what it cost, and then we could give them 
 back one worth as much and a little over." *' Just 
 as much will do, I think, my dear," added the wife, 
 who, like most wives of " magnificent " men, was 
 obliged to think of economy. " But we must give 
 something; they will expect it." 
 
 This expecting something in return for a present 
 is surely one of the meanest of feelings ; yet it is at 
 the root of half the gifts given. Marriage, christen- 
 ing, birthday presents are made, not because people 
 wish to give, but because they think they ought, 
 and that other people will expect it of them. 
 Gifts, irksome to receive, and sometimes actually 
 wrung to offer, as either draining purses already too 
 
i ■ 
 
 132 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 slender, or irritating those who can afford it by a 
 kind of feeling that as every body knows they can 
 afford it, they must give more than any body else. 
 If the " happy pair " who exhibit a roomful of such 
 offerings could know all that they subject their 
 friends to, or their friends foolishly subject them- 
 selves to, in this matter, they would turn with dis- 
 gust from most of the presents they receive. I am 
 not sure that it is not the truest kindness as well as 
 wisdom to say point-blank, "I never give any 
 thing to any body." 
 
 Yet a gift; is a pleasant thing, rightly given ; most 
 pleasant and dear and sacred, whether its value be 
 much or little, if only it is offered with the heart, 
 and chosen from the heart — chosen with care and 
 pains, and a tender anxiety that it should be ex- 
 actly the thing we liked and wanted. It is so 
 sweet to be remembered and taken trouble over, 
 even in the smallest things. But gifts carelessly 
 given — merely to gratify a love of giving, which 
 some people have even to a disease — given without 
 thought of whether they will be useful or not, 
 whether the receiver will care for them or not, are, 
 between friends, often a great vexation; between 
 strangers, or any who are not exactly equals, a 
 burden of obligation simply intolerable. 
 
 The child, with its innocent sudden kiss, and its 
 earnest, "Thank you so much !" for a doll's sash, 
 or a penny toy, ^/hich it really wanted, comes much 
 nearer the true theory of giving and receiving than 
 hundreds of people who weary themselves in choos- 
 ing handsome presents, or in returning equivalents 
 
BENEVOLENCE — OR BENEFICENCE ! 
 
 133 
 
 for the same — presents which, the instant after 
 they are made, become, like stopped checks, 
 "of no value to any body," not even to the 
 possessor. 
 
 These — like the charity which is indifferent to 
 error, and ready to overlook every sin that is not 
 personally inconvenient to itself, as well as the 
 generosity which looks not to the advantage of its 
 object, but its own — these three may all go under 
 the head of that sort of benevolence which, if not 
 an actual crime, is a very great mistake and an 
 egregious folly. 
 
 Why.? 
 
 Here, again, we come to the root of things. 
 Why.? Because it is content with wishing well, 
 instead of doing well. Because whatever good it 
 does is done, not for duty's sake, for righteous- 
 ness' sake, for God's sake, but merely for its own 
 sake ; to gratify its vanity, to ease its conscience, 
 to heal up its wounded self-esteem with the smooth 
 cataplasm of gratitude. 
 
 But true beneficence never looks for gratitude 
 at all. What it does is not done with a view to 
 itself, but solely for the sake of that other whom 
 it desires to benefit ; and above all for His sake 
 who is the source of all charity. . There is a deep 
 truth in the passionate pleading of the Irish beggar : 
 " Shure, sir, ye'll do it ; not for the love o' me — 
 for the love o' God." Therefore real beneficence, 
 which does all its good deeds for the love of God, 
 is neither vainglorious nor exacting; not easily 
 wounded, and never offended. It goes straight on, 
 
134 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 
 1 , 
 
 r ■ 
 
 ii 
 
 doing what it believes to be right and best, without 
 any reference to what people may say of it, and 
 whether the recipients of its bounty are grateful 
 or not. 
 
 A word about gratitude, which some people 
 seem to think the natural result and reward of be- 
 nevolence — to follow as unerringly as day follows 
 night. Alas ! they had much better say as night 
 follows day ; for kindly deeds as often end in dark- 
 ness as in light — at least what seems like darkness 
 to our human eyes. Unless benevolence, like 
 virtue, cah be its own reward, it must often rest 
 satisfied with no reward at all. 
 
 What matter ? Of course, gratitude is a wel- 
 come thing ; in this weary world a most refreshing 
 thing; but it is not an indispensable thing. It 
 warms the heart and cheers the spirit, but it has 
 nothing to with either benevolence or beneficence, 
 nor is it the origin or end of either. The wisest 
 people are they who, though happy to get thanks, 
 never expect them, and can do without them. 
 Such may be deceived and disappointed but they 
 are never embittered ; because their motive lay 
 deeper, and is higher than anything belonging to 
 this world. The truly benevolent man is he who, 
 looking on all his charities, great or small, says only 
 — in devout repetition of his Master's words — " I 
 have finished the work which Thou gavest me to 
 do," — not that 'Which I gave myself to do, and not 
 that which I did for myself, but that which Thou 
 gavest me and I have done for Thee, To such the 
 
BENEVOLENCE — OR BENEFICENCE ? 
 
 135 
 
 answer comes, even as in Lowell's touching ballad 
 of"SirLaunfal:" 
 
 " The Holy Supper is kept indeed • Jjt 
 
 In what we share with another's need ; 
 Not what we give, but what we share, 
 For the gift without the giver is bare ; 
 Who gives himself with his alms, feeds three : 
 Himself — his hungering neighbor — and MB." 
 
# 
 
Sbttmm V* 
 
 MY BROTHER'S KEEPER. 
 
/"^ 
 
 V. 
 
 MY BROTHER^S KEEPER. 
 
 Are we, or are we not — our brother's keeper? 
 That is, to what extent are we responsible for those 
 beneath us, or dependent upon us, or connected 
 with us by any link which gives us power with 
 regard to them or influence over them ? 
 
 This is, I think, the point at issue between those 
 who are called philanthropists, and those others 
 — well, I suppose no one would voluntarily dub 
 himself misanthropist — ^but those who refuse to 
 " bother " themselves with their brother's affairs ; 
 to whom the question, " Who is my neighbor ? " is 
 as indifferent as the naturally succeeding one, 
 " What have I to do for him ? " In fact, people 
 who, though they would be much offended if you 
 said so, are of the same type as the most respect- 
 able priest and Levite who preceded the good 
 Samaritan in passing by him who "fell among 
 thieves." 
 
 A parable often misapplied, since many of the 
 waylaid sufferers for whom our sympathy is de- 
 manded are very often thieves themselves: the 
 weak, the selfish, the unprincipled ; who live by 
 robbing honest people, and by laying on others the 
 burden of their self-created woes. But it is not of 
 
 139 
 
I40 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 them I have now to speak, but of those designated 
 by the word " broLh^r." 
 
 In the first place, who is our brother ? 
 
 There are those who will tell us it is the negro- - 
 the South Sea Islander — the " heathen Chinee ; " 
 whom, as the first of moral duties, we must try to 
 convert — (of course, to our own special form of 
 Christianity, any other being worse than none, 
 which a little complicates matters). Nevertheless, 
 it must be done. And conversion gained, all else 
 will follow. 
 
 Be it so. Let those go proselyting who feel 
 themselves thereto called. There is work enough 
 in the world for all; innumerable "brothers " — and 
 very few who are fit, in any sense, to be their 
 " keepers." But let not this interesting black or 
 brown brother far away shut out from our sight the 
 white brother who stands at our very door. Stand, 
 did I say ? He crawls — he grovels — not only out- 
 side, but actually within our doors. We can 
 scarcely take a step without treading upon him — 
 even though we may shut our eyes to the sight of 
 him. 
 
 And we do shut our eyes, either intentionally or 
 unintentionally. We prefer looking a long way off 
 — upon objects picturesque and heroic. The 
 " noble savage " running wild in his " native 
 woods " is a much more interesting subject of civi- 
 lization than Billy the washerwoman's boy, es- 
 pecially when 'entering our family as William the 
 boy in buttons. Yet, perhaps, he no less needs 
 the care, and could be developed into at least as 
 
MY BROTHER S iCEEPBR. 
 
 HJ 
 
 good a Christian, and at a somewhat cheaper rate. 
 And the feminine hearts who yearn over the " con- 
 dition of women in India " would find as worthy an 
 object for their reformatory sympathy in Jane the 
 gardener's wife, with six children, living in two 
 rooms upon a pound a week ; or Emma the house- 
 maid, insanely spending all her large wages upon 
 dress, and leaving herself not a half-penny for sick- 
 ness or old age. 
 
 " Charity begins at home " — the old-fashioned 
 proverb used to say. But the peculiarity of our 
 large - minded modern society is that " home " 
 either does not exist, or that it is the last place in 
 the world about which charity ever troubles itself. 
 
 I have been led to this train of thought by two 
 articles which appeared lately in a well-known 
 magazine on the much-vexed question of domestic 
 servants. The writers took opposite sides : one 
 defended the lower class against the upper ; pro- 
 tested against the extreme ill-usage sustained by 
 servants in general, and contended for their " privi- 
 leges," averring that they ought to be allowed full 
 time to cultivate their intellects — and that, among 
 other refinements, there should be a library in 
 every pantry and a piano-forte in every kitchen. 
 The opposing paper took the mistresses* side — the 
 much-tried, much-enduring mistresses ; and, so far 
 from allowing our domestics any rights, would fain 
 have reduced servitude to its original meaning, 
 and considered servants somewhat as the ancients 
 considered their slaves — an altogether different 
 order of beings from themselves. The first pro- 
 
I4« 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 tested loudly that we were all brothers ; though 
 the great point — which of us was to be "our 
 brother's keeper " — was left untouched. The 
 second, so far as I remember, almost denied that 
 there was a common human nature between the 
 kitchen and the parlor. 
 
 Bcih meant well, I verily believe ; and both had 
 a certain justice in their arguments. But the real 
 truth, as in most contests, lay between the two. 
 Let us consider it a little. * 
 
 Few will deny the melancholy fact that the servant 
 questic^n is growing more difficult year by year. 
 Perhaps naturally so, since every class is rising 
 and trying to force itself into the class above it— 
 a not ignoble aim, if it at the same time educate 
 and fit itself to enter that class ; but it mostly does 
 not do this. Therefore a continual struggle goes 
 on — a continual pushing up of heterogeneous ele- 
 ments into the already wildly seething mass — and 
 the result is — chaos } Let us hope not. Let us 
 trust that all will settle in time. Providence 
 knows its own business much better than we do. 
 
 Still we must do our business, too, and do it our 
 very best. Any thing short of our best is setting 
 ourselves in opposition — oh, how futile ! — to Pro- 
 vidence, and consequently to our own selves. He 
 only who works with God, so far as he sees, works 
 for God and for himself at the same time. 
 
 Those who remember the servants of even 
 twenty-five years ago can not fail to discover a 
 great change in the whole class — as a class. For 
 less work is done by each individual ; and far more 
 
MY BROTHER S KEEPER. 
 
 ^ M3 s 
 
 Iks 
 
 en 
 a 
 or 
 Dre 
 
 wages expected. The most faithful, intelligent, 
 and clever servant I ever knew began life at 
 thirteen years old as maid of-all-work in the family 
 of a gentleman — a poor one certainly, still it was 
 " a gentleman's family," consisting of himself, his 
 wife, and three children. Her wages the first year 
 were three pounds per annum. What would be 
 thought of such a "place" now-a-days? Yet it 
 turned out not a bad one. The girl was taken 
 literally as "one of the family." The mistress 
 trained her ; the little ones loved her ; the eldest 
 daughter educated her — aye, up to a point that 
 even the aforesaid article would approve, for she 
 could read a .d understand Shakespeare, and write 
 as good a letter as most young ladies when they 
 leave school and marry. She never married, but 
 she remained faithful to the family in weal and 
 woe — far more woe than weal, alas! — until she 
 died, but not until she had served two genera- 
 tions. Her grave has been green now for many a 
 year, yet the last remnant of that family never hears 
 the sound of her name — a very common one, 
 "Bessy" — without a throb of remembrance too 
 sweet for tears. -^ 
 
 This is what servants used to be, as many an 
 old family tradition will prove. What are they 
 now? ■ - - 
 
 As an answer I could put forward two illustrative 
 anecdotes : of the butler who threw up his place 
 because he had " always been accustomed to have 
 a sofa in his pantry ; " and the parlor-maid who, 
 having accepted a situation, declined to go because 
 
. \ 
 
 144 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 she and her luggage were to be carried from the 
 station in a spring-cart, whereas in her last place 
 they had sent the carriage and a footman to meet 
 her. These are, I hope, exceptional instances, 
 but we all know what our own and our friends' 
 sen^ants are in the main. 
 
