L o LOUIS IX OF FRAUCE.) / New York, P Y. Collier. THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD; AND TRUE MEN AS WE NEED THEM. BY KEY. BERNARD O’REILLY, L.D. (LAVAL.) TWO VOL TIMES IN ONE. NEW YORK: PETER F. COLLIER, PUBLISHER. 1881 OOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY CHESTNUT HILL, MASS. \ , & h) x KJ' 1 JL / % THE MIEEOE OF * \ TRUE WOMANHOOD. A Book of Instruction for Women in the World. “ At the present day, I swear to thee, that there are Women in the World of such excellence, that I have more envy of the life which they lead in secret, than of all the Sciences which the Ancients taught in public.”— Antonio de Guevara. Copyright, 1877. Bx P. F. Collier. New York: J. J. Little & Co., Printers, 10 to 20 Astor Plaeo. * I 'i TO THE MEMORY OF » MY MOTHER, , ' » i TAKEN FROM ME IN MY CHILDHOOD : AN IRREPARABLE LOSS, , / ’ ' AND A LIFE-LONG REGRET# •t \ \ ' New York, Nov. 10th, 1817. IMPRIMATUR. , JOHN CARDINAL McCLOSKY, ARCHBISHOP OF NEW YORK. Archiepiscopal Residence, Quebec, November 16, 1877. Rev. B. O’Reilly, New York. Reverend and Dear Sir :—I received in good time your letter of the 6th instant, with the first 256 pages of your last work, “ The Mirror of True Womanhood.” • Before sending you an answer I wished to read a few chapters of this hook, and now I can hut congratulate and thank you for it. It would he desirable to have this work translated into French, and circulated among our Canadian people, who, I am quite certain, would read it with interest and benefit to themselves. Pray accept once more my congratulation and thanks, and believe me your devoted servant. * E. A., Archbishop of Quebec. Cincinnati, November 12, 1877. Reverend and Dear Sir :—Thanks for your beautiful new book, “The Mirror of True Womanhood.” Like St. Francis de Sales’ “Devout Life,” written, I think, at the suggestion of the Bon Henri (Henry IY. of France), it shows that, if we should look for the perfect religious in convents, perfec¬ tion is also attainable in the world. May God grant you the multos annos to write more books ! Yours sincerely, J. B. PURCELL, Archbp. Cincinnati. Rev. Dr. O’Reilly . 278 Ohio St., Chicago, November 12, 1877. Dear Rev. Sir :—Your very kind letter reached me this morning, and it was followed in a few hours by the superb copy of your “ Life of Pius IX.” I am rejoiced to hear that your publisher has been compelled to commence a seventh edition. The new work of which I have received the advance sheets to-day, “ The Mirror of True Womanhood,” is a work fitted to the times. It will be of vast service to many mothers and daughters in the Church* by showing them how they may practically conform their lives to the bright pictures of womanly virtue you have so felicitously portrayed. And if others outside the Church may be induced to look into your pages, how many may be saved who are eager to do good and live virtuously, and have no one to teach them ! There is a vast multitude of women in this country marching toward a precipice of ruin, and it is a mystery to know what to do to arrest their downward progress. Many of them have no religion, and, though a man without religion is danger¬ ous to society, a woman who is destitute of it is prone to be a monster. I shall welcome your complete work with the highest satisfaction. Gratefully your servant, THOMAS FOLEY, Bishop Adm. Chicago. iv THE AUTHOR’S PREFACE. It is not without diffidence that this book is sent forth to take its place in the literature of Christian households. The form in which its teachings are imparted is novel, and may appear to many strange. But a word of explanation from the author may suffice to the fair-minded reader. Ascetic works we have in superabundance; but these would not reach the class of readers for whom these chap¬ ters are destined, nor would they be taken up and perused in the hours which might be given to a work which is not professedly one of devotion. Perhaps, too, there may be found in the following pages instructions which will prove more attractive and profitable to its readers than the more arid lessons of the ascetic or the didactic writer. The chief object which the author had in view in under¬ taking to write this book was to help, so far as his abilities permitted, in withstanding the spread of the prevailing na¬ turalism, which is daily invading more and more our homes, the minds and lives of parents as well as of children. If we can preserve the Home from its influence, by mak¬ ing of every mother a supernatural woman, living a life of faith, loving above all things self-denial and self-sacrifice, fondly attached to the heroic ways and virtues of our ancestors,—the Home, in our midst, will bring forth super- v vi THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE. natural men and women, unselfish, pure, truth-loving, trust¬ worthy, and devoted to the best interests of country and religion. What is attempted here may encourage others to pursue the same theme with far better prospects of success. This holy emulation would in itself reward the labor bestowed on this book; and who knows but, imperfect as it is, it may bring happiness to more than one hearth, light to more than one mind, and nobler aims to more than one life hith¬ erto wasted ? It is not only the ripe fruits which Autumn pours into our homes that are treasured by young and old alike ; the very last withered leaves which the storms of this dreary November weather whirl along the roadside, or through the forest wastes, may serve as a welcome couch to the benighted wayfarer or the homeless outcast. And, dear reader, do not quarrel with the writer’s me¬ thod. A book written for pleasant recreation, as well as for solid instruction, cannot be like the broad surface of a royal river over which the largest and the smallest craft can move together without hindrance or interruption. Our path, in these chapters, lies along a shallow stream amid sylvan scenery : we can rest in the noonday heat beneath the sha¬ dow of some wooded overhanging crag, stretching our limbs on the green sward, inhaling the fragrant air, and soothed by the noisy river beneath as it frets and foams among the rocks, discoursing the while on the Home we have left, and on the busy world toward which we are journeying. Or, as we wend our way later along shady banks where the stream glides, noiseless and unruffled, as if it also reposed after a toilsome passage, we can discuss together the diffi¬ culties of life’s road, examine the grounds of our hopes and our fears, propose in turn our ideals and aims; and thus beguiling the length of the way, forget the sultry THE AUTHOR'S PREFACE. • • YU » weather, and the flight of time, till, with the declining sun, we descry afar the streamlet joining the broad river, where the river itself skirts the vast and crowded city, and min-, gles with the golden expanse of the vast ocean beyond. Enjoy the shady and restful nooks you will find as you proceed from chapter to chapter; open your eyes to the prospects they here and there afford; and if they prompt you, in looking on the pleasant earth around, or in gazing up into the blue heavens overhead,—in picking up the simple flower that springs by the wayside, or listening to the sweet songsters of thicket and grove, to bless the Great Giver of all that is good and beautiful,—you will be grate¬ ful to your guide ere your journey’s end. As it will be apparent to the reader, frequent quotations have been borrowed from the works of Kenelm Digby, which have ever been especial favorites with the author. Nor can he abstain from expressing his thanks to the spir¬ ited publisher, who spared no expense in securing the very highest typographical excellence in the establishment of J. J. Little & Co., of this city, and in Mr. J. S. King, an engraver whose artistic skill will be admired in the exquis- . ite plate which forms the frontispiece to our Mirror of True Womanhood. i New York, November the 25 th, 1877. TABLE OF CONTENTS. Dedication • • PAGE . iii Approbations • • iv Author’s Preface. • • . V Chapter I. Introductory. Early love of natural beauty . 1 Early love of supernatural beauty 2 The bistory of boly women a mir¬ ror reflecting tliat beauty . . 2 Tbe Incarnate God tbe First Model : next to bim tbe Blessed > Mother.3 We, tbeir children, bound to be like to them .... 3 Women, by nature, are prone to all that is most heroic ... 3 This book written for home-life . 4 Especially for tbe laborer’s wife and daughter .... 4 Chapter II. The True Woman's Kingdom: the Home. Sacredness of tbe family home . 7 Woman’s love, its light and warmth.8 Supernatural virtues in the Chris¬ tian home ..... 9 A living faith .... 9 How Christian mothers can imitate the Blessed Virgin Mary . . 12 PAGK Piety. Purity of intention . . 14 Illustrated from home-life of the early Christians ... 15 Chapter III. The Home Virtues —( Continued ). Hospitality.18 Holiness.20 Innocence of conversation . . ; 21 What the home ought not to be . 21 Chapter IV. How the Home can he made a Paradise. Illustrated by the life of St. Mar¬ garet of Scotland ... 23 How the poor man’s home is made delightful ..... 28 Unselfishness in the wife . . 29 Make your home bright and sunny 31 Dark and cheerless homes created by selfishness .... 32 Sad consequences of this in labor¬ ers’ homes .... 33 Consequences in a wealthy home 34 Chapter V. Further Illustrations of Selfishness and Unselfishness. The example of St. Elzear and his wife, St. Delphine . . .38 St. John Colombino converted by his patient wife .... 39 IX X CONTENTS. PAGE Example of an angelic girl : Wliat she did for lier father and brother ..... 40 Contrary example : How a young wife’s selfishness ruined her home and her husband . . 48 * Chapter VI. The Wife in the Christian Home. The Christian home a sanctuary blessed by the Church . . 55 Guarded by angels ... 57 Woman’s duties as wife . . 57 To be her husband’s companion . 58 To be her husband’s helpmate . 59 Help in the wealthy home . . 64 Help in the laborer’s home . . 64 To be her husband’s friend and savior ..... 65 Example : The carpenter’s wife . 68 The chivalrous service and obedi¬ ence of every true-hearted hus¬ band to his wife ... 73 Chapter VII. The Wife as the Treasurer of the Home. Man’s province to provide for the home : Woman’s to dispense the treasures of the home . . 75 Economy of time : Order, comfort, loveliness.76 Stewardship of the wealthy wife. 78 Two extremes to be avoided . 79 She dispenses hospitality . . 80 A hospitable spirit illustrated . 81 Leon du Coudray’s widowed mo¬ ther .81 An American wife; an ideal home . .... 83 The wife as the friend of the Poor.87 Spirit of charity in Catholic coun¬ tries .88 The lofty ideal of Catholic Spain 89 That of Catholic Germany St. Elizabeth of Hungary . . 91 PAGE Habitual practice of reverence recommended in the home, and toward the poor ... 93 Beautiful example of a French peasant girl .... 94 Of Frencli-Canadian women in 1847 . 96 Crowning instance: The ship- carpenter’s wife ... 99 Chapter VIII. The Wife's Crowning Duty : Fidelity. Solicitude of the Church for the honor of the home . . . 104 How she guarded it in past times . 