 As to dress, for instance. If extravagant folly 
 of toilet were not becoming so common in all ranks, 
 we should be absolutely startled by the attire of 
 our cooks and parlor-maids — on Sundays especially. 
 And it is so utterly out of proportion to their 
 means. Fancy our grandmothers giving Jenny the 
 housemaid to Thomas the gardener to settle down 
 in holy matrimony upon — say a pound a week ; and 
 they are seen walking to church — he in a fine 
 black suit, and she in a light silk gown, tulle bonnet 
 and veil, and a wreath of orange blossom ! Yet 
 such has been the costume at more than one 
 wedding which has lately come under my notice ; 
 and I believe it is the usual style of such in that 
 class. 
 
 Then as to eating and drinking ; the extent to 
 which this goes on in large and wealthy families is 
 something incredible. Stout footmen, dainty ladies' 
 maids, and under servants of all kinds, expect to 
 be fed with the fat of the land, and to drink in pro- 
 portion. It is not enough to say that they live 
 as well as their masters and mistresses — they 
 often live much better ; the kind of fare that satisfied 
 twenty or forty years ago would be intolerable now. 
 Expense and waste they never think of; they are 
 only comers and goers according to their own con- 
 
MY BROTHER S KEEPER. 
 
 X45 
 
 IS 
 
 ey 
 
 venience, and the more they get out of their 
 " places ** during their temporary stay the 
 better. 
 
 This, too, is another sad change. A house where 
 the servants remain is becoming such an exception 
 as to be quite notable in the neighborhood. 
 
 " Why did I come after your place, ma'am ? " 
 answered a decent elderly man, applying for a 
 situation as gardener. " To tell you the truth, I 
 heard yours was a place where the servants stayed ; 
 so I thought it would suit me, and my wife too, 
 and I came after it." Of course, he was taken, 
 and will probably end his days there. 
 
 But most servants are rolling stones which 
 gather no moss. Nor wish it even; they prefer 
 moving about. They change their mistresses as 
 easily as their caps. The idea of considering them- 
 selves as members of the family — to stick to it, 
 as it to them, through all difficulties not absolutely 
 overwhelming — would be held as simply ridiculous. 
 To them "master*' is merely the man who pays, 
 and " missis " the woman who " worrits." That 
 between these and themselves there could be any 
 common interest, or deep sympathy of any kind, 
 never enters their imagination. Nor, alas ! does 
 it into that of the upper half of the household. If 
 the mistress, with a child dangerously ill up-stairs, 
 is shocked to hear the unchecked merriment in 
 the servants* hall, why does she forget that not long 
 ago she refused to let her cook away to see a dying 
 sister because of that day's dinner-party. "It 
 would have been so very inconvenient, you know, 
 xo 
 
 ■"^^^ 
 
146 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHUHCH. 
 
 [Ml 
 
 ll , ' 
 
 Afterward, I let her go immediately." Yes, but — 
 the sister was dead. 
 
 This may be a sharply drawn picture, but, I ask, 
 is it overdrawn ? Is it not the average state of 
 the relation nowadays between masters and 
 servants ? There may be strict uprightness, liber- ' 
 ality, even kindness on the one side, and duty 
 satisfactorily done on the other; but of sympathy 
 — the common human bond between man and 
 man, or woman and woman — there is almost none. 
 Nobody gives it, and nobody expects to find it. 
 
 Why lis this.? Or can it be the reason — there 
 must be a reason — that every body declares it is 
 almost impossible to get good servants ? * 
 
 May I suggest that perhaps this may arise from 
 the fact of servants finding it so exceedingly difficult 
 to get good masters and mistresses ? 
 
 By good I mean not merely good natured, well- 
 meaning people, but those who have a deeply rooted 
 conscientious sense of responsibility — who believe 
 themselves to be, as superiors, constituted by God, 
 not merely the rulers, but the guide and guard of 
 their inferiors ; and whose life is spent in finding 
 out the best way in which that solemn duty can be 
 fulfilled. 
 
 In every age, evil as well as good takes root 
 downward and bears fruit upward. All reforma- 
 tions, as well as all corruptions, begin with the 
 upper class and descend to the lower. Even as 
 there is selclom an irredeemable naughty child 
 without the parents being in some way to blame, so 
 we rarely hear of a household tormented by a long 
 
MY brother's keeper. f^^^S^^ 
 
 succession of bad servants without suspecting that 
 possibly the master and mistress may not be alto- 
 gether such innocent victims as they imagine 
 themselves. 
 
 For it is from them, the heads of the house, that 
 the house necessarily takes its 'tone. If a lady 
 spends a large proportion of her income on milli- 
 ners and dressmakers, how can she issue sumptuary 
 laws to her cook and housemaid ? If a gentleman 
 habitually consumes as much wine as he can 
 safely drink — perhaps a little more, though he is 
 never so ungenteel as actually to get "drunk" — 
 how can he blame John the coachman or William 
 the gardener that they do get drunk — they who 
 have nothing else to amuse themselves with ? For 
 their master takes no care to supply any thing that 
 they rationally can amuse themselves with, being 
 as indifferent to their minds as he is to their bodies. 
 So that both are kept going like machinery, ready 
 to do their necessary work, nothing else is needed, 
 and nothing ever inquired into. They, the master 
 and mistress, are not their "brother's" keepers — 
 they are only his employers. They use him, 
 criticise him, control him, are even kind to him in 
 a sort of way, but they have no sympathy with 
 him whatever. 
 
 This is apparently the weak point — the small 
 wheel broken — which produces most of the jarring 
 in the present machinery of society. The tie 
 between upper and lower classes has become 
 loosened — has sunk into a mere matter of con? 
 venience. Not that the superior is intentionally 
 
148 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 ! 
 
 i 
 
 n 
 
 unkind ; in fact, he bestows on his inferiors many 
 a benefit ; but he does not give it, or exchange 
 it ; he throws it at him much as you would throw 
 a bone at a dog, with the quiet conviction, " Take 
 it — it is for your good; but you are the dog 
 and I am the man, for all that." 
 
 Is this right — or necessary ? That there should 
 be distinctions of classes is necessary. Rich and 
 poor, masters and servants, must always exist; 
 but need they be pitted against each other — the 
 one ruling, the other resisting ; the one exacting, 
 the other J denying, to the utmost of their mutual 
 power? That mysterious link, which can bind 
 together the most opposite elements, and which in 
 default of a better term, I have called sympathy — 
 though using it more in the French than English 
 meaning of the word — is altogether wanting. 
 
 Was it always so? In olden times, when the 
 primitive institution of rude slavery softened into 
 feudal servitude — the weak hiding together under 
 shelter of the strong, and the ignorant putting 
 themselves under the guidance of the educated — 
 undoubtedly the relation was very different. The 
 line of division between class and class was 
 drawn as distinctly as now, and yet the bond was 
 much closer and tenderer. The feudal lord had 
 his retainers, the lady her serving-maids. These 
 she instructed in all domestic duties, even as he 
 trained his men in the field. The root of the 
 relationship was, of course, mutual advantage ; but 
 it blossomed into mutual kindliness, and bore fruit 
 in that fidelity which is not lessened but increased 
 
.--iS' 
 
 MY BROTHER S KEEPER. 
 
 M9 
 
 by the consciousness of mutual dependence. The 
 difference of rank was, so far as we can discover, 
 maintained in those old days as strongly as now ; 
 but it was like the difference between parent and 
 child — where the one exercises, and the other 
 submits to, an authority which is not mere arbi- 
 trary rule, but wise control and generous pro- 
 tection. 
 
 This, I think, is the point which all shoot wide 
 of nowadays ; the magic charm which nobody can 
 find. They will not recognize that the kingly 
 relaticr — for every head of a household must be a 
 king I ! f ;: ■ nay, an autocrat, since a wise autocracy 
 is the - ■ -.it and simplest form of government — 
 the regal relation also includes the parental. The 
 Romans understood this in the words "pater- 
 familias," "materfamilias:" "familias*' implying 
 not only the children, but the servants. Is it too 
 startling a theory to assert that the heads of a large 
 household are nearly as responsible for their ser- 
 vants as they are for their children ? and that the 
 servants owe them the same kind of duty — faithful- 
 ness, gratitude, loving obedience ? Not blind 
 obedience, but a clear-sighted submission ; which 
 must be won, not compelled ; and can only be won 
 by the exercise of those qualities — the only qualities 
 which justify one human being in being the master 
 of another. This, I believe, is the principle upon 
 which we are constituted " our brother's keeper." 
 A principle which modern masters and mistresses, 
 who take their servants from the nearest register- 
 office, and return them thence when they have done 
 
 I 
 
#1 
 
 fit. 
 
 Hi, 1 
 
 ISO 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 with them, will call perfectly Utopian. Did they 
 ever try t6 put it in practice? 
 
 In the first place, what is their definition of a 
 servant ? A person who will do the prescribed 
 work in the most satisfactory manner for reasonable 
 wages, and beyond that give as little trouble as 
 possible. Somebody who comes when convenient, 
 is treated as convenient, and got rid of als. when 
 convenient to the establibhment. If servants " suit" 
 the place, or the place suits them, they stay ; if 
 not, they go ; and there is an end of it. The idea 
 that they " enter a family," as the phrase is, to 
 become from that day an integral portion of it ; 
 to share its joys and sorows, labors and cares, and 
 to receive from it a corresponding amount of 
 interest and sympathy, thereby commencing and 
 cementing a permanent tie, not to be broken except 
 by serious misconduct or misfortune, or any of 
 those inevitables which no one can guard against 
 — this old-fashioned notion never occurs to any 
 body. 
 
 ' Hence the rashness with which such engagements 
 are formed. The carelessness manifested by most 
 people in engaging their servants is almost incon- 
 ceivable. The " place " is applied for — or the 
 mistress applies at a register ofdce. Out of 
 numerous candidates she selects those she thinks 
 most likely ; the " character " is sought and 
 supplied ; if that is satisfactory , all is settled ; and 
 a man or woman, whom nobody knows any thing 
 of, is thereupon brought into the family, to hold in 
 it the most intimate relation possible. Of course, 
 
MY brother's keeper. 
 
 'SI 
 
 such an arrangement may succeed ; but the chances 
 that it will not succeed are enormous. 
 
 This formality of " getting a character" has often 
 seemed to me one of the most curious delusions 
 that sensible people labor under. When written, 
 it is almost valueless : any body can forge it, or even 
 giving it bona fide, may express it in such a way as 
 to convey any thing but the real truth. Besides, 
 is that truth the real truth } When we consider 
 the prejudices, the vexations, on both sides, which 
 often arise in parting with a servant, can we always 
 depend upon a faithful statement, or upon those 
 who make it ? I have often thought that instead 
 of inquiring any servant's character, we ought 
 rather to inquire the character of the late mistress. 
 
 Besides, as a rule, a really efficient servant needs 
 no character at all. Such a one on leaving a 
 situation is sure to have half-a-dozen families eager 
 to secure so rare and valuable a possession. A 
 good servant never lacks a place ; a good master or 
 mistress rarely finds any want of good servants. 
 Temporary difficulties may befall both ; but in the 
 long run it is thus. Even as — if one carefully 
 notices the course of the world — every man, be he 
 religious or irreligious, will come, at the middle or 
 end of life, to the same conclusion as David : " I 
 have been young, and now am old ; yet have I not 
 seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging 
 bread." Not that all is smooth or easy or fortunate ; 
 on the contrary, " Many are the afflictions of the 
 righteous ; but the Lord delivereth him out of them 
 all." 
 
' i 
 
 iU 
 
 
 SIRMONS OUT or CHURCH. 
 
 And so, to measure small things by great, I 
 believe that though accidental difficulties may arise, 
 a good servant may drift into a bad place ; a con- 
 scientious master or mistress may be cheated here 
 and there by unfaithful servants — still, in the long 
 run, things right themselves. No law is more 
 certain in its ultimate working than that which 
 affirms that all people find their own level and reap 
 their own deservings. 
 
 But to come to practicalities — and yet I believe 
 no practical work is ever done so well as when it 
 has a strong spiritual sense at the core of it — what 
 is the fi^st thing to be considered in choosing one's 
 servants? I answer, unhesitatingly — their p"oral 
 nature. 
 
 "What!" I hear some fashionable mistress 
 exclaim, " trouble myself about the moral nature 
 of John the footman or Sarah the cook — or even, 
 though they come closer in contact with me, of my 
 housemaid, nurse, or lady's-maid? Impossible! 
 simply ridiculous ! So that they do their work 
 well, and don't trouble me, that is all I re- 
 quire." 
 
 Is it all ? You are then content to have about 
 you continually mere machines, the motive power 
 of whose existence you are utterly ignorant of? 
 What hold have you upon them? what guard 
 against them ? what guarantee for virtue or pre- 
 servative from vice ? Vice which, say what you 
 like, must affect you and' yours, sometimes in the 
 very closest way. 
 
 Nothing is more remarkable than the extreme 
 
MY BROTHBRS KXBPIR. 
 
 153 
 
 / 
 
 / 
 
 fool-hardinesS| to say the least of it, with which 
 respectable families put themselves at the mercy of 
 strange servants, of whose antecedents they know 
 nothing, or know only that they are capable of 
 doing their allotted work, are "trained parlor- 
 maids," "good plain cooks," and so on. But of 
 their moral characteristics, their tempers, principles, 
 habits — all that constitutes the difference between 
 bad people and good, those who are a comfort and 
 help, or else an absolute torment and curse in a 
 household — the heads of that household are in 
 entire ignorance. Yet they expect, besides 
 efficiency in work, all the fidelity, conscientious- 
 ness, and other good qualities which they would 
 have found in a person which they had known all 
 their lives, who was trained in all their ways, and 
 accustomed to all their peculiarities. ?r« 
 
 Do they never consider that in this, as in most 
 things, we only get what we earn, and get nothing 
 without earning it ? That if we want really good 
 servants, we must make them such.? We must 
 bring them up, even as we bring up our children, 
 with the same care and patience, making allowance 
 for the nice distinctions of character in every 
 human being ; and above all, having the same sense 
 of responsibility, though in a lesser degree, that we 
 have concerning our own family. 
 
 To this end it is advisable to take young servants, 
 which most people object to. They prefer domestics 
 ready-made — that is, made by other people, who 
 have had all the trouble of training them. But 
 these can never suit us so well, or have the same 
 
,k 
 
 IS4 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 personal attachment for us, as those we have trained 
 ourselves. 
 
 For I hold — strange doctrine nowadays ! — that 
 personal attachment is the real pivot upon which 
 all domestic service turns. It may sound very 
 ridiculous that a lady should try to win the hearts 
 of her cooks and housemaids, and a gentleman 
 trouble himself as to whether his coachman or 
 gardener had a respectful regard for " master." 
 Yet otherwise little real good is effected on either 
 side. , 
 
 Without love, all service becomes mere eye- 
 service, 6r at best a cold matter-of-fact doing one's 
 duty ; any attempts at training are almost useless ; 
 and with already trained and efficient servants, 
 their very efficiency is, the heart being wanting, 
 an unsatisfactory thing, like being served by the 
 two hands which waited upon the Prince in the 
 fairy tale of the White Cat. Admirably competent 
 hands, no doubt, but a poor exchange for the bright 
 face and pleasant voice of what children call a 
 " person," and a person that loves us. 
 
 I am bold enough to say that in a really happy 
 and well - arranged household it is absolutely 
 indispensable that the servants should really love 
 " the family," and be loved by them. Under no 
 other conditions can the duty which is laid upon 
 us of being our brother's keeper be thoroughly 
 fulfilled. And how is this to be done ? 
 
 " I can't imagine why it is that my servants never 
 take to me," said a very kind but reserved mistress, 
 complaining to another who was more happily cir- 
 
MY brother's keeper. 
 
 155 
 
 or 
 
 cumstanced ; " I am sure I mean them well — would 
 do all I could for them, only somehow I never know 
 how to talk to them." 
 
 That is the very reason. Most people never talk 
 to their servants at all. They " speak " to them 
 with patronizing benignity, they order them, find 
 fault with them,' or sharply scold them ; but any 
 thing beyond that, any thing that brings the two 
 human beings face to face as human beings, such 
 as cordial praise for well-doing; quiet, serious, 
 sorrowful rebuke for ill-doing ; sympathy in trouble ; 
 and last, not least, ah equally quick sympathy in 
 their pleasures and amusements — is a thing un- 
 thought of on either side. Class and class go on 
 their parallel lines, close together, yet eternally 
 apart. 
 
 It is sad as strange sometimes to notice the way 
 in which presumably good people speak to servants, 
 either with a cold, repellent reserve, or a furious 
 unreserve, such as they would never use toward any 
 other. Now he who flies into a rage and insults 
 an equal may be a fool, but he who insults an 
 inferior is worse — he is a coward. Many a gentle- 
 man in his stable, and many a lady in her kitchen 
 or nursery, would do well to pause before condemn- 
 ing themselves as such. 
 
 . Nevertheless, to " spoil " a servant is as dangerous 
 as spoiling a child. In both cases discipline must 
 be kept up. The head of a household is justified 
 in laying down for it the strictest laws, and insisting 
 that they shall not be broken. Mistresses might 
 with advantage be very much severer than many 
 
156 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 riM 
 
 now take the trouble to be against waste, overdress- 
 ing, overfeeding, perquisites, visitors, and all the 
 luxurious items which make servants so expensive 
 — to the family's injury and their own. And, laws 
 once laid down, no alternative must be accepted. 
 " Obey, or you leave my service," is the only safe 
 rule. 
 
 But this strictness is compatible with the utmost 
 kindness, — nay, even familiarity. A mistress who 
 is^sure of her own position, and safely intrenched 
 in her own quiet dignity, may be almost a mother 
 to her servants without fearing from them the 
 slightest over-familiarity. Nay, she will not lose 
 their respect by actually helping in their work, or 
 at least showing them that she knows how the 
 work should be done, as was the habit with the 
 ladies of olden time. A cook will not think the 
 worse of her mistress, if, instead of ringing the bell 
 and scolding violently over an ill- cooked dinner, 
 she descends to the kitchen and takes the pains to 
 explain all the deficiencies of to-day, showing how 
 they may be remedied to-morrow. And if this is 
 done carefully and kindly, the chances are that 
 they will be remedied ; and a little temporary 
 trouble will avoid endless trouble afterward. 
 
 Fault finding is inevitable ; reproof, sharp and 
 unmistakable, is sometimes necessary — nay, salu- 
 tary; dismission, instant and sudden, without hope 
 of reprieve or forgiveness, may occasionally be the 
 only course possible ; but no head of a household 
 is justified in using toward any of its members one 
 rough, or harsh, or contemptuous word. The 
 
MY BROTHER S KEEPER. 
 
 '57 
 
 mistress who scolds, and the master who swears at 
 a servant, at once put themselves in a false position, 
 sink from their true dignity, and deserve any 
 impertinjence they get. 
 
 "Impertinence!" I once heard remarked by a 
 lady, a house mother for many years ; " why, I 
 never had an impertinent word from a servant in 
 my life." 
 
 Of course not, because in all her dealings with 
 them she herself was scrupulously courteous — as 
 courteous as she would have been to any of her 
 equals, friends, or acquaintances. She had sense 
 to see that, putting aside the duty of it, one of the 
 chief differences between class and class, superior 
 and inferior, educated and uneducated, is this 
 unvarying politeness. I shall never forget watching 
 an altercation between two London omnibus 
 drivers — the one heaping on the other every oppro- 
 brious name he could think of; while his rival, 
 sitting calmly on ;he box, listened in silence, then 
 turned round to reply, "And you — you 're a" — he 
 paused — "you're a gentleman !" The satire cut 
 sharp. Omnibus No. i drove away amid shouts 
 of laughter, mingled with hisses; omnibus No. 2 
 remained master of the field. 
 
 So, whatever may be the conduct of her serv- 
 ants, the " missis " loses her last hold over them 
 if, however provoked, she allows them by any 
 word or deed of hers to doubt that she is a lady. 
 
 And servants have a far keener appreciation of 
 a " real lady," as they call it, than we give them 
 credit for. They seldom fail to distinguish between 
 
158 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 the born gentlewoman, however poor, and the 
 nouveau riche^ whom only her riches make different 
 from themselves. They are sharp enough to see 
 that, as a rule, the born or educated gentlewoman, 
 sure of herself and her position, will treat them 
 much more familiarly and kindly than the other. 
 And this kindness, even unaccompanied by tangible 
 benefactions, what a powerful agent it is ! 
 
 Of course, there are those whom we may 
 emphatically term " the lower classes," who seem 
 to consider the upper class not only their keepers, 
 but their legitimate prey. But there are others, 
 over w^hom gentleness of speech, thoughtfulness in 
 word and act, a desire to save them trouble, a little 
 pains taken to procure them some innocent pleas- 
 ure, has a thousand times more influence than 
 gifts, or even great benefits carelessly bestowed. 
 
 And here, among the duties of heads of families, 
 I would include one, too often overlooked — that 
 of giving their servants a fair amount of actual 
 pleasure. "All work and no play makes Jack a 
 dull boy," and the kitchen requires relaxation as 
 well as the parlor. Not an occasional " day out," 
 grudgingly given, and with a complete indifference 
 as to where and how it is spent, but a certain 
 amount of variety and amusement regularly pro- 
 vided. 
 
 The question is what this should be ; and there 
 each individual family must decide for itself. I 
 differ from .that eloquent defender of servants' 
 rights who would put the piano-forte side by side 
 with the dresser, and mix elegant literature with 
 
MY BROTHER S KEEPER. 
 
 '59 
 
 the cleaning of saucepans; but I do think that any 
 servant with an ear for music or a taste for reading 
 should be encouraged in every possible way that 
 does not interfere with daily duty. " Work first, 
 pleasure afterward," should be the mistress's creed, 
 for herself, her children, her servants ; and she will 
 generally find the work all the better done foi not 
 forgetting the pleasure. 
 
 Ignorance is at the root of half the errors of this 
 world — errors which soon devebp into actual sins. 
 In spite of the not un frequently given opinion that 
 it is a mistake to educate our inferiors, and that 
 the march of intellect of late years has been the 
 cause of most of the evils from which we now 
 suffer, I think it will always be found that the 
 cleverer and better educated servants are, the 
 greater help and comfort they prove in a house- 
 hold. 
 
 And oh, what a help, what a comfort ! " Better 
 is a friend that is near than a brother afar off," 
 says Solomon. And often, in the cares, worries, 
 and hard experiences of life, far better than even 
 the friends outside the house are the faithf"! 'rerv- 
 ants within it, who offer us no obtrusive sympathy, 
 no well-meant yet utterly useless and troublesome 
 advice, but simply do what we tell them, or know 
 us well enough to do what wewant without our 
 telling; and by their regular mechanical ways 
 make things smooth and comfortable about us, 
 thereby creating an unconscious sense of repose 
 amid the sharpest trials. If I were to name the 
 greatest domestic blessing that the mother of 9, 
 
'•f. 
 
 1: 
 
 I 
 
 nil ; 
 
 II 
 
 x6o 
 
 SERMONS OUT 07 CHURCH. 
 
 family can have next to a good and dutiful child, 
 it is a faithful servant. 
 
 But, as I have said before, the blessing must be 
 earned. And even in these days it is in every 
 one's power to earn it. Even if the present genera- 
 tion has so greatly deteriorated that a satisfactory 
 trained servant is almost impossible to find, there 
 is always the raw material, the new generation, to 
 work upon. Every mistress of a household, every 
 clergyman of a parish, with other responsible 
 agents who form the center of a circle of depen- 
 dents, m^y with a little pains keep their eyes upon 
 all the growing-up girls and boys around them ; 
 catch them early and guide them for good in all 
 sorts of practical ways. Of course this gives trouble 
 — every thing in life gives trouble; it requires 
 common-sense and patience, qualities not too 
 abundant in this world. But the thing can be 
 done, and those who do it will rarely fail to reap 
 the benefit. For it is one of those forms of charity 
 which pays itself — " small profits and quick returns.*' 
 And though this may be a mean reason to urge, 
 just like the maxim that honesty is the best policy, 
 still there are people in this world who will not be 
 the less charitable for knowing that charity is a 
 good investment. 
 
 It is especially so — when beginning at home it 
 goes on to widen into the circles nearest home. 
 There is a subject which has been well talked over 
 in public meeHngs, well discussed in newspapers, 
 for the last few years, yet remains pretty nearly 
 where it stood when well-to-do-people first began 
 
MY BROTHER S KEEPER. 
 
 i6i 
 
 to open their eyes to it — the condition of the 
 poor at their gates. 
 