107 Modern legislation destructive of the family honor . . . 108 Conjugal fidelity illustrated . 109 Rebecca . . . . . 110 Judith.110 Anna, the Prophetess . . .111 Fidelity to the living intended here.112 Rules : Reserve and secrecy . 113 Friendships that are baneful . 114 Remedies in danger and trial . 115 Imperative necessity of superna¬ tural virtue to women sorely tried.116 Example of fidelity : The child- wife ..117 Vanity, the path to dishonor . 123 The home-pleasures which are a safeguard.124 Honor the tree of life in the home p.aradise . .... 126 „ Chapter IX. The Mother. Supernatural methods of the true mother.128 Share of the Divine Spirit in the work of education . . . 132 Other qualities in the mother’s government . . . . 135 Consistency. Perfect truthful¬ ness .135 \ CONTENTS. xi PAGE Happy effects of early habits of truthfulness .... 186 Justice—Kindness—Gentleness . 137 Self-control . . . . . 138 Never correct in a passion . . 141 Win the hearts of your children . 141 Importance of this . . . 143 Chapter X. The Mother’s Office toward Childhood. What a child is in the sight of God.146 The soul of childhood . . . 147 The mind of childhood . . 149 How it is to be cultivated : A beau¬ tiful example .... 149 Joyousness and love of enjoy¬ ment .153 How nature is to be made lovely to the child .... 154 Make the child see everywhere God and his angels . . . 156 Never, at any moment, repel your children.157 Faith and trust in a mother’s love are the breath of life for her children .... 157 The mother is the keeper of her children’s hearts . . . 158 How a solid religious character is built up.159 Be invariably cheerful. . . 161 Be pitiless toward uncharitable¬ ness .161 The choice of baptismal names . 165 Chapter XI. A Digression: The Homes of the Old Country and of the Adopted Country. How to account for many diffi¬ culties mothers in the homes of the laborer and the poor man have to encounter . . .171 Homes in Ireland . . .173 Their virtues . . . .174 PAGE Education in these homes . .175 These traditions to be cherished in the new homes . . . 176 Impossibility of preserving the influence surrounding the old home. ... . . . 177 City life fatal to the ancient home influences.179 How poor mothers might be aided by their wealthy sisters . . 181 Chapter XII. The Mother's Office toward Boyhood and Girlhood. The boys and girls in the la¬ borer’s home . . . .184 Courage and generosity of labor¬ ing women . . . .185 How firmly they can count on Christ’s assistance . . . 186 Other treasures found in such homes.108 Their children to be taught the dignity of labor. . . .189 To be kept joyous . . .190 To be stimulated by praise . . 190 Their mother should be gentle, low-voiced, and patient . . 191 What kind of independence they are to be given .... 193 Extreme care in choosing compa¬ nions for them . . .194 “ The Two Nests ” . . . 195 Chapter XIII. Formation of Boyhood and Girlhood — ( Continued). Simplicity in dress and sobriety in food.198 / Sense of duty to be inculcated very early.199 And sedulously cultivated . . 300 Cultivate the hearts of your chil¬ dren .301 Children are not born but made heartless.303 Xll CONTENTS. PAGE Heartlessness is but full-blown selfishness.204 Examples of heartlessness : A heartless girl . . . . 205 A heartless wife and husband . 207 Terrible end of a heartless mis¬ tress .212 Chapter XIV. Culture of the Heart—{Continued). The rich treasures and mighty moral forces undeveloped in the heart of youth . . . 217 Even in the hearts of the poor . 217 Instance : Madame Barat, found¬ ress of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart.217 Education a creation . . . 220 Create in the heart of childhood and boyhood generosity in con¬ quering self .... 222 Generosity in the exercise of the home-charities .... 224 Reverence and devotion toward sick parents and others . . 224 Forbearance toward the aged and infirm.228 Generosity in forgetting one’s aches to please others . . 229 A beautiful instance of it . 230 Generosity in practicing the out¬ door charities . . . .233 A patriarchal family and its char¬ ities .234 A terrible lesson . . . . 235 Make not the bread of hospitality bitter ..... 236 Chapter XV . Special Training for Girls and Boys. I. What is special in the training of girls.240 Simplicity in dress . . . 243 Suitability in dress not extrava¬ gance .244 PAG* Passion for dress and passion for light reading .... 247 What girls should read . . 247 Special religious topics : Modern errors.249 What girls should not read . 251 Objects of art : Exceeding care in their choice .... 252 Spanish painting possesses the true Christian ideal . . . 253 Teach them the value of time . 254 Minutes the golden sands of time.257 “ Odd moments ” and their use . 258 Practices of devotion: Careful choice of them .... 260 Their significance to be carefully explained.260 The mother’s guidance with re¬ spect to matrimony . . . 261 With respect to vocations to reli¬ gious life.263 II. Special care needed in educating boys.264 Ground them in true piety,—the foundation of true manliness . 265 The spirit of Christian chivalry 266 It is the ideal of true manhood . 267 Its characteristics : The oath and rules of chivalry . . . 269 Fearlessness in the cause of Truth : St. Columbanus ^ . 271 “ Be the Soldier of Truth ! No Struggle, no Crown ! No Lib¬ erty, no Honor or Dignity ! ” . 273 Other traits of Christian chivalry 274 Teach your sons to be their sis¬ ters’ willing servants . . 275 Home-bred courtesy,—its neces¬ sity and value .... 276 Noble courtesy of Catholic coun¬ try-folk .277 In Portugal.277 In Spain.278 CONTENTS. PAGE Do not allow your daughters to make themselves their brothers’ servants.279 Let your home be the center of amusement for your sons . .281 Be their constant companion in their outdoor amusements . 282 What a divine work the education of a single child is . . . 282 One easy to the poor mother . 283 And easy to the wealthy mother . 284 A poor mother and her two noble orphans.285 Let your sons be God-fearing and self-reliant .... 288 The profession of truth; and truth in our actions . . . 290 , - v • / Chapter XVI. Duties toward Parents and Servants. I. The ancient patriarchal authority still a living institution . . 292 Filial piety the religion of sweet¬ est gratitude .... 293 Taught by civilized pagan na¬ tions .293 How necessary in the New World 295 Kindness to parents-in-law . . 296 A heroic example . . . 297 II. The Christian idea of service . 301 Win your servants’ hearts . . 303 The Catholic Golden Kule: Do them all the good you can,—and make them as good as you can 304 Lofty views of duty in Catholic Spain.307 Care of servants’ souls in Catholic countries.307 “ If you would be loved, love.” . 309 The tie of household charity loos¬ ened in modern society . . 310 How the kindness and charity of Christian women can prevent socialism and communism. . 311 XIII PAGE Unite a motherly interest with reserve.313 Encourage them to consult you and trust in you . . . 313 Do not judge them hastily . . 314 Try to make them comfortable, to refine and elevate them . . 314 Do not overburden them with work.315 In sickness care for them tenderly 316 Praise them generously, but j ustly 317 How servants repay kindness . 319 Chapter XVII. Obstacles to the right Government of the Home. The ideal home, which united hearts and wills create . . 321 The Beatrix of Dante is the Church, the sanctifier, and sa¬ vior of man : such is the wife in the home .... 322 Make your home an hereditary home.323 Obstacles to the wife’s good gov¬ ernment .325 In the wealthy home . . . 327 In the poor home .... 331 Chapter XVIII. The Mistress of the Home and her Social Duties. Twofold meaning of the word “Society” .... 334 The “ Woman of the World” and the “ Worldly Woman ” . . 335 Need of true Christian women in the world . . . .338 Importance of their social duties . 339 Good effected by such women in Europe.340 In America.341 Charity and religion promoted by social gatherings . . . 342 Influence of a true woman over a degenerate society : Example . 345 XIV CONTENTS. PAGE Social virtues of American women 348 Work of tlie woman of tlie world outside of lier home . . . 349 Part of the working-man’s wife . 351 How the good work together . 352 Chapter XIX. Maidenhood. Girlhood of the Virgin Mother, its model ..... 356 Her public life, a guide for the trials of womanhood . . . 357 Girls reared in affluence and forced to labor .... 359 Resolution and fortitude of American women . ... 359 Superior virtue developed in ad¬ versity : Instances . . . 361 low this superiority was sorely tested.362 leroism of Southern women . 363 'ruelty of Federal officials . . 364 r ow ladies filling Federal offices should regulate their conduct 367 ^ady companions: Their hard lot.370 Guidance for them . . . 371 An ideal example of their influ¬ ence . 372 Governesses : An example illus¬ trating two different classes . 380 Rules for the direction of govern¬ esses .388 School-teachers : They must be guided by the same rules . 397 Thorough training needed : Nor¬ mal schools in England . . 397 In Canada ..... 398 Not to be satisfied with a low standard of excellence . . 398 Should be well remunerated . 399 Special advice to teachers . . 400 Chapter XX. The Toilers of the Shop and the Loom . PAGE The divine comforts of poverty and toil.403 Toilers in the shop : Their abject servitude . . . . . 405 Hard lot of dress-makers . . 407 Advice to dress-makers and sales¬ women.408 Woman in manufactures . . 411 The brilliant side of modern in¬ dustry .4ll Its hideous side .... 413 Godless and conscienceless indus- 0 try a foul plague-spot . . 414 The armies of women toilers : In America.416 In Europe.417 Social outlook .... 417 The Ancient Church the helper of women.418 Appeal against heartless industry 418 It cuts down the tree to gather the fruit.419 It destroys the child, the woman, and the home .... 419 A European statesman on factory women.420 Was the ideal of the Puritans a great industrial manufacturing people,—or a nation of farmers and seamen ? 422 The unlimited extension of indus¬ try a political, economical, and social blunder .... 424 Remedial measures from religion 425 Chapter XXI. Duties of Servants. . . . 435 Chapter XXII. Supplementary .... 459 THE MIRROR OP True Womanhood. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY. Omnis honos, omnis admiratio, omne studium ad mrtutem, et ad eas actiones qucB virtuti sunt consentanece refertur. All honor, admiration, and zealous endeavor is referred to virtue and to the actions which are conformable to it.—C icero. It is said of one of the most celebrated men of the last century, that, when a mere babe, he was made to love flow¬ ers and all beautiful things in nature. His father, a dis¬ tinguished naturalist, would take the child with him into the garden, and while he was busied watering the plants and examining how it fared with each of them, he would place in the child’s hands and on his lap bunches of the most lovely dowers. Whether or not it was an inbred disposi¬ tion in the child, he would—so the story or his life relates —amuse himself with the bright and fragrant things, ad¬ miring and studying them more and more as he grew up, till this pursuit became an irresistible fascination ; and thus, from botany to other departments of natural science, the student progressed, revealing to his fellow-men the wonders that he had discovered, and leaving behind him an immor¬ tal name.