 The question, Am I my brother's keeper ? is as 
 serious to the rich man with regard to the 
 dependents ouvside his doors as within them. 
 This, setting aside the question of their spiritual 
 state. I do not hold with those who administer 
 tracts first and food afterward ; and I incline to 
 believe that the washing of the soul is very useless 
 until the body has been well treated with soap and 
 water. Each earnest man has his own pet theory 
 for dealing with the spiritual condition of those 
 about him, but for their physical state, so far as 
 he can affect it, every man is answerable. 
 
 Not in a large way. The great error of benevo- 
 lent people nowadays is that they will do every 
 thing largely. They begin far off, instead of near 
 at hand. They will subscribe thousands of pounds 
 for the famine in India, the widows and orphans 
 of a shipwreck or a colliery accident, the present- 
 ing of a testimonial to the widow and children of 
 some notable man, who in most cases ought to 
 have himself provided for his belongings; but the 
 duty of seeing that the two or three families who 
 depend on them have enough wages to live upon, a 
 decent house to live in, and some kindly supervision 
 and instruction to help them to live a sanitary 
 and virtuous life, is far too small a thing for your 
 great philanthropists. 
 
 Yet if they would manage to do this, and only 
 this — just as every one in a large city is compelled 
 ^ to sweep the snow from his own door-step — what 
 II 
 
i6a 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 an aggregate of advantage would be reached! 
 Each large household is a nucleus, around which 
 gather, of necessity, several smaller ones. Coach- 
 man, groom, gardener, laborer, out-door servants 
 of every sort, must all trust for their subsistence 
 to the great family. Thus every man with an 
 income of from one thousand to indefinite thou- 
 sands per annum has inevitably a certain number, 
 more or less, of human souls and bodies dependent 
 on him for their well - being. Is he conscious of 
 the responsibility ? Does he recognize that in this, 
 at least, he is his brother's keeper ? 
 
 In Ikrge towns things are different. Though 
 the pooF hang festering upon the very robe's 
 hem of the rich, and scarcely any grand street or 
 square but has a wretched mews or back alley 
 behind it, still the gulf between the two is so great 
 that it is difficult to pass it. Then, too, the popula- 
 tion is so migratory — here to-day, gone to-morrow 
 — that any lasting influence is almost impossible. 
 The evils only too possible — and rich neighbors 
 would do well for their own sakes not to forget 
 this — are the crimes that lurk, the diseases 
 that breed, in these miserable, homeless 
 homes. 
 
 Some people have been bold enough to attempt 
 a remedy. Some noble, self-denying souls have 
 gone from end to end of these courts and alleys, 
 cleansing and reviving, pouring through them a 
 wholesome stream of beneficence, which God grant 
 may never run dry. For in our large cities this 
 melancholy condition of things is inevitable. All 
 
MY BRCYHF.R S KEEPER. 
 
 / 
 
 163 
 
 All 
 
 honor be to them who attempt — not a cure, alas ! but 
 even an amelioration. ''' 
 
 However, in the country our land-owners and 
 large householders have no excuse for their sins. 
 For years, ever since Charles Kingsley wrote his 
 " Yeast," in which the noble girl, Argemone, dies 
 of a fever caught at the miserable cottages which 
 had been left year after year undrained, unrepaired, 
 a hot-bed of disease and contagion, the same thing 
 has been going on in country villages, lovely and 
 picturesque to the eye, but, if you look further, 
 full of all things foul and vile. It is as bad or 
 worse in new-built suburban neighborhoods, where 
 wealthy residents have been so anxious to drive 
 uncomfortable neighbors away that there are liter- 
 ally no cottages. The mechanic has to go to his 
 work, or the out-door servant to his daily calling, 
 miles and miles ; and even then house accommo- 
 dation is as wretched as it is limited ; several 
 families — not of the very poor, but of people able 
 to pay for decent accommodation, if they could 
 only get it — are huddled together in some ill- 
 drained, ill -ventilated, and worse built house, 
 sub-divided and sublet to the last possibility. 
 
 As the neighborhood increases, and with it the 
 absolute necessity for a certain number of the poor 
 to serve the rich, their need of house-room increases 
 too. So great is the press of tenants that rents 
 rise; grasping builders run up,' on speculation, 
 wretched strings of cottages, bran-new and taking 
 on the outside — -quite " genteel residences " to look 
 at — but within every conceivable want and abomi- 
 
 *■-*- 
 
A 
 
 164 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 nation. However bad great towns may be, any 
 body who examines the dwelling-houses of — I will 
 not say the poor, but the working classes — in the 
 country, has good need to turn to all their " brethren" 
 who have money in hand, and ask why, when 
 building "palatial mansions" for themselves, or 
 even stately churches for — is it for Him who 
 expressly says He "dwells not in houses made with 
 hands?" — they can not spare a few hundred 
 pounds to build a few decent cottages for their 
 humbler neighbors ? Simple, solid cottages, where 
 the wind does not whistle through one-brick walls, 
 nor the rain soak through leaky windows, and the 
 gaudy papering drop off with damp ; where water 
 supply and house drainage do not mingle — even as 
 the respectable and the vile, the provident and the 
 improvident, the sober and the drunkard, are often 
 forced to mingle in these wretched homes. Con- 
 sequently the best-intentioned helper, the most 
 judicious friend, find it difficult to choose between 
 the bad and the good, the careful and the untidy, 
 those who deserve to be aided and encouraged 
 and those whom any assistance makes only more 
 helpless and more undeserving. 
 
 Nevertheless, we are still our brother's keeper. 
 Not our seventeenth cousin — ^black, olive, or brown 
 — but our brother who lives next door to us, and 
 for whom we ought to do our very best before we 
 go further. Therefore, I say, let every man bweep 
 his own door-step clean. Let him take a little 
 trouble to use among his immediate dependents all 
 the influence his position gives him. Let him try 
 
MY brother's keeper. 
 
 165 
 
 to make them good, if he can ; but at any rate 
 let him do his utmost to make them comfortable. 
 I have heard it said that a thief is not half so likely 
 to steal when he has got a clean shirt on ; and I 
 believe the master who takes pains to provide his 
 servants with decent houses, safe from malaria, 
 free from overcrowding — nay, who even con- 
 descends to look in and see that every thing is neat 
 and convenient, taking an interest in the papers 
 on the walls and the flowers in the gardens — would 
 soon cease to complain that they wasted or 
 peculated his substance, or spent their own in 
 the skittle-ground and the tap-room. 
 
 But in this matter no absolute laws can be laid 
 down, no minutiae particularized. The subject is 
 so wide, and each case must be judged on its own 
 merits. Every man and woman must decide 
 individually how far fortune has constituted them 
 their brother's keeper, and to what extent they are 
 fulfilling that trust. How it should be fulfilled they 
 alone can tell. It lies between them and their 
 consciences ; or, to spe? k more solemnly, between 
 them and their God. 
 
 " Those whom Thou hast given me," said the 
 divinest Master that ever walked this earth, of the 
 men who instinctively called Him by that name. 
 And though in this cynical generation it may pro- 
 voke a smile — the mere notion that our hired 
 servants, our followers and dependents, are g ven 
 to us by God, that we may be His agents in guid'ng 
 and helping them — still the fact, if it be a fa^^t, 
 remains the same, whether we believe it or not. 
 
 '& 
 
i66 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 And I think it would be a consolation at many a 
 death-bed — death-beds watched and soothed by 
 some long-tried, faithful servant, and oftentimes 
 only a servant — to look back through the nearly 
 ended life upon a few waifs and strays rescued, a 
 few young souls guided in the right way, sufferers 
 saved from worse suffering, honest " brothers " and 
 sisters helped, strengthened, and rewarded. The 
 world may never know it, for it is a kind of bene- 
 ficence which does not show outside ; but I can 
 imagine such a man or woman — master or mistress 
 — echoing without any pride, and with a sort of 
 thankful gladness, the momentous words, " Those 
 that Thou gavest me I have kept, and none of them 
 is lost." ; 
 
 
 
\f a 
 
 by 
 
 nes 
 
 irly 
 
 ' a, 
 ers 
 
 ind 
 
 rhe 
 
 ne- 
 
 :an 
 
 ess 
 
 of 
 
 ose 
 
 em 
 
 I 
 
 .1 
 
 5emon Vi. 
 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
VI. 
 
 GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS, 
 
 I SHOULD premise of this sermon that it is not a 
 very cheerful one, nor meant for the very young. 
 They, to whom joy seems as interminable as sorrow 
 at the time, will neither listen to it nor believe it. 
 But their elders who may have experienced its truth, 
 and had strength to accept it as such, may find 
 a certain calm evep in its sadness. For these I 
 write ; not those, until in their turn they have proved 
 the same. 
 
 " Gather up the fragments that remain, that 
 nothing be lost." So once said the Divine Master, 
 after feeding His hungering five thousand. How 
 often, even without relation to the circumstances 
 under which they were first uttered, do the mere 
 words flash across one's mind in various crises 
 of life ; words full of deep meaning — solemn with 
 pathetic warning. 
 
 For to how few has existence been any thing 
 like perfect, leaving no fragments to be gathered 
 up ! Who can say he has attained all his desires, 
 fulfilled all his youth's promises ? looks back on 
 nothing he regrets, nor desires to add any thing to 
 what he has accomplished .^ 
 
 How many lives are, so to speak, mere relicg of 
 
; 
 
 lyo 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 an ended feast, fragments which may be either left 
 to waste, or be taken up and made the most of. 
 For we can not die just when we wish it, and be- 
 cause we wish it. The fact may be very unromantic, 
 but it is a fact that a too large dinner or a false 
 step on the stairs kills much more easily than a 
 great sorrow. Nature compels us to live on, even 
 with broken hearts as with lopped-off members. 
 True, we are never quite the same again ; never 
 the complete human being ; but we may still be a 
 very respectable, healthy human being, capable of 
 living out our three-score years and ten with toler- 
 able comfort after all. 
 
 Of course this is very uninteresting. It is not 
 the creed of novels and romances. There every 
 body is happy and married, or unhappy and dies. 
 A cynic might question whether, in his grand 
 solution of all mundane difficulties, to transpose 
 the adjectives, retaining the verbs, would not be 
 much nearer the truth ; since death ends our afflic- 
 tions, and marriage very often begins them. But 
 your cynics are the most narrow - visioned of all 
 philosophers. Let them pass. Safer and better is 
 it to believe that every one may, if he choose, attain 
 to a certain amount of happiness — enough to 
 brighten life, and make it not only endurable, but 
 nobly useful, until the end. But entire felicity is 
 the lot of none, and moreover was never meant 
 to be. 
 
 Until we have learned to accept this fact, rever- 
 ently, humbly, not asking the why and wherefore, 
 which we can never by any possibility find out — 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 171 
 
 until then our soul's education, the great purpose 
 of our being in the body at all, is not even begun. 
 We are still in the A B C of existence, and many a 
 bitter tear shall we have to shed, many an angry fit 
 of resistence to both lessons and Teacher, many a 
 cruel craving after sunshiny play and delicious 
 laziness, will be our portion till we are ad- 
 vanced enough to understand why we are thus 
 aught. 
 
 It is curious, if it were not so sad, to notice how 
 many years of fruitful youth we spend less in 
 learning than in wondering why we are compelled 
 to learn — why we can not be left to do just as we 
 like, having every thing to enjoy and nothing to 
 suffer. For, whether we confess it or not, most of 
 us start in life with the conviction that Providence 
 somehow owes us a great debt of felicity, and if He 
 do not pay it, there must be something radically 
 wrong — not* with ourselves, of course : in youth 
 the last person we doubt is ourself — but with the 
 whole management of the universe. " Here I am," 
 the young man or maiden soliloquizes. " I wish 
 to be happy ; it is Heaven's business to make me 
 happy — me individually, without reference to the 
 rest of the world, and whether or not I choose 
 to obey the laws laid down for the general good. 
 I am I ; every blessing sent me I take as my right ; 
 every misfortune that befalls me is a cruelty or an 
 injustice." 
 
 Odd as this reads, put so plainly, still I believe 
 it is, if they will seriously examine themselves, the 
 attitude that most young people take toward Prov- 
 
 :]i 
 
•.V 
 
 I7« 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 idence and the world in general while they are 
 still young. 
 
 A comfortable doctrine, but having one fault, in 
 common with many other doctrines conceived out 
 of the arrogant egotism of the human heart — it is 
 not true. 
 
 " This God is our God," exclaims the Psalmist, 
 adding, joyfully, " He will be our guide unto 
 death." Aye, but He will also be the guide of 
 millions more, equally his children, with whom 
 we must take our lot ; every minute portion of His 
 creation Veing liable to be made subservient to the 
 working of the whole. A working which, if not 
 entirely by chance and for evil, must necessarily 
 be by design, and for the general good of the 
 whole. Any other theory of happiness strikes a 
 blow at the root of all religious faith — the sense 
 of a divine Fatherhood, not limited or personal, but 
 unlimited and universal. 
 