* * Linnaeus, or Carl von Linne, born in 1707, died in 1778. 1 1 i 2 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. Even so is it possible to place in the hands and keep be¬ fore the eyes of childhood some of the loveliest and most fragrant flowers of goodness, purity, and heroism which bloom innumerable in the Church of God, and thereby awaken in the innocent soul the sense of moral beauty, till the study and pursuit of all that is ennobling and elevating becomes an absorbing passion. And talking of flowers, we are reminded of the story of that demented youth preserved among the graceful fictions of ancient Greece. He was a simple child, and would wan¬ der away into the neighboring woods and along the pleasant banks of streams. One day as he stooped down to drink from the deep, smooth current of one of them, he beheld his own face in the crystal mirror, and forthwith became enam¬ ored of the fair apparition, which he mistook for an inhab¬ itant of the waters. And his passion and his madness grew apace, vainly appealing to the image which gazed up into his eyes, for words of love in answer to his own, till he pined away and died ; and from him the beautiful flower Narcissus derives its name. But in the deep, pure, and never-deceiving mirror formed by that bright, broad river of holiness of life, which springs in Paradise from beneath the throne of Christ, and flows down through the ages to us,—glorious figures appear with which it will be no madness to fall in love. For, to love them, to study their beauty, to imitate their loveliness, to become like to them in thought and feeling and word and deed,—is to become most truly the children of God. In the Eternal Son of God become for our sakes the Son of the Virgin Mary, we have the Author of our nature living on earth, and displaying in His life the virtues which can make every child born of woman most like to Himself, who is at one and the same time our adorable model and our judge. Generosity, devotedness, self-sacrifice are the char¬ acteristic virtues of woman: in Him they shine forth with surpassing splendor ; and, next to Him, the Blessed Mother, —so near and dear to Him,—is the most perfect mirror of womanly perfection. She is the “ Woman clothed with the INTRODUCTORY. 3 Sun.”* She gave him the sacred body in which He prac¬ ticed the sweet human virtues befitting childhood, boyhood, and manhood,—the deeds which graced the lowly home of Joseph and Mary at Nazareth, and those which adorned the three years of his public life, till His work was consummated on the cross. Enlightened and warmed by this close and continual union with Him, who is the true Sun of Holiness, during the thirty years of intimacy at Nazareth,—this Mo¬ ther, blessed among women, could not help reflecting more perfectly than any other human being the thoughts, the aims, the sentiments,—the humility and the self-sacrificing charity of her divine Son. Thus her life was invested from this most privileged intimacy, with such a light of supernat¬ ural holiness, that it vividly pictured the life of Jesus. She had been closest, nearest, and dearest to Him, had studied Him most attentively and lovingly, had followed faithfully in His footsteps from the manger to the cross, and was, when He ascended to heaven, the living image of her cruci¬ fied love to all who believed in His Name. We are all the children of these great parents, and are therefore bound to become like to them in mind and heart and conduct. None can attain to the eternal glory of the children of God in the life to come, but such as will have acquired this living likeness by generosity in imitating God’s incarnate Son.f # It is precisely because women are, by the noble instincts which God has given to their nature, prone to all that is most heroic, that this book has been written for them. It aims at setting before their eyes such admirable examples of every virtue most suited to their sex in every age and condition of life, that they have only to open its pages in order to learn at a glance, what graces and excellences ren¬ der girlhood as bright and fragrant as the Garden of God in its unfading bloom, and ripe womanhood as glorious and peerless in its loveliness and power, as the May moon in her perfect fullness, when she reigns alone over the starry heavens. * Apocalypse xii. 1. f Komans viii. 29. 4 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. Nor is it for women secluded in tlie cloister, or conse¬ crated by religious vows to the pursuit of perfection and the sole love of Christ and His poor, that our teachings are intended. It is for home-life—the home-life of the artisan and the lowliest laborer, much more than that of the lordly and wealthy—that this little book is calculated to bear sweet fruits of manifold blessedness and utility. Religious Communities are so favored, in return for their generous devotion to the Divine Majesty, by graces so lavish and so extraordinary and by so exceptional a culture, that they resemble those royal gardens in which bloom the whole year round all the rarest plants, and most exquisite flowers of every clime. But it is the wife or daughter of the man of toil, crushed beneath her load of care and fatigue, or cooped up by night between the narrow walls of an unsavory dwelling in a crowded neighborhood,—that we would fain teach how to rear in the little garden of her soul those flowers of paradise, which will make her a spec¬ tacle to angels and to men. Among the latest heroines of sanctity those women who shine at long intervals of hundreds of years, throwing into the shade the brightness of very many of their contempo¬ raries—like stars of surpassing brilliancy in some beautiful cluster in the firmament—is a poor little peasant-girl, St. Germaine Cousin, canonized with such extraordinary solem¬ nity on June 29th, 1S67. Farther on, we shall examine mere leisurely the figure of this little French shepherdess, whose life, amid the mountain solitudes of Southern France, was made so bitter by a stepmother’s cruelty, but whose soul soared above the hardships of her condition, to heights of holiness unknown to the great, the rich, the learned in her own day. How many souls will look into these pages, who have it in their power, with His aid who yearns to help us toward the acquisition of all goodness and the most blessed fruits of all spiritual joy, to rise to these same heights of true womanly greatness, to that near resemblance to Christ and to her who is the Queen of all saints ? We cannot say. But INTRODUCTORY ,. 5 this much is certain—that the living lessons reflected from their reading must enable every heart which tries to under¬ stand them, to be better, stronger, braver, truer, even from looking, for a few moments, on the angelic features of any one of the heroic women reflected in our Mieeoe. CHAPTER II. THE TEUE WOMAN’S KINGDOM—THE HOME. Who is not struck with beholding your lively faith ; your piety full of sweetness and modesty ; your generous hospitality ; the holiness which reigns within your families ; the serenity and innocence of your conversation ?—St. Clement, Pope and Martyr, First Epistle to the Corinthians. We are about to describe tbe sacred sphere within which God has appointed that true women should exercise their sway, that most blessed kingdom which it is in their power to create, and over which the Author of every most perfect gift will enable them to reign with an influence as undis¬ puted as it may be boundless for all good. The home of the Christian family, such as the Creator wills it to be, and such as every true woman can make it,—is not only the home of the wealthy and the powerf ul, but more especially still that of the poor and the lowly. For, these constitute the immense majority of mankind, and must ever be the chief object of his care who is Father and Lord over all. From him spring the laws which regulate all the sweet duties of family life, and the graces which enable the mem¬ bers of a household to make of their abode a paradise. Hence it is, that when the Author of our nature deigned to become man and to subject himself to these same laws and duties, he chose not a palace for his abode, nor a life of wealthy ease, while upon earth, but the poor home of an artisan, and the life of toil and hardship which is the lot of the multitude. It was a most blissful design, worthy of the infinite wisdom and goodness. The human parents he 6 THE FAMILY HOME. 7 chose were of royal blood, that the highest on earth might learn from Joseph and Mary how holiness can exalt princes to nearness to God, and how the most spotless purity can be the parent of a regenerated world. And he made all his human virtues bloom in the carpenter’s home at Naza¬ reth, in order that the poorest laborer might know that there is not one sweet virtue practiced by the God-Man, Jesus, which the last and hardest driven of the sons and daughters of toil may not cultivate in their own homes, though never so poor, so naked, or so narrow. So, dear reader, standing on the shore of the calm and beautiful Lake of Galilee, near which our Lord was reared, let us see his humble home and his home-life reflected therein, as in a most beautiful mirror ; and with that divine image compare our own home, and the life with which we study to adorn it. There is nothing here below more sacred in the eyes of that good God who governs all things, and will judge all men in due time, than THE FAMILY HOME. All the institutions and ordinances which God has created in civil society or bestowed upon his Church, have for their main purpose to secure the existence, the honor, and the happiness of every home in the community, from that of the sovereign or supreme magistrate to that of the most ob¬ scure individual who labors to rear a family. There is nothing on earth which the Creator and Lord of all things holds more dear than this home, in which a father’s ever- watchful care, untiring labor, and enlightened love aim at creating for his children a little Eden, in which they may grow up to the true perfection of children of God ; in which a mother’s unfailing and all-embracing tenderness will be, like the light and warmth of the sun in the heavens, the source of life and joy and strength and all goodness to her dear ones, as well as to all who come within the reach of her influence. 8 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. The most learned men of modern times agree in saying, that tlie sun’s light and warmth are, in the order established by the Creator, the sources of all vegetable and animal life on the surface of our globe. They regulate the succession of seasons, the growth of all the wonderful varieties of tree and shrub and flower and grass that make of the surface of. the earth an image of Paradise. They give health and vigor to the myriads of animals of every kind that live in the air or in the waters or on the dry land, and to which, in turn, the vegetable world furnishes food and sustenance. The very motion given to the rain in falling, to the rivers in their course, to the oceans and their currents, comes from that sun-force,—as well as the clouds which sail above our heads in the firmament and the lovely colors which paint them. Nay, there is not a single beauty in the million- million shades which embellish the flowers of grove or gar¬ den or field, or clothe, at dawn or noontide or sunset, the face of earth and heaven, which is not a creation of glorious light, the visible image of His divine countenance in whom is the source of all splendor and life and beauty. Even so, O woman, within that world which is your home and kingdom, your face is to light up and brighten and beautify all things, and your heart is to be the source of • that vital fire and strength without which the father can be no true father, the brother no true brother, the sister no true sister,—since all have to learn from you how to love, how to labor lovingly, how to be forgetful of self, and mind¬ ful only of the welfare of others. The natural affection by which the Creator of our souls draws to each other husband and wife, and which, in turn, they pour out on their children and receive back from these in filial regard and reverence, is the very source of domestic happiness. We cannot estimate too highly this holy mu¬ tual love which knits together the hearts of parents and children. It is as necessary to the peace, the comfort, the prosperity, and the bliss of every home, as the dew and the rain and the streams of running water are necessary to the husbandman for the fertility of the land he cultivates and SUPERNATURAL ATMOSPHERE OF TEE HOME. 9 the growth of the harvest on which depend both his sub¬ sistence and his wealth. Let the dew and rain of heaven cease to fall on the fairest valley, let the springs of living water be dried up all over its bosom, and the rivers which brighten and fertilize it cease to flow but for a few seasons, and it will be like the vale of death, forsaken of every living thing. Do you wish, O reader, to learn how the springs of true life, of true love and joy, may flow, unfailing and eternal, within the little paradise of your home ? Then weigh well the words of the great Martyr-Pope placed at the head of this chapter. These point out the virtues and qualities which should adorn every household in which Christ is worshiped:—a lively faith, a piety full of sweetness and modesty, a generous hospitality; holiness of life, serenity and innocence of conversation. Let us examine together how much there is in every one of these. We need not send to a great distance for one of those men famed for their skill in discovering hidden and plentiful springs of water beneath the surface of the ground. Their mysterious knowledge and the use of their magic wand are useless here. For, here we have seven pure and exhaustless wells of liv¬ ing water, created for our home by the Maker of all tilings, and placed ready to our hand for every need. And, first of all, is a lively faith. We Christians are given that eye of the soul which enables us to see the in¬ visible world, as if the vail which hides it were withdrawn. God becomes to us an ever-present, most sweet and most comforting reality. The great patriarch, Abraham, was bidden, in his long exile, and as a sure means of bearing up against his manifold trials, to walk before God,—that is, to have God ever present before the eye of his soul. This sense of the Divine Majesty as a vision always accompanying us in our every occupation, in labor as well as repose—just as the pillar of cloud wunt with the Israelites in their jour- neyings toward the Promised Land—gives wonderful light to us in our darkness and difficulties, cheers us marvelously in distress and adversity, lightens the hardest labor and the 10 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. most intolerable burden, imparts a divine strength in the hour of temptation ;—for, what can we not undertake and accomplish, what enemy can we not resist and put to flight, when we feel that His eye is on us, that we have him there face to face, that his arm is ever stretched out to sup¬ port and to shield us, and that all the love of his fatherly heart sweetens the bitterness of our struggle, and rewards our generosity in overcoming all for his sake % Joseph and Mary at Nazareth were privileged above all human beings to behold that Wisdom which created the world living and laboring daily beneath their humble roof, and growing up into the successive perfection of holy infan¬ cy, boyhood, and manhood, while concealing his quality from the surrounding multitude, and revealing only to a few like themselves his Godhead and his mission. It is certain, that he practiced all the virtues and fulfilled all the duties of his age and station in the way best fitted to glorify his Father: he was enlightening the world, sancti¬ fying himself, and marking out the path of life as truly for every one of us, during these long and obscure years of his abode in Nazareth, as when his teaching and his miracles drew around him all Galilee and Judsea. And what an eloquent lesson was there, exemplifying that “'life of faith,” without which the existence of the Christian man or woman is barren of all supernatural merit! Christ, in the helpless years of his infancy and boyhood, when his life was one of entire dependence and submission, glorified and pleased his Father by solely seeking his good, will and pleasure in obeying those appointed his earthly parents, and in accomplishing the obscure duties of his age. This lesson Mary and Joseph were not slow to learn and to practice. They read in the rapt charity with which their worshiped Charge offered to the Divine Majesty every day and hour and moment of these golden years of humility and toil,—this all-important law of life for the children of God: 4 That the value of what we do does not depend on the greatness or publicity of the work accomplished; but on the spirit of love toward the Father with which it is MODEL HOME OF NAZARETH. 11 undertaken and carried out; and that the pure purpose and offering of the heart is what God prizes above all else.’ It has been the constant belief and teaching of Christian ages that the lives of Joseph and Mary consumed in the voluntary poverty, lowliness, and toil of their condition, were ennobled, elevated, sanctified, and made most precious before God by being—after the example of the Divine Model before them—devoted to God alone, and animated by the one sole thought and purpose of pleasing and glorifying him by perfect conformity to his holy will. The Mother who ruled in this most blessed home, beheld in the Divine Babe confided to her, the Incarnate Son of God walking before her in the true way of holiness, and, like him, she applied herself to set the Eternal Father con¬ stantly before her eyes, studying to make every thought and aim and word and action most pleasing to that Infinite Perfection. When Christ had begun his public life, when the home at Nazareth was broken up, and Mary had taken up her abode with her kinsfolk at Capharnaum, the light of the Father’s countenance, in which she had learned to live, accompa¬ nied her, and the grace of her Son’s example continued to surround her like a living atmosphere. After the terrible scenes of Calvary and the glories of the ascension, she brought with her to the home which St. John and his mother, Mary Salome, so lovingly offered her, the image of her Crucified Love, as the one great mirror in which she could behold the new heights of sanctity and self-sacrifice which she was called on to tread with him. Since her day who was Mother of our Head, Mother of the Church which she labored to beget and to form, and Mother of us all—since she quitted her home on earth for heaven—the image of the Crucified God has ever been the chief ornament, the principal light, and the great Book of Life in every true Christian home. Not one saintly mother among the millions who have trained sons and daughters, ay, and husbands and depend¬ ents, to be the true followers of Christ, his apostles and 12 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. liis martyrs, when need was—but always his faithful ser¬ vants and imitators;—who did not read in the ever open page of her crucifix, how she might best lead a life of self- sacrifice, and best induce her dear ones to be 66 crucified to the world.” But let no one fancy that, in placing before her this holy model-home of the ever-blessed Mother of God, it is the intention of the writer to urge any one who chances to read these pages to expect to equal in self-sacrifice either herself or her Divine Son. ISTo : the aim of the instruction here given is to encourage all who look into this mirror to adorn their homes with some of the heavenly flowers which bloomed in Nazareth, to bring to the performance of their daily duties in their own appointed sphere, that lofty spirit of unselfish devotion to God which will make every thing they do most precious in his sight, transform the poorest, narrowest, most cheerless home into a bright temple filled with the light of God’s presence, blessed and protected by God 5 s visiting angels, and fragrant with the odor of paradise. It is merely sought to open to the darkened eyes visions of a world which will enable the burdened soul to bear pa¬ tiently and joyously the load of present ills; to fire the spirit of the careworn and the despairing with an energy which will enable them to take up the inevitable cross and follow Mary and her Son up to heights where rest is certain and the promised glory unfading. No—you shall not be asked to quit your home, or ex¬ change your occupations, or add one single particle to the burden of your toil, your care, or your suffering ; but she who is the dear Mother of us all will teach you by the silent voice of her example, how to bring the light of heaven down into your home, the generosity of the children of God into the discharge of your every occupation, and the sweet spirit of Christ to ennoble your toil, to brighten your care and your suffering. Travelers among the loftiest mountains often chance upon calm, bright lakes within whose crystal depths are mirrored not only the blue heavens into which the eagle alone can LIFE OF FAITH IN THE HOME. 13 soar, and the cold, ice-covered summits which only the feet of the most daring few have trodden, but the low and fer¬ tile hills aronnd the shore covered with the green woods, the healthful pastures, and frequented by the shepherds and their flocks. It is to these lovely, safe, and accessible heights of virtue that this little book would guide the foot¬ steps of mother and maiden alike. And of such easy access is the height of purity of inten¬ tion and living faith which should be the constant light of your home. It is characteristic of the depth and constancy of womanly affection that the thought of the loved one, during the longest and most painful