 For it is God's relation to us, not ours to Him, 
 which is the vital question. The great craving of 
 humanity is — we want a God to believe in. What 
 He wants with us or does with us is a secondary 
 thing; being God, He is sure to do right. I have 
 sometimes smiled to hear deeply religious people 
 bless the Lord "for saving my poor soul." Why 
 that is the very last thing a creature with a spark of 
 His nature dwelling in it would dream of blessing 
 Him for, or that He would accept as a fit thanks- 
 giving. Especially if that salvation involved, as it 
 usually does, the supposed condemnation of un- 
 known millions, including many dear friends of the 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 173 
 
 devout thanksgiver. That all religion should con- 
 sist merely in the saving of one's own individual 
 soul ! Such a creed is simply the carrying out 
 spiritually of that much despised sentiment, " Self- 
 preservation is the first law of nature;" and the 
 followers of it are as purely selfish as the wrecked 
 sailor who, seizing for himself a spar or a hen-coop 
 — nay, let us say at once, a comfortable boat — 
 calmly watches all his mates go down. For this, 
 plainly put, is the position of many an earnest 
 worshiper toward his self-invented God. But what 
 a worshiper ! and oh, not to speak it profanely, 
 what a God ! 
 
 You will perceive this sermon is clearly " out of 
 church," and would put me outside the pale of 
 many churches. Not, I trust, outside that of the 
 Church invisible, spread silently over the whole 
 visible world. Because " Gather up the frag- 
 ments " is a text which it is useless for me to 
 preach upon or you to listen to unless we both 
 have a strong spiritual sense — a conviction of the 
 nothingness of all things human, except those 
 which bind the soul to its Maker, which we call re- 
 ligious faith. And though I am far from believing 
 that the present world is nothing, and the world to 
 come every thing; that we are to console ourselves 
 for every grief, and repay ourselves for every 
 resignation, by the idea that thereby we somehow 
 or other make God our debtor, ready to requite us 
 in another existence for all we have lost or willfully 
 thrown away in this ; still it is hopeless either to 
 teach or learn the difficult lesson, which in plain 
 
I'' 
 
 lil 
 
 hmwi' 
 
 174 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 »* 
 
 words I may call "making the best of things,' 
 without a firm trust, first in His love who bids us 
 do it ; secondly in our own duty of obedience to 
 His paramount will, in great things and small, 
 simply because it is His will, whether we under- 
 stand it or not. 
 
 Therefore I am no heretic, though I may say 
 things that make orthodoxy shudder ; perhaps be- 
 cause it has a secret fear that they may be true 
 after all. 
 
 These " fragments " of lives — how they strew 
 our daily path on every side ! Not a house do we 
 enter, not a company do we mix with, but we more 
 than guess — we knotv — that these our friends, men 
 and women, who go about the world, doing their 
 work and taking their pleasure therein, all carry 
 about with them a secret burden — of bitter dis- 
 appointments, vanished hopes, unfulfilled ambi- 
 tions, lost loves. Probably every one of them, 
 when his or her smiling face vanishes from the 
 circle, will change it into another, serious, anxious, 
 sad — happy, if it be only sad, with no mingling 
 of either bitterness or badness. That complete 
 felicity, which the young believe in, and expect 
 almost as a matter of certainty to come, never does 
 come. Soon or late, we have to make up our minds 
 to do without it ; to take up the fragments of our 
 blessings, thankful that we have what we have, and 
 are what we are ; above all that we have our own 
 burden to bear, and not our neighbor's. But, 
 whatever it is, we must bear it alone ; and this 
 gathering-up of fi^gments, which I am so earn- 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 175 
 
 »> 
 
 estly advising, is also a thing which must be done 
 alone. The lesson is sometimes learned very 
 early. It is shrewdly said, " At three we love our ' 
 mothers, at six our fathers, at twelve our holidays, 
 at twenty our sweethearts, at thirty our wives, at 
 forty our children, at fifty ourselves." Still, in one 
 form or other, love is the ground-work of our ex- 
 istence. 
 
 So at least thinks the passionate boy or senti- 
 mental girl who has fallen under its influence. 
 For I suppose we must all concede the every-day 
 fact that most people fall in love some time or 
 other, and that a good many do it even in their 
 teens. You may call it " calf-love," and so it often 
 is; and comes to the salutary end of such a 
 passion: 
 
 " Which does at once, like paper set on fire, 
 Bum — and expire." 
 
 But it gives a certain amount jf pain and dis- 
 comfort during the conflagration, and often leaves 
 an ugly little heap of ashes behind. 
 
 Also, it is well to be cautious ; as the foolishest 
 of fancies may develop into a real love — the bless- 
 ing or curse of a life time. 
 
 "Fond of her.?" I heard an old man once 
 answer, as he stood watching his wife move 
 slowly down their beautiful but rather lonely 
 garden ; they had buried eight of their nine chil- 
 dren, and the ninth was going to be married that 
 spring. " Fond of her ? " with a gentle smile, 
 *' Why, I've been fond of her these fifty years ! " 
 
1 1 
 
 176 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 But such cases are very exceptional. It is so 
 seldom that one love — a happy love — runs like a 
 golden thread through the life of either man or 
 woman, that we ought to be patient even with the 
 most frantic boy or forlorn girl who has " fallen in 
 love,'* and is enduring its first sharp pleasure — or 
 pain — for both are much alike.. 
 
 When they come and tell you that their hearts 
 are broken, it is best not to laugh at them, but to 
 help them to "gather up the fragments " as soon as 
 possible. At first, of course, they will not agree 
 that itj is possible. " This or nothing ! " is the 
 despairing cry ; and though we may hint that the 
 world is wide, and there may be in it other people, 
 at least as good as the one particular idol, still we 
 can not expect them to believe it. Disappointed 
 lovers would think it treason against love to sup- 
 pose that life is to be henceforward any thing than 
 a total blank. It is so, sometimes ; Heaven 
 knows ! I confess to being one of those few who, 
 in this age, dare still believe in love, and in its 
 awful influence, for good or for evil, at the very 
 outset of life. But it is not the whole of life ; r.or 
 ought to be. 
 
 The prevention of a so - called " imprudent " 
 marriage — namely, an impecunious one — and the 
 forcing on of another, which had nothing in the 
 world to recommend it except money, has often 
 been the ultimate ruin of a young man, who would 
 have been k good man had he been a happy man 
 — had he married the girl he loved. And in in- 
 stances too numerous to count, have girls — 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 ,-■'(-■'■ 
 
 177 
 
 through the common but contemptible weakness of 
 not knowing their own minds, or the worse than 
 weakness of being governed by the minds of others 
 in so exclusively a personal matter as marriage 
 — driven honest fellows into vice. Or else into 
 some reckless, hasty union, whereby both the man 
 himself and the poor wife, whom he never loved 
 but only married, were made miserable for life. 
 
 Generally speaking, men get over their love-sor- 
 rows much easier than women. Naturally ; be- 
 cause life has for them many other things besides 
 love ; for women, almost nothing. But still one 
 does find occasionally a man, prosperous and 
 happy, kind to his wife, and devoted to his chil- 
 dren, in whom the indelible trace of some early dis- 
 appointment is that one name is never mentioned, 
 one set of associations entirely put aside. He is a 
 good fellow — a cheerful fellow too ; he has taken 
 up the fragments of his life, and made the very 
 best of them. Yet sometimes you feel that the life 
 would have been more complete, the character 
 more nobly developed, the man had had his heart's 
 desire, and married his first love. 
 
 Which nobody does, they say; certainly, almost 
 nobody ; yet the world wags on ; and every body 
 seems satisfied — at least in public. Nay, possibly, 
 in private too ; for time has such infinite power of 
 healing or hiding. There is nothing harder than a 
 lava stream grown cold. 
 
 I'hose of us who have reached middle age with 
 out dropping — who would ever drop ? — the ties 
 of our youth, move about encircled by dozens of 
 )9 
 
 Si. 
 
 li 
 
 
 ^1 
 
178 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 
 such secret historifs, forgotten by the outside world 
 — half forgotten, perhaps, by the very actors 
 therein — with whom we, the spectators, had once 
 such deep sympathy. Now, we sometimes turn 
 and look at a face which we remember as a young 
 face, alive with all the passion of youth — and we 
 marvel to see how commonplace it has grown ; 
 reddening cosily over a good dinner, or sharp and 
 eager over business greed ; worn and wrinkled 
 with nursery cares, or sweetly smiling in a grand 
 drawing-room, ready to play its 
 
 ' ♦• Petty part, 
 
 With a little hoard of maxims preaching down a daughter's 
 heart." 
 
 A sort of gathering -up of fragments ^vhich those 
 who are weak enough or strong enough still to 
 believe in love will think far worse than any 
 scattering. The young will not believe us when 
 we tell them that their broken hearts may be mended 
 — ought to be ; since life is too precious a thing to 
 be wasted over any one woman, or man either. It 
 is given us to be made the most of; and this, 
 whether we ourselves are happy or miserable. 
 The misery will not last — the happiness will ; if 
 only in remembrance. No pure joy, however 
 fleeting, contains any real bitterness, even when 
 it is gone by. 
 
 But time only will teach this. At first there is 
 nothing so overwhelming as the despair of youth, 
 which sees neither before it nor behind ; refuses to 
 be laughed out of or preached out of its cherished 
 
 It :! 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 179 
 
 woe, which it deems a matter of conscience to 
 believe eternal. 
 
 It will not be eternal ; but best not to say so to 
 the sufferer. Best to attempt neither argument 
 nor consolation, only substitution. Hard work, 
 close study, a sudden plunge into the serious 
 business of life, that the victim may find the world 
 contains other things besides love, is the wisest 
 course to be suggested by those long-suffering, 
 much-abused beings — parents and guardians. Love 
 is the best thing — few deny that ; but life contains 
 many supplementary blessings too : honorable am- 
 bition, leading to a success well-earned and well- 
 used; to say nothing of that calm strength which 
 comes into a young man's heart when he has fought 
 with and conquered fate by first conquering him- 
 self, the most fatal fate of alL 
 
 Commonplace preaching this! Every body has 
 heard it. Strange how seldom any body thinks of 
 acting upon it. In the temporary madness of 
 disappointment a poor fellow will go and wreck his 
 whole future ; and when afterward he would fain 
 build up a new life — alas! there is no material 
 left to build with. 
 
 Therefore it is the 'luty of those older and wiser, 
 who, perhaps, their selves have waded through the 
 black river and landed safe on the opposite shore, 
 to show him that it is nc*^ as deep as it seems, and 
 that it has an opposite shore. He may swim 
 through, with the aid of a stout heart and an honest 
 self-respect; self-respect, not selfishness — for the 
 most selfish creature alive is a young man in love, 
 
 ^1 
 
 A 
 
 I! 
 
 I 
 
 I 
 
 •y n 
 
 V n 
 
k • 
 
 .1 
 
 H 
 
 i8o 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 except toward the young woman he happens to be 
 in love with. Not seldom, the very best lesson of 
 life — bitter but wholesome — is taught to a young 
 man by a love disappointment. 
 
 Not so with women ; they being in this matter 
 passive, not active agents. So few girls are " in 
 love " nowadays ; so many set upon merely getting 
 manicd, that I confess to a secret respect for any 
 hea't which has in it the capacity of being 
 '" broken." Not that it does break, unless the victim 
 Is too feeble physically to fight against her mental 
 flUhei»ng; ! but the anguish is sore at the time. 
 Tlitre is no cure for it, except one. suggested by a 
 little girl I know, who with the innocent passion 
 of six and a half adored a certain "beautiful 
 Charlie " of nineteen. Some one suggested that 
 Charlie would marry and cease to care for her. 
 " Then I should be so unhappy," sighed the sad 
 little voice. " What, if he married a wife he was 
 very fond of, and who made him quite happy — 
 would you be unhappy then ? " — " No," was the 
 answer, giveri aftei a slight pause, which showed 
 this conclusion was not come to without thought — 
 "No; I would love his wife, that's all." 
 
 The poor little maid had jumped by instinct — 
 womanly instinct — to the true secret of faithful 
 love — the love which desires, above all, the good 
 of the beloved, and therefore learns to be brave 
 enough to look at happiness through another's eyes. 
 