absence, wnll suffice to sustain them and to brighten a life which otherwise would appear cheerless. Thus it is said of that truest of wives, ST. ELIZABETH OF HUNGAKY, that during her young husband’s long spells of absence at court or in the wars, she was wont to animate herself and her large household by the thought of how much he would be pleased, on his return, that they had endeavored to do every thing as they knew he would wish them. Elizabeth, before her marriage, had received from him, in a moment of bitter trial to her, a small pocket-mirror which gentlemen in those days usually carried with them. It was of polished silver, with the reverse adorned with a crucifix set in gems. She never parted with this dear pledge of his truth, often taking it out of her satchel to kiss it. During her cruel wid¬ owhood and when driven ruthlessly forth from her palace with her helpless orphans, she would continually hold this mirror in her hand, kissing the image of her crucified Lord and recommending unceasingly to his mercy the soul of her husband. Nor was this perpetual remembrance of him a source of prayerful resignation only ; it also stirred her up to vindicate the rights of his plundered children. As she pleaded their cause before the Thuringian nobles, she would hold the well-known mirror in her hand, kiss it frequently, and press it to her heart, as if to warm herself to greater 14 x THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. energy and eloquence. Nor were her nobles insensible to the spectacle of their young mistress’s fidelity and truth to her earthly love. In like manner, if the thought of God and the remem* brance of his incomparable love have any influence on our lives, they will be the soul of all our actions, inspiring, di¬ recting, cheering, and sustaining us in all that we plan and undertake and suffer day after day. St. Clement next praises in the Corinthians a “ piety full of sweetness and modesty.” Piety is a word of Latin ori¬ gin, and, among the old Homans who first used it, meant that spirit of dutiful and generous love with which children do the will and seek the interests of their parents. This sense of free, generous, disinterested, and unselfish devotion to the happiness, honor, and interests of one’s parents, is always contrasted with the selfish, mercenary, or compulsory service of a slave or a servant in a familv. True-hearted children «/ make their happiness to consist in seeking how they can best please and honor father and mother : what they do is not dictated by the fear of punishment or the hope of re¬ ward or the prospect of gain or self-gratification. The hope or certainty of delighting or pleasing or helping the dear authors of their being, such is the thought which prompts the labors or obedience of a loving child. Not so the mercenary : his motive is to gain his wages. He bargains to do so much in return for such a wage. The happiness of the family, the interest or honor of his em¬ ployers, their satisfaction or the praise which they may bestow, do not, most likely, enter into the thoughts or cal¬ culations of venal souls. You have known, perhaps, in many families, daughters so noble-minded, that they were content to labor untiringly for their parents, placing their whole delight in doing all they could to lighten the burden of father and mother, or to make the home bright and pleasant for brothers and sis¬ ters, without seeking or expecting one word of praise and ac¬ knowledgment. This is the best description of filial piety. Only transfer to God’s service that same unselfish and gen- THE TRUE PIETY OF THE HOME. 15 erous disposition,—asking yourself only liow muck you can do to please him, to glorify him, to make yourself worthy of him, to make him known and have him loved and served by others,—and you have an idea of what piety toward God is. Thus faith gives to the soul that “ purity of intention,” which not only makes the thought of God habitual, but en¬ ables one to lift one’s eye toward the Divine Majesty in every thing that one does,—in labor as well as in repose,— in suffering as well as in enjoyment, at home and abroad, in company and conversation, as well as in solitude and si¬ lence. It kindles in the heart that flame of love which makes one burn with the absorbing desire of pleasing Him supremely. It is thus the foundation of piety, the motive power of every good work,—just as fire is the generating force of steam, and steam itself is the mighty force which annihilates distance on sea and land and transforms all the industries of the modern world. The soul accustomed to keep God before her eyes in all her ways, cannot help being pious in the truest sense: no¬ thing can prevent her from seeking in all that she does the Divine pleasure, and of esteeming all that she can do and suffer too little for so great a majesty and such incompara¬ ble goodness. This piety—working ever beneath that all-seeing Eye- must be both sweet and modest: sweet, in the calmness and gentleness with which every thing is undertaken and accom¬ plished ; modest, in that no seeking of self and no conscious¬ ness of evil can disturb or overcast the limpid purity of a soul which reflects only the light and serenity of Heaven, and is divinely sheltered from every blast of earthly passion. When we remember who these early Christians were whose sweet and virginal piety was praised by St. Clement, we are filled with astonishment at the total and sudden transformation which the truth of the gospel—the knowl¬ edge and imitation of Christ and his Virgin Mother- effected in the most ill-famed city of the pagan world and the most abandoned population known to history. The very name of Corinth was odious to the ancient Homans of 16 THE MIllROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. tlie true republican era,—and when she fell beneath the Roman arms, she was utterly blotted ont, lest the simpli¬ city and austerity of the conquering race should become corrupt by contact with the voluptuous city. A Roman colony was afterward planted there, and Corinth arose once more from her ruins on that enchanted shore, shorn indeed of her greatness and power, but scarcely less infamous than her former self. It was like the alkali plains of our Western territories, where nothing seems able to grow but the sage¬ brush which saddens the eye. No sooner had St. Paul preached there, practicing all that he preached, than piety, purity, and modesty—all the gentle virtues of Mary’s home at Nazareth—spread with the faith from house to house in Corinth, till the infant church there resembled a society of angelic men and women. In soil deemed hitherto incapable of producing a single fruit of heavenly modesty, the cross of Christ had been planted; the curse of centuries was removed, and the land began to be fair with flowers of supernatural promise. What was the part of woman in this extraordinary renova¬ tion % Three women are mentioned in the New Testament as having been associated-with the apostles in the work of planting and fostering the Christian faith in the beautiful city and its dependencies,—Prisca or Priscilla, Chloe, and Phebe, revered as saints from the apostolic times by the churches of the East and West alike.' It was in the house of Prisca that St. Paul took up his abode when he first arrived at Corinth. Her husband, Aquila, was, like Paul himself, a tent-maker ; for it was the admirable custom, even of the highest and most wealthy Jewish families, to teach every one of their sons some trade or handicraft, which might place them above want, and thereby secure their independ¬ ence, when persecution or adverse fortune deprived them of country and riches. Aquila had been expelled from Rome by the Emperor Claudius just before Paul’s arrival on the Isthmus of Corinth, and was working at his craft of tent-maker, weaving for that purpose the hair of the Phry¬ gian goat into a much esteemed and water-proof cloth. PIETY OF EARLY CHRISTIAN HOMES. 17 Their common craft was a first bond of intimacy between the great apostle and this household; the Christian faith drew them still closer together. At any rate, though Pris¬ cilla and her husband opened their home and their hearts to. the apostle and the divine message which he bore, we know from Paul himself that he would be beholden to no one for his support and. that of his fellow-laborers in the gospel. Still that laborious and well-ordered household became the cradle of Christianity in Western Greece, the first sanctuary in Corinth where the Divine Mysteries were celebrated, and the word of God explained to the highest and lowest among the proud, cultivated, and pleasure-loving population. JSTot unlike Priscilla was Chloe, in all proba¬ bility also a married woman, while Phebe, the female apos¬ tle of Cenclirem, the eastern suburb and seaport of Corinth, was unmarried, a deaconess, and the first fruits, on that long-polluted land, of the Virgin-Life destined to be so fruit¬ ful of holiness in Christian Europe. Priscilla and her husband followed Paul to Ephesus in Asia, a city scarcely less ill-famed than Corinth, where the devoted and energetic wife shared the mortal dangers which beset the apostle, and instructed in the Christian faith the accomplished and eloquent Apollos, who was sent to Cor¬ inth to continue there the good work so gloriously begun. When Paul was sent in chains to Pome, the noble woman and her worthy husband forsook every thing, risked even life itself to be near him, and to share his labors and perils. Priscilla’s house in Pome became a church, a center of Christian activity and charity, and Chloe and Phebe’s names are associated with hers in the heartfelt commenda¬ tions of the imprisoned apostle, and the undying gratitude and veneration of every succeeding age. Most blessed, therefore, of God and man was the sweet and gentle piety as well as the unbounded hospitality of these early Christian homes. But pass we not lightly over this great home-virtue of hospitality: this, and the two other precious virtues mentioned by St. Clement, we must reserve to the next chapter. 2 CHAPTER III. THE HOME VIRTUES (CONTINUED)—HOSPITALITY, HOLINESS, AND INNOCENCE OF CONVERSATION. Let each one inquire in the Church for the poor and the stranger ; and when he meets them, let him invite them to his house ; for with the poor man Christ will enter it. He who entertains a stranger, entertains Christ. The glory of a Christian is to receive strangers and pilgrims, and to have at his table the poor, the widow and the orphan. —St. Ephrem, De Amove Pauper um. HOSPITALITY. The Christian religion, beside inheriting all the divine legislation of preceding ages, and consecrating all that was ennobling and purifying in public and private life, perfected every virtue practiced by Jew and Gentile by assigning to each a supernatural motive and by assisting the weakness of nature with most powerful graces. Doubtless in the most ancient times, men, wherever they chanced to live, were not altogether unmindful of their being sprung from the same parents, and the first impulse of nature urged them to open their house to the stranger as to a brother, one who was their own flesh and blood. In the patriarchal ages we find a higher motive superadded to that of common brotherhood: that to receive the stranger, was to discharge a debt due to God himself—that to shut him out was, possibly, to close one’s door against the Deity in disguise. Abraham and his nephew Lot gave hospitality to angels disguised in human form, and were rewarded, the former by the birth of Isaac, the latter by being saved with 18 HOSPITALITY. 19 his family from the terrible destruction in which Sodom and the neighboring cities were involved. Not dissimilar was the reward divinely granted to the poor pagan widow of Sarephta who harbored and fed the famished and fugitive prophet Elias, and to the wealthy lady of Sunam who sheltered Elisseus. Their generous hospi¬ tality w^as rewarded by the restoring to life of the only son of each. But in the gospel, Martha and Mary made them home the resting-place of the Incarnate God, and their hospitality was accompanied by a public and unhesitating confession of their Guest’s divinity,—and that, too, at a time when he was most opposed and persecuted by the leading men of the nation. Not only were they, also, rewarded by the res¬ toration to life of their dead brother, but they had the further recompense of becoming the apostles of the Divine Master. This was, moreover, the return made by Him to his Mother’s cousin, Mary Salome, mother of St. James the Elder and St. John the Apostle, for the hospitality so gen¬ erously bestowed on Mary, after the breaking up of her own home at Nazareth. The same maybe said of that other Mary, the sister of the apostle St. Barnabas, and the mo¬ ther of another apostle, John-Mark. It is the common tradition that her house was that in which our Lord cele¬ brated the Last Supper, in which the Blessed Virgin found a refuge during the interval between the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, and in which the apostles and disciples were wont to assemble till the Holy Ghost came down on them. Certain it is that there the faithful were wont to meet with Peter and the other apostles till after the martyrdom of St. Stephen and St. James, the-imprisonment and miracu¬ lous liberation of St. Peter, and the visit made to him by St. Paul after the latter’s conversion. Her home was the common home of the infant church of Jerusalem, and, as tradition affirms, the first Christian church in that city. This generous mother’s hospitality was rewarded by seeing both her brother and her son called to the glorious labors and perils of the apostlesliip. 20 TEE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. Thenceforward, the bestowing hospitality was for the mis¬ tress of a Christian household to receive Christ himself, the God of Charity, in the person of every guest who crossed her threshold, be he rich or poor, kinsman or stranger, friend or foe, sick or loathsome, the holiest 6f men or the most abandoned of sinners. But we must reserve for another place the rules of hos¬ pitality to be observed by the mistress of the home and all her dependents. We are at present only pointing out the distinctive character and the ideal of Christian hospitality. HOLINESS. A ho]y house is one in which God is truly King ; in which he reigns supreme over the minds and hearts of the in¬ mates ; in which every word and act honors his name. One feels on entering such a house, nay, even on approaching it, that the very atmosphere within and without is laden with holy and heavenly influences. Modern authors have writ¬ ten elegantly and eloquently about the home life which was the source of all domestic virtues and all public greatness in the powerful nations of antiquity. They describe, in every household, in the poor man’s cabin as well as in the palace, that altar set apart for family worship, on which the sacred tire was scrupulously watched and kept alive night and day. No one ever went forth from the house without first kneeling at that altar and paying reverence to the divinity of the place, and no one, on returning, ever saluted his dearest ones before doing homage there. There, too, at night the household met for prayer and adoration, and there again with the dawn they knelt to¬ gether to beg on the labors of the day before them the blessing of the deity worshiped by their fathers. This altar and this undying fire were regarded as a some¬ thing so holy that only the most precious wood and the purest material was employed to feed the flame. Nothing filthy or defiled was permitted to approach the spot; and every indecent word uttered or act committed near it was WIT AT THE HOME OUGHT NOT TO BE. 21 deemed a sacrilege. This hearth-altar, or hearth-fire, as it was called, was symbolical of the fate of the family. If it was neglected and allowed to die out, this was deemed an irreparable calamity foreboding the ruin of the home and the extinction of the race. In the Christian home it is the flame of piety, ardent love for God, and charity toward the neighbor, which constitutes the hearth-fire that should ever burn bright. Old Catholic homes—how many of our readers will remember it ?—were wont to have the cross placed outside as a symbol of the love for the Crucified which ruled all hearts within ; and in the interior his name, as well as his image could be seen on almost every wall, informing the stranger-guest that he was in the house of the common Parent, and in the midst of dear brethren. And how many of ns may also remember the poor but cleanly cottage of the laborer, or the narrow room of city families, on whose bare but white walls there was no orna¬ ment but the crucifix, and no glory but that of the Holy Name written there as a seal of predestination ? Where the fire of divine love is fed as carefully, and the mother and her daughters watch as jealously as the Roman matrons and maidens of old that its flame shall never be extinguished, there is little fear that any conversation but what is “ innocent 5 ’ shall prevail. Purity and charity are the twin-lights of every home deserving of God’s best bless¬ ing and man’s heartfelt veneration. WHAT THE HOME OUGHT NOT TO BE. The Spaniards say, “Shut the door and the Devil passes by ; ” the true woman who has read the preceding pages and understood the teaching conveyed therein, will know how to preserve her home-sanctuary from evil. It is, com¬ paratively, an easy task to cultivate and cherish in one’s own life and in the souls of those nearest and dearest to one, all the sweet virtues and holy habits indicated above, or connected with true piety. But how hard it is, when 22 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. once evil habits have been formed, to resist or reform them! There are certain horrible skin diseases to which persons of the pnrest blood and most refined nature are most liable. And the terrible poison, sometimes caught by a breath or a touch of the hand, once deposited in blood hitherto un¬ tainted, will spread instantaneously, and commit the most fearful ravages. So is it with souls highly privileged: a single voluntary act of sin may be followed by such a state of spiritual lep¬ rosy, that all their former beauty and glory appear changed into hideous deformity and seemingly incurable corruption. Be careful to keep evil far away from the hearts of your dear ones ; and close and bar the door of your home at all times, when you know that wickedness is abroad in the street or on the highway. Keep out the fatal influences which might weaken or destroy the precious boon of Chris¬ tian faith in your household ; bar and bolt your door against uncharitableness, immodesty, and that odious spirit of irreverance toward age, authority, and all that our fathers have taught us to respect and love. And, O women who read this, learn here how to make your home, though never so poor and bare, lovely to your dear ones and an object of respect and envy to all who know you. This you shall be taught in the next chapter. \ V CHAPTER IV. HOW SAINT MARGARET, QUEEN OF SCOTLAND, MADE HER HOME LOVELY AND HER KINGDOM A PARADISE—HOW EVERY TRUE WOMAN CAN IMITATE MARGARET, AND MAKE HER LITTLE HOME-KINGDOM SWEET AND AT¬ TRACTIVE. Malcolm (IV.), King of Scotland . . . shone like a star in the heavens ; for, being prevented [supplied beforehand] by God in the benediction of sweet¬ ness from his tender years, he had a fervent love for God, and was of such pure conscience and gentleness of manners, that when amongst persons of the world he seemed like a monk, and, indeed, an earthly angel. —William of Newbury, Rerum Anglicarum, lib. i. 25. This Malcolm was tlie grandson of St. David, and tlie great-grandson of St. Margaret, the blessed scion of a line of heroic kings. Let ns see how the gentle Margaret trans¬ formed, by the irresistible ascendency of her womanly vir¬ tues, her rude, worldly-minded, and warlike husband into a saint, and all Scotland into a school of gentleness and piety. Her example will teach most eloquently how every true¬ hearted woman can make all hearts yield to the influence of her goodness, and her own life be like a reservoir of liv¬ ing waters in a thirsty land for many a generation after her day. Margaret, born in exile, reared in Buda in Hungary be¬ neath the eyes of its apostolic king, St. Stephen (997-1038), returned to England in her early girlhood only to become an orphan, and to have to fly for dear life with her sister and brother across the seas. A storm providentially cast them on the shore of Scotland, where they found a refuge in the 23 24 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. court of Malcolm III., or Malcolm Canmore (Greathead). Malcolm had himself tasted the bitterness of exile, hay¬ ing seven years before been obliged to fly to England after the murder of his father by Macbeth. St. Edward the Confessor, Margaret’s grand-uncle, had warmly befriended the fugitive and enabled him to recover his own. So the generous Malcolm was but too happy to repay to the help¬ less descendants of Alfred the Great the debt of gratitude thus contracted. Margaret was then in her twenty-fourth year, and had been during their long orphanhood a second mother to her sister, Christina, and her brother, the chivalrous Edgar Atheling. Her wonderful beauty and her angelic modesty, much more than her royal birth and the accomplishments due to the careful education she had received, drew on her the admiration of the untutored Scottish nobles and their warlike king. He was attracted by the manifold graces of the royal maiden ; for hers were the supernatural virtues which he had learned to worship in Edward the Confessor, and which shone with a softened and gentler charm in the lovely exile. She became, a few months after her arrival in the court of Dunfermline, its mistress and the queen of all Scotland, to the unbounded delight of every class in the community. It was a rude age, in a country which a long series of inva¬ sions by the Northmen, frequent wars with England, and perpetual feuds between the native clans, had kept half-un¬ civilized in spite of its Christianity. Providence had re¬ served for a woman, for this young queen, whose soul had been so chastened and tempered by a whole life of trial, to complete the work begun by St. Columba and his brethren five centuries before that. Let a woman’s hand trace the first outlines of the glorious picture of piety, charity, and patriotism offered in this queenly life of twenty-three years on the throne. 