 This is the only way by which any girl can take 
 up the fragments of a lost or unrequited affection 
 by teaching herself, not to forget it — that is impos- 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 i8i 
 
 sible — but to rise above it ; until the sting is taken 
 out of her sorrow, and it becomes gradually trans- 
 formed from a slow poison into a bitter but whole- 
 some food. 
 
 Besides, though the suggestion may seem far 
 below the attention of poetical people, there are 
 such things as fathers and mothers, brothers and 
 sisters, and other not undeserving relations, to 
 whom a tithe of the affection wasted upon some 
 (possibly) only half-deserving young man would be 
 a priceless boon. And so long as the world 
 endures there will always be abundance of helpless, 
 sick, and sorrowful people, calling on the sorrow- 
 stricken one for aid, and ready to pay her back for 
 all she condescends to give with that griteful 
 affection which heals a wounded heart better than 
 any thing — except work. 
 
 Work, work, work ! That is the grand panacea 
 for sorrow; and, mercifully, there is no end of work 
 to be done in this world, if any body will do it. 
 Few households are so perfect in their happy self- 
 containedness that they are not glad oftentimes of 
 the help of some lonely woman, to whom they also 
 supply the sacred consolation of being able to help 
 somebody, and thus perhaps save her from throw- 
 ing herself blindly into some foolish career for 
 which she has no real vocation, except that forced 
 upon her by the sickly fancy of sorrow. For 
 neither art nor science nor religion will really 
 repay its votaries, if they take to it, like opium 
 eaters, merely to deaden despair. 
 
 And here I must own to a certain sympathy with 
 
 'ifS 
 
 'f: 
 
, \ 
 
 182 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 
 those sisterhoods — yes, even Roman Catholic sister- 
 hoods — who hold out pitying arms to sufferers like 
 these : disappointed maidens, unhappy wives, 
 childless widows ; struck by some one of the many 
 forms of incurable grief which are so common 
 among women, whose destiny generally seems less 
 to conquer than to endure. Of course, the natural 
 duties, those which lie close at hand, are safest 
 and best ; but such do not come to all, and any 
 duties are better than none ; any work, even the 
 painful and often revolting toil of a sister of 
 charity, is safer than idleness. 
 
 For, say what you will, and pity them as you 
 may, these broken hearts are exceedingly trouble- 
 some to the rest of the world. We do not like to 
 see our relatives and friends going about with 
 melancholy faces, perpetually weeping over the 
 unburied corpse of some hopeless grief or unpar- 
 donable wrong. We had much rather they buried 
 it quietly, and allowed us after a due season of 
 sympathy to go on our way. Most of us prefer to 
 be comfortable if we can. I have always found 
 those the best-liked people who have strength to 
 bear their sorrows themselves, without troubling 
 their neighbors. And the sight of all others most 
 touching, most ennobling, is that of a man or 
 woman whom we know to have suffered, perhaps 
 to be suffering still, yet who still carries a cheerful 
 face, is a burden to no friend, nor casts a shadow 
 over any household — perhaps quite the contrary. 
 Those whose own light is quenched are often the 
 light-bringeri, " - 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 183 
 
 
 To accept the inevitable; neither to struggle 
 against it nor murmur at it, simply to bear it — this 
 is the great lesson of life — above all to a woman. 
 It may come late or early, and the learning of it 
 is sure to be hard ; but she will never be a really 
 happy woman until she has learned it, I have 
 always thought two of the most pathetic pictures 
 of women's lives ever given are Tennyson's 
 "Dora"— 
 
 "As time 
 Went onward, Mary took another mate ; 
 But Dora lived unmarried to her death " — 
 
 and Jeanie, in " Auld Robin Gray," who says, with 
 the grave simplicity of a God-fearing Scotswoman — 
 
 "I daurna think o' Jamie, for that wad be a sin ; 
 So I will do my best a gude wife to be, 
 For Auld Robin Gray is vera kind to me." 
 
 Besides lost loves, common to both men and 
 women, there are griefs which belong perhaps to 
 men only — lost ambitions. It is very sore for a 
 man just touching, or having just passed, middle 
 age, slowly to find out that he has failed in the 
 promise of his youth; failed in every thing — 
 aspirations, hopes, actions; a man of whom 
 strangers charitably say, " Poor fellow, there's a 
 screw loose somewhere ; he'll never get on in the 
 world." And even his nearest friends begin mourn- 
 fully to believe this; they cease to hope, and 
 content themselves in finding palliatives for a sort 
 of patient despair. That "loose screw" — Heaven 
 knows what it is, or whether he himself is aware of 
 
i84 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 * 
 
 M iil 
 
 it or not — always seems to prevent his succeeding 
 in any thing; or else, without any fault of his own, 
 circumstances have made him the wrong man in 
 the wrong place, and it is too late now to get out of 
 it. Pride and shame alike keep him silent; yet 
 he knows — and his friends know, and he knows 
 they know it — that his career has been, and always 
 will be, a dead failure ; that the only thing left for 
 him is to gather up the fragments of his vanished 
 dreams, his lost ambitions, his wasted labors, and 
 go on patiently to the end. He does so, working 
 away at a business which he hates, or pursuing an 
 art which he is conscious he has no talent for, or 
 bound hand and foot in a mesh of circumstances 
 against which he has not energy enough to struggle. 
 Whatever form of destiny may have swamped him, 
 he is swamped, and for life. 
 
 Yet even in a case like this, and there are few 
 sadder, lies a cercain consolation. People prate 
 about heroes ; but one sometimes sees a simple, 
 commonplace man, with nothing either grand or 
 clever about him, who, did we only know it, is 
 more worthy the name of hero than many a 
 conqueror of a city. Aye, though all the dream 
 palaces of his youth may have crumbled down ; or, 
 like the Arabs, he may have had to build and 
 live in a poor little hut under the ruins of temples 
 that might have been. But One beyond us all 
 knows the story of this pathetic " might have been," 
 and has pity upon it — the pity that, unlike man's, 
 wounds not, only strengthens and heals. 
 
 For, after all, patience is very strong. Making a 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 «85 
 
 »» 
 
 mistake in the outset of life is like beginning to 
 wind a skein of silk at the wrong end. It gives 
 us infinite trouble, and perhaps is in a tangle half 
 through, but it often gets smooth and straight 
 before the close. Thus many a man has so con- 
 quered himself, for duty's sake, that the work he 
 originally hated, ard therefore did ill, he gets in 
 time to do well, and consequently t' 'ike. In the 
 catalogue of success and failure, >uld such be 
 ever truthfully written, it would be curious to note 
 those who had succeeded in what they had no mind 
 to, and failed in that which they considered their 
 especial vocation. A man's vocation is that to 
 which he is "called;" only sometimes he mistakes 
 the voice calling. But the voice of duty there is 
 no mistaking, nor its response — in the strong 
 heart, the patient mind, the contented spirit; 
 especially the latter, which, while striving to the 
 utmost against what is not inevitable, when once it 
 is proved to be inevitable, accepts it as such, and 
 struggles no more. Still to do this requires not 
 only human courage, but superhuman faith; the 
 acknowledgment of a Will diviner than ours, to 
 which we must submit, and in the mere act of 
 submission find consolation and reparation. 
 
 This is above all necessary in the most irreparable 
 shattering of any lot — an unhappy marriage. A 
 subject so difficult, so delicate, that I would shrink 
 from touching on it, were it not so terribly common, 
 so mournfully true. 
 
 Yes; optimists may deny, and pessimists exult 
 in the fact — but I am afraid it is a fact — that few 
 
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i86 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 iparriages are entirely happy. As few, perhaps as 
 those single lives which are proverbially supposed 
 to be so miserable. This because the average of 
 people are, voluntarily or involuntarily, only too 
 prone to be miserable ; and those that are unhappy 
 single will not be cured by marriage, but will rather 
 have the power of making two people wretched 
 instead of one. Add to this the exceeding rash- 
 ness with which people plunge into a "state" 
 which, as Juliet says — 
 
 " Well thou knowest is full of doubt and fear." 
 
 The fvonder is not that some married people are 
 less happy than they hoped to be, but that any 
 married people, out of the honeymoon, or even in 
 it, are ever happy at all. 
 
 Also it is curious to observe how many persons 
 seem actually to enjoy misery ; to throw away their 
 good things, and fasten deliberately on their evil 
 things ; so that each day — instead of being a rejoic- 
 ing over blessings that, possibly, are like daily 
 bread, only for the day — is wasted in dreary com- 
 plainings; regrets for what is not, rather than 
 thanksgivings for what is. It all springs from the 
 strange idea before adverted to that Heaven is 
 somehow our debtor for endless felicity, which if 
 we do not get, or getting, waste and lose, we cry 
 like Jonah over his withered gourd, " I do well to 
 be angry." 
 
 As men do — no, not men ; they are mostly silent, 
 either from honor or pride — but women, when, 
 having made a rash or loveless marriage, they wake 
 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 187 
 
 up to find themselves utterly miserable, and causing 
 misery — all the sharper because it is irretrievable. 
 
 And yet that very irretrievableness is its best 
 hope. Heretical as the doctrine may seem, I believe 
 if one half of the ordinary marriages one sees 
 could have been broken without public scandal, 
 they would have been broken, some times even 
 within the first twelve months. But the absolute 
 inevitableness of the bond, at least in our English 
 eyes, makes it fix itself like an iron band around a 
 tree trunk — the very bark which it pierces grows 
 over it in time. With the woman, at least; the man 
 is rather different. But with both, if truly honor- 
 able men and women, having made a mistake in 
 marriage, which was presumably a voluntary act, 
 they must abide by it till death. Death, that 
 remorseless breaker of bonds — alike awful to con- 
 template by love or by hate. Since I suppose the 
 most brutally treated wife, the most heavily bound 
 and sorely tried husband, would never contemplate 
 that release without sensations little short of those 
 of a murderer. 
 
 You perceive I am not one of those who uphold 
 divorce. I believe that from no cause, except that 
 which the New Testament gives as a reason for a 
 man's putting away his wife, or a woman her 
 husband, should the tie be allowed to be broken ; 
 at least, not so as to admit of either party marrying 
 another. The Catholic Church is not far wrong 
 in holding marriage to be a sacrament, and its 
 dissolution impossible; though there are cases in 
 which we must admit the right — nay, the necessity 
 
x88 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 >— of total and life-long separation. But only in 
 extreme cases, and when to go on enduring hopeless 
 misery would sacrifice others besides the parties 
 themselves. These two, undoubtedly, alas! fall 
 under the lash of that grim truth, " If you make 
 your own bed, you must lie upon it." ^ 
 
 And is it not sad — if it were not often so heroic 
 — the way people do lie on it ? with the iron spikes 
 eating into their very flesh ; making no complaint, 
 keeping a fair outside to the world, and telling 
 heaps of innocent lies, which deceive nobody, 
 except perhaps those who tell them. 
 
 A perfect marriage is as rare as a perfect love. 
 Could it be otherwise, when both men and women 
 are so imperfect ? Could aught else be expected ? 
 Yet all do expect it. Does not every young couple 
 married believe that they are stepping from the 
 church door into entire felicity, to end only with 
 their lives ? Yet, look at them ten, fifteen, twenty 
 years after, and how have those lives turned out ? 
 Should some old friend pay them a visit, will he or 
 she return envying their felicity, as perhaps on that 
 wedding morning — or hugging themselves in their 
 own independent old-bachelorship or peaceful old- 
 maidism, thinking happiness is, after all, a much 
 more evenly spread thing than they once supposed? 
 
 So it is. Though, according to the old joke, 
 married people are often like little boys bathing, 
 who cry with chattering teeth to the boys on the 
 shore, " Do come in, it's so warm " — it is not always 
 warm. There is no sadder picture — if it were not 
 such an every-day picture — than two young people, 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 X89 
 
 married perhaps for love, at any rate for liking, 
 but married in haste, to repent at leisure ; which 
 they piteously do. Knowing little or nothing of 
 each other's temper, taste, character, they slowly 
 wake up to find these so diverse, that it was morally 
 impossible they could have been happy for very 
 long ; and here they are, tied together in the most 
 intimate union that life allows, forever. A thought 
 absolutely maddening — at first, and with people of 
 sensitive or impulsive natures. I fear, if we could 
 look into our neighbors' hearts, the catalogue of 
 suicides never committed, of elopements unaccom- 
 plished, even of unperpetrated murders, would be, 
 to those who see no difference between the 
 thought and the act, something startling — nay 
 appalling. 
 