4 ‘Margaret was a true daughter of Alfred, and the tradi¬ tions of the Alfred of Hungary (St. Stephen) were fresh upon her, and, instead of sitting down to cower alarmed SAINT MARGARET OF SCOTLAND. 25 amid the turmoils round her, she set herself to conquer the evils in her own feminine way, by the performance of her queenly duties. She was happy in her husband : Malcolm revered her saintly purity even more than he loved her sweet, sunny, cheerful manner, or admired her surpassing loveliness of person. “He looked on her as something too precious and tender for his wild, rugged court, and attended to her slightest bidding with reverence, kissing her holy books, which he could not read, and interpreting her Saxon-spoken advice to his rude Celts. 4 4 She even made him help her to wash the feet of the poor, and aid her in disgusting offices to the diseased, and his royal treasury was open to her to take all that she de¬ sired for alms. Sometimes she would pretend to take it by stealth, and Malcolm would catch her by her wrists and carry her to her confessor to ask if she was not a little thief who deserved to be well punished. In his turn he would steal away her books, and bring them back after a time gilt and adorned with beautiful illuminations.” * W e have not, in order to form an estimate of the incredi¬ ble amount of good done by this extraordinary woman, to depend upon legends or disjointed historical fragments. Her confessor himself, a monk of Durham called Theodoric or Thierry, composed a history of this most admirable and most imitable life. The Scottish chieftains who were least inclined to reform their lives or refine their manners in emulation of Malcolm Canmore, could not resist the influence which drew them to Dunfermline, were it only to enjoy the privilege of looking upon a beauty which appeared to them unearthly, of being addressed by their royal mistress with a grace that bor¬ rowed more of its charm from piety than from courtesy, and of bearing with them to their homes some trifling pres¬ ent, which borrowed infinite value in their eyes from the angelic goodness of the giver. * Charlotte Mary Yonge, “ Cameos from English History,” vol. i., p. 98. 26 TEE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANEOOD. She effected in the thoughts, the sentiments, the manners, and the morals of these hitherto nntamed and nnruly no¬ bles, not a little of the same change which had taken place in the mind and heart and conduct of the king; and thus the blessed influence of her virtue and gentleness spread from above downward, through every class, till the lowliest peasants and the remotest Highland glens were made to feel the refining and elevating effects of Margaret’s rule and motherly solicitude. The court of Malcolm—from the boisterous meeting-place of turbulent and intemperate warriors that it had been for centuries—became the image of the court of Buda, where St. Stephen made Grecian culture and Magyar magnificence to reign side by side, blended and sanctified by the cross. “Not one of them (her nobles) ventured to use a profane word or make an unseemly jest before her. They had a rude, ungodly practice of starting away from table without waiting for grace, and this the gentle queen reformed by sending, as an especial gift from herself, a cup of wine to all who remained. In after times, the last cup was called, after her, St. Margaret’s cup, or the grace-cup. “To improve the manners of the ladies, she gathered round her a number of young girls, whom she brought up under her own eye, and she used to sit in the midst of them, embroidering rich vestments for the, service of the Church, and permitting cheerful talk with the nobles whom she admitted, all men of whose character she had a good opi¬ nion.” * From these young ladies she exacted that their homes should, in turn, become so many centers of zeal for the good of others; and thus every home in Scotland was benefited by the examples and teachings of the queen. But above all her other qualities shone her tender love for the poor and the sick. She founded hospitals and asylums for them ; and among her nobles,- her most especial friends and favor¬ ites were such as distinguished themselves by their active charities. * Miss Yonge, ibidem. ®°STOf\! COLLEGE UEsFtAn^ chestnut hiul, mass. HOW MARGARET CIVILIZED SCOTLAND. 27 Fully aware that true religion is the parent and nurse of that great chief virtue, she bent herself, from the first year of her reign, to the task of making it flourish wherever the misfortunes of the times had caused it to languish, and to plant it by serious missionary labors wherever the mission¬ aries had not penetrated or had only had an imperfect success. She caused councils to be convened, encouraged the bish¬ ops and abbots to enact the most salutary decrees, support¬ ing them with the whole force of the royal authority ; ob¬ tained the erection of new episcopal sees, did away with every abuse condemned by the Supreme Pontiff, insisted on cordial and unqualified submission to his teaching ; repaired churches and monasteries in decay, and built new ones in every place where they were most needed or promised to be most useful, and, above all, spared no effort and no expense to give to Scotland a thoroughly educated, exemplary, and devoted clergy. While thus proving herself to be a true mother to her adopted people, she was not unmindful of her English origin or of the sufferings and needs of her countrymen. The wars between the two kingdoms which she was power¬ less to prevent, left many English captives in Scottish pris¬ ons. But her generosity and her influence found means to alleviate their condition and to hasten their ransom. She founded an hospital for sick and infirm prisoners, where they were tenderly cared for till they obtained their free¬ dom ; and for this purpose, she spared not her own purse, nor warm appeals to the generosity of the Scottish captors and the affection of the prisoners’ English relatives. Thus the veneration and love felt for Margaret in Scot¬ land spread beyond its borders to every part of England; and from the nearest counties emigrants flocked across the boundary to settle in the Lowlands, and enjoy there the security and other manifold blessings bestowed on their subjects by Malcolm Canmore and his angelic queen. There are other inestimable benefits for Avhich Scotland has always acknowledged herself indebted to St. Margaret: 28 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. the foundation of her great schools of learning, the estab¬ lishment of a large and flourishing commerce with conti¬ nental Europe, the encouragement of the liberal and the industrial arts, and the enactment of wise and enlightened laws protecting the liberties and fostering the best interests of the people. Of the nine children with whom her union was blessed, one, Ethelred, died in infancy, the eldest, Edward, was slain with his father before Alnwick Castle in 1093 ; of the others, three sons, Edmund, Edgar, and David, reigned suc¬ cessively on the throne of Scotland, continuing the Golden Age inaugurated by their parents: of her two daughters, Matilda or Maud became the wife of Henry I. of England, and was her mother’s living image, and Edith was married to Eustace, Count of Boulogne, becoming in her turn the mother of her people. Surely it was a beautiful life, this of the tempest-tossed royal child, born in exile far away from the land of her fathers, and then cast by the storm on the Scottish coast, like a treasure beyond all price to be cherished by king and people, and to live in the hearts of all succeeding gen¬ erations. With the mirror of this most admirable life before us, let us see how every woman can in like manner make of her home a paradise, and be the loved and worshiped queen of the little kingdom which no one can take from her. HOW THE POOR MAN’S HOME CAN BE MADE RICH AND BRIGHT AND DELIGHTFUL BY A TRUE WOMAN’S INDUSTRY. Lest persons who are not of princely station or noble birth should fancy that the lessons of St. Margaret’s life do not concern them, we shall devote this section to showing how easy and necessary it is for the mistress of a poor and lowly home to imitate the sainted Scottish queen: women of wealth and rank will find practical instruction for them¬ selves in the succeeding sections. As it was to a poor and lowly home that the Son of God THE POOREST HOMES MADE DELIGHTFUL. 29 came, when lie began the work of onr redemption, as it was in the home of a poor mother that he lived so content¬ edly during thirty years, so, ever since, his followers have looked upon the dwellings of the poor with inexpressible love and tenderness. Ah ! h,e is no true lover of Christ who is not drawn to the home of poverty and labor; and the spirit of Christ dwells not in the heart whose sympa¬ thies do not go forth to the trials and distresses of those who are, above all others, the friends of Jesus Christ. But onr concern is now with the wife, the daughter, the sister of the laboring man and the poor man ; we wish them to understand what royalty of spirit can and ought to be theirs, in order to be the true imitators and true children of that great Mother, who knew how to make the poor home of Joseph so rich, so bright, so blissful, so lovely in the eyes of men and angels. She, too, was of right royal blood who was the mistress of that little home where Joseph toiled and the Divine Child grew up in all grace and sweetness, like the lily of the valley on its humble stem beneath the shadow of the sheltering oak. It was the lessons of Mary’s life at Nazareth that Mar¬ garet had learned from her royal kinsfolk at the court of Buda, and had practiced so industriously through girl¬ hood and early womanhood, till she became mistress of a court and a kingdom. One lesson above all others she was trained to practice from childhood —to be forgetful of self and mindful only of making every one around her happy. Woman’s entire existence, in order to be a source of happiness to others as well as to herself, must be one of self-sacrifice. The first step in this royal pathway to all goodness and greatness, is to forget self. Self with its miserable little cares and affections is the root of all the wretchedness we cause to others, and all the misery we endure ourselves. Every effort we make to forget self, to leave self behind us, and to devote ourselves to the labor of making every person with whom we are bound to live, 30 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. happy, is rewarded by interior satisfaction and joy. The supreme effort of goodness is,—not alone to do good to others ; that is its first and lower effect,—but to make others good. So with unselfishness : the first step is to for¬ get one’s own comfort in order to seek that of others ; the