 But these tragedies do not happen — at least not 
 often. They drop into "genteel comedy." "Can 
 two walk together, unless they be agreed V* Very 
 many couples are not " agreed " — far from it ; yet 
 seeing they must walk together somehow, they 
 make up their minds to do it, and they do do it. 
 Aye, in spite of good-natured friends, who can 
 not help observing how unhappy they are, and 
 perhaps how happy they might both have been if 
 each had been married to a different sort of person. 
 But this is not the case — they are married to the 
 person whom they themselves chose, or fate chose 
 for them. The thing is done, and there is no un- 
 doing it. 
 
 None ; for the unavoidable bigamies and innocent 
 adulteries so popular nowadays are to all right* 
 
190 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 minded, I will not even say Christian people, actual 
 sin: simple, absolute, inexcusable sin. No non- 
 sense about "elective affinities" and "Platonic 
 friendships " can excuse the smallest trifling with 
 the sanctity of the marriage bond. The empty 
 heart must remain empty forever. v 
 
 Yet it is pitiful — most pitiful! especially if the 
 couple are not bad, only ill-assorted, and young 
 still ; young enough to make a possible future of 
 twenty or thirty years look so black in the distance ! 
 haunted by the pale phantom of dead love, the 
 wretched will-o'-the-wisp of a lost happiness. God 
 help them, poor souls ! No wonder such a lot 
 should drive men wicked and women mad; as it 
 does, oftener perhaps than the world knows. 
 
 For such a grief is of necessity a secret one. 
 The husband pays all outward respect to his silly, 
 bad-tempered wife — the wife hides all her husband's 
 faults and exalts his virtues. Both do their best 
 to take up the fragments that remain, pretending 
 all is exactly as they desire ; throwing dust in their 
 neighbors' eyes ; and, partly from pride, partly from 
 shame, sometimes from mere worldly prudence, 
 keeping up appearances before the world. What- 
 ever the motive, it answers the purpose — a righteous 
 purpose too. Society is not scandalized, the home 
 is not broken up, friends and kindred are not 
 troubled. They only guess — they really know 
 nothing. And if guessing something, they look on 
 in compassionate sympathy — they attempt no help 
 or advice, for none is asked : it would be rather 
 resented than not. The fragments must be gathered 
 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 I9X 
 
 up alone, by each forlorn sufferer, out of the depths 
 of the suffering heart. And how ? 
 
 It is a curious opposite picture to our vaunted 
 English " love " marriages that the French *' ar- 
 ranged" marriages often turn out so well. The 
 reason is apparent. Two people can not live long 
 together in indifference. The tie between a married 
 pair, howsoever married, must be one of either love 
 or hate ; and, being an indissoluble tie — also, few 
 people being wholly wicked or entirely detestable 
 — the chances are that in time it becomes the 
 former. One by one they discover each other's 
 virtues, and learn to be tender over each other's 
 faults. Having, unlike lovers, only the future to 
 deal with, no dead past to bury out of sight, they 
 £^re kinder to one another even than those who 
 were once much more than kind. For there is no 
 injustice deeper than the conscience-stricken in- 
 justice of a waning love — no cruelty sharper than 
 that of apostates to a forsaken idol. And it might 
 be a nice question for some modem Court of Love 
 to decide — ^which is the bitterest lot, to cling through 
 life to a love unfulfilled, or to have attained one's 
 heart's desire, and found the object not worth 
 possessing ? 
 
 Nevertheless, the saving fact which I have 
 acknowledged and accounted for concerning these 
 " manages de con venance," which we in England 
 condemn so much, gives a hope for those almost 
 more hopeless "love" marriages, which, beginning 
 so brightly, sink slowly into permanent gloom, and 
 end — who knows how ? — unless there comes to the 
 
i9> 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 rescue that " stern daughter of the voice of God" 
 — Duty — which is still "loved of love*' — and has 
 oftentimes the power to revive love, even when to 
 all outward eyes it is dead forever. 
 
 Duty — pure duty — without any thought of 
 personal reward or personal happiness — is the 
 strongest, sweetest, most sacred force that domestic 
 life possesses. And it brings with it its own con- 
 solations ; not perhaps the consolation it craves — 
 it is strange how seldom Heaven gives us poor 
 mortals exactly what we desire — but something 
 else, in substitution. How many a sorrowful 
 woman heals her bruised heart beside her baby's 
 cradle ! How many a disappointed, lonely man — 
 to whom his wife is no companion and no helpmeet 
 — takes comfort in his baby daughter, and looks 
 forward hopefully to the time when she will be a 
 grown woman ; his friend and solace, the sharer of 
 his tastes and humorer of his innocent hobbies — 
 all, in short, that her mother might have been, but 
 is not ! Yet he will not love her mother the less, 
 but rather the more, for the child's sake. 
 
 He is right, and the forlorn woman is. right, who, 
 having missed the highest bliss, has strength to 
 take up the fragments of a secondary one ; so that 
 in the divine and comforting words before referred 
 to, " nothing be lost." If she has children, she 
 loves them, often passionately ; not, alas ! for the 
 father's sake; but they teach her to be patient 
 with the father for the sake of his children. While 
 the man who, however inferior his wife may be— 
 and, the glamour of passion ended, he knows her to 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 193 
 
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 ^he 
 
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 be, and knows that all the world knows it too— 
 never allows her to suffer for his own rash mistake, 
 but pays her all tender respect as the mistress of 
 his house and the mother of his offspring — that 
 man, who, whatever his inward sufferings, betrays 
 nothing, and makes no one miserable but himself, 
 will have at least the peace of a quiet conscience. 
 As he goes about the world, doing his duty therein, 
 with a calm brow and a reticent tongue — whatever 
 people suspect, be sure they will say nothing. He 
 has accepted his lot, taken up his burden ; and will 
 carry it through life, steadily, nobly, uncomplain- 
 ingly. Therefore man will honor him, and God 
 will sustain him — to the end. 
 
 Also burdens lighten — or else the back gets used 
 to them by degree. How many a house do we 
 enter, and witnessing its secret cares, think — not 
 without thankfulness — that we can bear our own 
 troubles, but we could not bear theirs. Yet we see 
 they are borne, even with apparent unconsCirus- 
 ness, by those accustomed to them. The endio s 
 snarling and pitiless fault-finding of a bad-tempered 
 man passes harmlessly over his placid, brave-hearted 
 wife; the intolerable silliness or churlishness or 
 selfishness of one member of a family is perhaps 
 hardly noticed by the rest. We have all so much 
 to put up with from other people — and other people 
 the same, or worse, from us — that even love itself 
 will not stand upright. That is (if I can put it 
 clearly without falling into cant phraseology) 
 unless in great things and small we are guided by a 
 motive below and above ourselves and our personal 
 
 13 
 
194 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 interests ; unless, in short, every love we have is 
 made subservient to the love of God. 
 
 If this be so, surely it is possible, even after ship- 
 wrecks like these, not to let ourselves drift away 
 into a sea of despair. The vessel has gone down, 
 but there may be a little boat somewhere ; our sail 
 may be torn to ribbons, but we have oars still ; if 
 we can not row, perhaps we can swim. Somehow 
 or other we may touch land. 
 
 But there is one wreck in which the sufferers can 
 never touch land, unless it be the Land Eternal — 
 I mean the fate of those who find themselves 
 smitten with incurable disease or doomed to hope- 
 less invalidism. It may be exalting matter over 
 mind, placing the physical above the spiritual, but 
 I think to be imprisoned for life in a miserable body 
 which hampers and paralyzes the soul, is as sad a 
 lot as any of the sentimental sorrows which are here 
 chronicled. The more so as it is such an every-day 
 occurrence that it excites little compassion. 
 
 We lavish great sympathy upon sudden accidental 
 illnesses; but the chronic sufferers, those who 
 carry about with them some perpetual pain, for 
 which there is no ease but death ; or even the mere 
 valetudinarians, who " never feel quite well," can 
 not do things which other people do, and have 
 continually to give up things they would like to 
 do, for fear of being a trouble to others — these we 
 get used to so that we often cease to pity them, or 
 to consider what a heavy burden they have to 
 bear, and how much courage they need in order to 
 sustain it all. 
 
OATHXR UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 195 
 
 For it is such an essentially solitary burden. 
 No healthy person can understand even the small 
 misery of feeling " always tired ; " and when it 
 comes to worse than this, when one has to sit still 
 and gaze into long years of helplessness, perhaps 
 acute pain, and though it is still noonday, face the 
 certainty that no genial sun will ever burst into 
 that dim twilight — then life grows very difficult, very 
 dark. To most the future is so obscure that they 
 can build it up in any fanciful way they please ; 
 but to these it is like a blank wall with nothing 
 beyond. To sit down and face it, knowing that 
 our small round of interests, pleasures, or labors 
 can never be wider than now — nay, will probably 
 narrow day by day ; that we can give no pleasure 
 to any body, and receive little from any body ; that 
 somehow or other, we know not why, God has made 
 us separate from our kind ; to invent a poor frag- 
 mentary life for ourselves, and bear it by ourselves, 
 until death comes to untie the knot and lift off the 
 burden — this, I think, is as sad a fate as can befall 
 any human being. 
 
 The only way to meet it is that which I have 
 already counseled in other but scarcely sharper 
 sorrows. Accept it. Cease trying to get well, 
 and worrying about each small symptom of being 
 worse or better. Remember Hezekiah, who 
 " sought not the Lord but the physicians." Not 
 that I defend the Peculiar People, who hold that 
 prayers are to supersede mustard plasters, and 
 esteem anointing with oil a substitute for good food 
 and wholesome water. Still I do think there is 
 
196 
 
 SERMONS OUT OP CHURClt. 
 
 something in the solemn peace of a soul that has 
 ceased to struggle with its body, but takes cheer- 
 fully the modicum of health allowed it, which 
 actually conduces to that very health which is 
 resigned. 
 
 When once an invalid has strength to say, " It 
 does not much matter ; at worst I can but die," 
 sickness and death itself lose their terrors. An 
 old man, a cruel sufferer, once said to me, " If my 
 pain is tolerable, I must bear it ; if it is intolerable, 
 I shall not have to bear it long.*' Nor had he ; 
 and wiien, not many days after, I stood looking 
 down on the peaceful face, so grand in its everlasting 
 calm, with the wrinkles all smoothed out, and the 
 irritable contractions of pain forever gone, I wished 
 that to the end of my days I might have strength 
 to remember those words. 
 
 Remember them too, you whose life is but the 
 fragments of what it might have been, either in 
 mind or body — for the mind is so strangely affected 
 by the body. Yet try to gather up these fragments 
 — they may be worth something still. Try to 
 separate the spiritual from the physical as much as 
 you can, and when you grow irritable, exacting, 
 prone to see every thing in an exaggerated light, 
 and to think that ever was any one so afflicted as 
 you, say to yourself, " It is only my body ; I, the 
 real me, must not let it conquer me. This flesh is 
 my temporary dungeon, yet — 
 
 " ' Stone walls do not a prison make, 
 Nor iron bars a cage '— 
 
GATHER UP THB FRA0MBNT8. 
 
 197 
 
 
 the * mind, innocent and quiet/ may abide with me 
 still." 
 
 Aye, and so it often is. Are not some of the very 
 sweetest faces we know — faces that memory falls 
 back upon and recalls in the tumult of life with a 
 sense of rest and peace — those of confirmed invalids, 
 who may have spent years of such imprisonment, 
 perhaps only moving from bed to sofa, and back to 
 bed, well aware that they never will move else- 
 where except to the one narrow couch where we 
 all must lie, yet never complaining, never craving 
 after the outside world, which circles noisily around 
 their perpetual silence ; exacting no sympathy, on 
 the contrary, giving it to all and any who need. 
 
 " I have no troubles," said, smiling, one of those 
 sweet saints whom most people would have con- 
 sidered " a great martyr." " It is you others who 
 come to me with all yours." 
 
 So we do — we who are still in the thick of the 
 fight — to these, who seem as if their battle were 
 done forever. How often do we find counsel and 
 comfort by the couch of some dear woman — it is 
 generally a woman — whom the world calls " a 
 terrible sufferer," but whose sufferings are the last 
 thing she talks about. She has let herself go, and 
 is absorbed in the interests of other people. The 
 fragments of her life that remain to her she has 
 made so beautiful that you almost forget it was 
 ever meant to be like other lives, a perfect whole ; 
 that the wasted frame before you was ever a merry 
 baby, a happy girl, a young woman looking forward 
 to woman's natural destiny. All that is over, yet 
 
198 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 
 she is not unhappy ; nay, she is actually happy in 
 her own way ; no one could look in her face and 
 doubt it. But it is a happiness quite different 
 from and beyond ours ; something which naught 
 earthly can either give or take away. 
 
 This is a bright picture, which I would fain place 
 opposite to the dark pictures I have drawn, com- 
 promising nothing and denying nothing ; yet saying 
 after all, " Take courage. God never leaves Him- 
 self without a witness. In the deepest darkness is 
 a possibility of light." "^ -h-scr 
 
 _ Fc^ there is that in the human soul which wi/l 
 not die. Neither mental nor physical suffering will 
 kill it before its time. And neither will extinguish 
 in it the germ of possible happiness, in this world 
 at least ; whether or not in other worlds, God 
 knows. But he has said enough to prove to us two 
 things, that here on earth sin is the only absolute 
 death, and " Deliver us from evil *' the only true 
 salvation. 
 
 Therefore, mere pain, in all forms, becomes a 
 temporary and endurable thing, if we will only try 
 to see it as such, accustoming our eyes to 'behold 
 the good rather than the bad ; choosing in our 
 daily life to eat the food and reject the poison. 
 
 Easy enough, one would say, yet nobody does 
 it. People sit and mourn over the fragments of 
 their scattered joys, blind to the blessings they 
 have, seeking madly for blessings denied. The 
 rich complain of their responsibilities, the poor of 
 their renunciations. The single think they would 
 have been happy married, the married reply warn- 
 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 199 
 
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 ingly, "Keep as you are." Many-childed parents 
 groan under the burden of that bright troop of boys 
 and girls, whom some empty household longs 
 enviously for, with an angry protest against Provi- 
 dence, whose gifts are so unequally divided. 
 Nobody will see his own blessings, or open his 
 heart to enjoy them, till the golden hour has gone 
 by forever, and he finds out too late all that he 
 might have had and might have been. 
 
 A discovery made sometimes in an empty room 
 or by a grave side, knowing that all the tears in the 
 world will nev^r lift that stone or fill that vacant 
 chair ; that all our ceaseless complainings, our 
 angry fault-findings, even our real wrongs, sink into 
 nothing before the remorseless stillness of death. 
 Even if life were not the absolute whole we expected 
 it to be, if our friends were not perfect, nor our- 
 selves neither, why did we fall into despair, instead 
 of quietly setting to work to gather up the fragments 
 that remained, suffering nothing to be lost ? Now 
 we never can gather them up any more. The great 
 Destroyer has passed by, and there they lie — must 
 lie — forever. 
 
 Gather up the fragments. In every human life 
 there are sure to be some. Every one of us has 
 a secret chamber somewhere, filled with inhabitants 
 whom none but himself can see; it rests with 
 himself alone whether they shall be decaying 
 corpses, or only beautiful ghosts. 
 
 " God made me what I am, and made my lot 
 what He willed it to be," is a truth not inconsistent 
 with the other truth that He gives us the materials 
 
200 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 to \^ork with, but leaves the workmanship in our 
 own hands. Every man can make or mar his own 
 life ; at any rate, it appears so. The fact that we 
 know nothing of the results of our acts, makes 
 them, as regards ourselves, absolutely independent; 
 and the impossibility of gazing one inch into the 
 impenetrable future comes to the same thing as if 
 we beheld it all. 
 
 ^ "Lead Thou me on: I do not ask to see * 
 
 The distant scene : one step's enough for me." 
 
 But that one step must be taken steadily, firmly, 
 religiously. There must be no looking back, no 
 mourning over the inexorable past. Each day — 
 such a little day, and every one circling around so 
 quietly that they mount into weeks and months 
 and years before we know what we have lost or 
 gained ! — each day must be filled up, minute by 
 minute, with those duties which are in themselves 
 joys, or grow to be. If among them ever rises 
 the spectral face of the never-forgotten might-have- 
 been — beautiful in its eternal youth, perfect in its 
 unattained felicity — why fear ? It is but a ghost, 
 and life is a reality. . . ; - 
 
 Aye, a useful, usable, noble reality. Happy, too, 
 when once the grim idol Self has been dethroned 
 forever. For it is a truth which we all have to 
 learn — oftentimes through many a bitter lesson — 
 that we never can be happy until we cease trying 
 to make ourselves so. -,.;', ^: 
 
 I said that this would be a rather sad sermon to 
 the young ; but it is not so sad as it seems. There 
 
GATHER UP THI FRAGMENTS. 
 
 80Z 
 
 comes a time — to some earlier, to others later — 
 when faith has to take the place of hope, and better 
 even than bliss is consolation. Surely, then, it is 
 something to know, on looking around on those 
 about us, men and women, that the lives which seem 
 the most complete — that is, have most perfectly 
 fulfilled the end for which they were given — are 
 very seldom what we call " fortunate " lives. Few 
 have been carried out exactly as they began, fewer 
 still have attained the felicity they expected. Some 
 — and those often the poblest and highest — ^have 
 been saddened by one or other of those secret, 
 silent tragedies which are always happening around 
 us, which we all know, or at least guess at, but 
 never speak of; nor do they. 
 
 I once knew a dear old lady — so sweet, so bright, 
 so clever; wearing her eighty years " as lightly as 
 a flower." When you talked with her you would 
 have thought her a woman of thirty, so full was 
 she of all the quick sympathy of youth, the wise 
 tenderness of middle age. Of the weaknesses of 
 old age she had absolutely none. Her interest 
 in all those about her was such that she never 
 seemed to think of herself at alh No complaint, 
 no murmur, at her own ailments — and she had 
 ailments and sorrows too — evet fell from her lips ; 
 her only anxiety was about the cares of other 
 people, and how she could lighten them, in great 
 things and small. Her bounty knew no limits 
 except her means, which were not great ; " but," 
 she once said, smiling, "I need so little ; and then 
 you see, my dear, I always pay my bills every week, 
 
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 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 V f 
 
 so as to give no trouble to any body afterward." 
 Thus she kept house, with the utmost order, yet 
 with ceaseless hospitality. It was indeed the 
 House Beautiful, to whose gates all who came 
 departed refreshed and strengthened, and whence 
 no creature who came in want or grief was ever 
 sent empty away. 
 
 I need not name it ; many now living will remem- 
 ber it ; and none who were familiar there could 
 ever forget it, or her, as she sat in her quiet comer, 
 with her sweet old face, and her lovely little ringed 
 hands — peaceful, idle hands ; since for some years 
 before she died she was nearly blind. Yet her 
 blindness — though, coming so late in life, it made 
 her very helpless — never made her sad or dull ; she 
 could still listen to and join in conversation, and 
 she greatly liked society, especially that of the 
 young. There was always a tribe of young people 
 coming about her telling her all their doings and 
 plannings, their amusements and their troubles. 
 She was fond of them, and they — they adored her ! 
 One girl in particular owned that the first time 
 this dear old lady voluntarily kissed her, she felt 
 " as if she had been kissed by her first love." 
 
 When she died — at over eighty, certainly, but 
 her executors had to guess at the date, for she 
 was an old maid, without any near relation, and 
 had often said did not even know her own age, it 
 was so long since she was born — when she died 
 there was found among her private papers a portrait 
 of a young man in a foreign military dress. No 
 one could guess who it was ; the name — there was 
 
 
 I 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAJMENTS. 
 
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 a name — ^no one had ever heaiu of. At last some 
 old aquaintance recalled a far-away tradition of 
 her having been once about to be married ; some- 
 how the marriage was broken off, but the two 
 remained friends, and, it was believed, corresponded 
 and occasionally met, till his death, which hap- 
 pened when she was about fifty years old. For 
 his nephew — and heir, he having died unmarried 
 — ^had then been to see her; somebody recollected 
 having met the young man at her house, and her 
 introducing him by the name on the miniature. 
 After that all was silence. She was never heard 
 to name the name again. Yet she lived on for 
 thirty more years. 
 
 " What do you do when you are quite alone ?" 
 was once asked anxiously of her, when she was too 
 blind either to write or sew or read. 
 
 " What do I do ? My dear, I sit and think. I 
 have so much to think about — and so many." 
 " And are you never dull ?" 
 " Dull ? Oh, no ! I am quite happy." 
 She was, I am sure. You could see it in her 
 face : the peaceful happiness of a soul which has 
 ceased " to bother itself" about itself at all, and is 
 absorbed in kindly cares for other people. Her 
 last act — the last time she ever crossed her thres- 
 hold — was, I remember, a visit of kindness, partly 
 as an excuse to take for a drive a person who was 
 too feeble to walk much. She was then extremely 
 feeble herself; and climbing a steep stair, one who 
 assisted her said anxiously, "I fear you are very 
 tired?" — "Yes," she replied, "lam always tired 
 
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 ao4 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 now. But/' turning suddenly around with the 
 brightest of smiles, " never mind ; it will be all right 
 soon." Four weeks after she lay in her final rest, 
 looking so young, so pretty, so content, that those 
 who best loved her choked down their sobs and 
 smiled, saying, "It was like putting a baby to 
 sleep." 
 
 This is but one story out of many which I could 
 tell, even out of my own knowledge, to prove that 
 the fragments of a broken life can be so gathered 
 up as to make a noble and even a happy life unto 
 the end. Many a time as we go on our troublous 
 way through the world, are we cheered and 
 encouraged by the sight of such: old men who 
 have done their work, and for whom is come the 
 time of rest — the "blind-man's holiday" between 
 the lights, when they do nothing, and nobody 
 expects them to do any thing but to look back on 
 the fruits of their labor and rejoice ; old women 
 who have their children around them, and grand- 
 children, in whom they take over again all a 
 mother's delight freed from a mother's anxiety. 
 Lastly — and these are not the least numerous, and 
 perhaps the most touching of all — unmarried 
 women, whose lives must necessarily have been 
 incomplete, barren of joy, or clouded with incurable 
 grief; yet one has but to look on their faces, sweet 
 and saintly, to perceive that their evil has brought 
 forth good — that, whatever their own lot may have 
 been, to others they have proved a continual bless- 
 ing. How can those fail to be blessed, who are 
 every body's comfort and every body's help ? 
 
GATHER UP THE FRAGMENTS. 
 
 20$ 
 
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 Occasionally, too, Ve meet persons, still in 
 middle age, for whom, it is easy to see, the sun 
 has gone down at noon. Something has happened 
 — ^we know not what, or perhaps we do know, but 
 never mention it — something which will make their 
 future like that of a tree with its "leader" broken; 
 it may not die, it may grow up green and strong, 
 but it will never grow tall, it will never be a perfect 
 tree. With them, too, life in its highest sense is 
 over ; the play is played out — the feast is ended ; 
 there is nothing left but to gather up the fragments 
 and endure. 
 
 And they are gathered. Slowly, painfully may 
 be — ^but it is done. Nothing is lost. Nothing 
 remains to cumber, corrupt, or decay. Every 
 thing available to use still, is used — strength, 
 talents, energies, affections ; all that God gave has 
 been given back to Him ; not perhaps in the way 
 the offerer once desired to give it, but nevertheless 
 in the right way, as the final result proves. And 
 he has accepted the sacrifice ; and requited it, too. 
 Not perhaps with earthly felicity ; not at all with 
 the sort of felicity longed for ; but with something 
 better than happiness — peace; that peace which 
 one sees sometimes on very suffering faces — it 
 was seen continually on the dear old face I have 
 spoken of — " the peace of God which passeth all 
 understanding." 
 
 There is a psalm of Darid*'— poor King David, 
 who paid so dearly in sorrow for every sin he com- 
 B)itted, yet who had strength over and over again 
 to gather up the fragments of his piteous, errorful 
 
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 906 
 
 SERMONS OUT OF CHURCH. 
 
 life, and live on — aye, and to die in faith, and in 
 hope of his never-builded temple ; there is a psalm, 
 I say, in which he speaks of those who "have 
 their portion in this life." He never blames them ; 
 he envies them not. Neither does he murmur at 
 the will of God, who sees fit to fill them with His 
 " hid treasure," and to give them the Jew's crown- 
 ing blessing, " children at their desire ; " that they 
 may "leave the rest of their substance to their 
 babes." 
 
 But "as for me," he continues, and you can 
 almost hear the ringing of the triumphant harp — 
 " Davia's harp of solemn sound " — " as for me, I 
 will behold Thy face in righteousness : I shall be 
 satisfied,- when I awake, with Thy likeness." 
 
 Thoroughly "satisfied." Nothing lost. Nothing 
 scattered or wasted. No fragments to be gathered 
 up; every thing perfect and complete in Him — in 
 the fullness of Him which filleth all in all. 
 
 May it one day be so with us, my brethren 
 and sisters ! Amen. 
 
 I •'*■ 
 
 These Sermons out of Church are ended. 
 
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