next is to forget one’s own pains and suffering, in order to alleviate those of others, or even to discharge toward others the duties of sisterly or neighborly kindness. We have known such great-souled women among the log- cabins of the forest settlements of Canada, in the crowded tenement houses and most ill-favored quarters of London and Liverpool and Yew York, as well as in the hardworked manufacturing population of the Yew-England towns and the poor slaves of Maryland: women animated, enlightened, and moved in all their actions by the Spirit of God,—the Spirit who filled Mary at Yazareth, Elizabeth in her moun¬ tain home, and Margaret of Scotland amid the manifold cares and duties of a kingdom. What our country,—indeed, what every Christian coun¬ try under the sun,—needs most, are these great-souled wives, mothers, and sisters in the dwellings of our over-burdened labprers ; women for whom the roof above them and the four walls which inclose their dear ones are the only world they care to know, the little paradise which they set their hearts on making pleasant, sunny, and fragrant for the husband who is out in the hot sun or the bitter cold, beneath the pelting of the rain or the snow or the sleet,— who, poorly clad and shod, with his scanty fare of hard bread and cold tea, is working away for the little home and the wife and babes,—and who is singing in his heart as he bethinks him of the warm welcome that awaits him when the long day is over,—of the bright smile and the loving words that will be sure to greet him when he crosses the threshold of his own little Eden,—of the cheerful fire in winter and the humble meal made so delicious by the love that prepares it and the sweet words that season it,—of the rest and the security and the peace which force the over¬ flowing heart of the husband and father and brother to think MAKE TOUR HOME BRIGHT AND SUNNY. 31 and to say that there is no spot of earth so dear and so blessed as the little sanctuary built up and adorned and made full of song by a true woman’s heart. O woman, woman! if you only knew how much you have it in your power to do,—with His assistance who can never fail us when we do our best,—to make true men of the husband of your choice, of the sons whom God has given you as his most precious treasures; true women, in their turn, of the little girls who are growing up at your knee,— to be, when you are gone to your reward, mothers blessed and praised by all who know them ! We have just spoken of the Divine assistance which never fails the soul striving earnestly to fultill important duties and to do all the good she can. Think of the contract God entered into with you, when you entered into the married state and received at the hands of the Church the nuptial blessing. You were told that the matrimonial union had its model in the union of Christ with his Church, that his great love for her, which brought him to the Cross and binds him to be present on our altars to the end of time,— is the type of the great and self-devoting love which hus¬ band and wife should ever have for each other. Did you ever reflect, that when you put your hand in your hus¬ band’ s hand before the Church, giving him your heart and your life thenceforward,—that God, who is ever by the side of those who believe and trust in him, promised you a mighty wealth of grace to be all your own till death, en¬ abling you to love your husband more and more daily, with a deeper and a holier love, to make your own life like that of the Church toward her Crucified Love, one perpetual act of devotion and self-sacrifice, giving him in his every need your own strong love to sustain and comfort and strengthen him, taking up his cr$ss courageously, and cheering him to labor and to suffer, because you both know, or ought to know, that God is ever with you f Were your lot cast and your home built in a treeless plain amid a dry and barren country, how you would thank the man who would dig for you at your very door a well so 32 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. deep and so unfailing that its cool and sweet waters would ever flow forth, winter and summer, for yourself and your dear ones! And yet the great graces attached by Christ to the worthy reception of the divine sacrament of matri¬ mony, form within your home, wherever you chance to be, a well of water for the soul’s health and strength so divine¬ ly prepared, that no length of time can exhaust it. Why do you not drink of the waters of your own well ? We have just said how much the true woman has it in her power to do,—no matter how poor her home or hard her husband’s lot,—if she only knew both the extent of her power to cheer his lot and the sacredness of the obligation which binds her to do it. We now appeal to the experience and generosity of the wife, mother, and sister of the laboring man. There was a rapid sketch above of the comforts and delights of the poor hard-working man’s home, when love and devotion were toiling to prepare a sweet rest for him when the day’s work was ended. DARK AKD CHEERLESS HOMES. But have we seriously thought of the number of homes made dark and cheerless and desolate and hateful to the husband, the brother, the son, and the daughter too, by the absence of that bright spirit of love, which works at home from dawn till sunset, to have every thing warm and plea¬ sant and restful for the weary ones coming back after their eight and ten hours of labor \ If the devoted, God-fearing, sweet-tempered woman is re¬ warded by seeing her dear ones unhappy when kept away from the bright home she makes for them, and most happy when seated near the warm hearth ^nd charmed with her smile and her voice, it is no less certain that the selfish, untidy, ill-tempered, and bitter-tongued woman succeeds in making home unbearable for every one who is dependent on her. Why is it that so many men,—thrifty, hard-working, made DARK AND CHEERLESS HOMES. 33 to be and disposed to be devoted husbands and most exem¬ plary fathers,—are driven, at the end of their day of toil, to find—not rest, indeed, nor recreation—in the neighbor’s house,—but some distraction from the thought of their own comfortless home, some rest from the din and lash of the ceaseless tongue which is their torment ? Why are so many, at length, driven to the tavern to seek forgetfulness in intox¬ ication \ Is it not because woman forgets to be loving and devoted and ingenious in the sweet arts of making her fire burn brighter on the hearth, and her own person more at¬ tractive to her dear ones by some little ornament put on to welcome the laborers at evening, and her humble meal made more appetizing by some of the many cheap seasonings that the poorest can buy, and her whole house shining with cleanliness and filled with the sweet music of her own delighted tones ? Ah ! love has stores from which can be borrowed without stint and at little cost kind words and warm smiles and a thousand other things which go straight to the heart thirsting for the endearments, the joys, and the repose of home. Why will you not be a queen in your own little kingdom, O wife, O mother, O sister, and make all hearts subject to you by this ascendency of your goodness and devotion ? There are worse consequences still,—especially in cities and manufacturing towns,—which are caused by the want of the wifely and motherly qualities described above. Young people of both sexes who are forced,—perhaps from early boyhood and girlhood,—to seek for employment out¬ side of their home, feel an imperative need of the rest and comfort and love of their own fireside, when the end of their long day of toil has come. Blessed is the mother who knows how to make their home bright and warm for them ! But what shall we say of her who cares not to do so ? or who makes her home intolerable to her dear ones ? This much is certain, that in our over-crowded cities, if not elsewhere, thousands upon thousands of hard-working young people are driven into dangerous company and cor¬ rupting amusements because they have no home to love, to 3 34 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD . % be proud of, in which to find the repose of heart and body so needful for their age especially. There is in this a mine of suggestion for parents, for pastors, as well as for all per¬ sons to whom Providence has given the means and the will to prevent the ruin of our youth. But far better than all explanations or dissertations may be the bright examples quoted in the next chapter. Before we come to these, however, let us complete the present sub¬ ject-matter by showing HOW THE SELFISHNESS AND FOLLY OF A FASHIONABLE WOMAN CAN MAKE THE MOST MAGNIFICENT HOME INTOLERABLE. We wish the reader to understand the term “ fashionable woman” in the odious or objectionable sense in which it is taken by the sound judgment of people of the world. With “fashions” in so far as they are unobjectionable and mark the changes in dress to which even the best and least worldly persons in society—men as well as women—have to conform, we do not mean to find fault; this would be foreign to our present purpose and serve only to distract the reader unprofitably. It will be seen by a glance at what we have to say, that our censure addresses itself to an exceptional class of wealthy women, whose number, unhap¬ pily, is increasing daily. The home of the wealthiest, we take it, no matter how splendid outwardly or how magnificent and luxurious with¬ in, can be at best but splendid misery, where unselfish and devoted love does not preside over the household, provide for the comfort of every person there, and minister to their happiness by the bright cheerfulness without which the most gorgeous furniture has no luster, and the electric warmth of affection, without which courtly manners are but a lifeless show. Here is a man who has fought a hard battle with fortune, but has won it at last. Like true soldiers on every field, he has not cared during his long struggle for many comforts, —luxury was beyond his reach. But now that fortune lav- SPLENDID MISERY. 35 ishes her favors on him, he wishes to enjoy life in a home that shall be, he hopes, a paradise. Would that many of our most thrifty and fortunate men, though never so up¬ right and honorable, would remember the old pagan super¬ stition about exposing one’s bliss to the eyes of the gods or flaunting one’s prosperity in the sunlight! The “loud¬ est” wealth is never likely to yield nnmixed or lasting felicity; this is better secured by quiet tastes, and the re¬ pose enjoyed in the shade and with the select few. But our fortunate man has built and furnished a home so comfortable that only a companion who can be devoted to him is wanting to complete it. He has been attracted by a handsome face and a name without reproach. Perhaps, on his part, there has been none of that romantic feeling to which the superficial world gives the name of love; but there is in his choice the hearty purpose of finding one who will love him truly, and to whose happiness he wishes to devote his fortune and himself. She is a woman, young, indeed, and stainless, but selfish and vain ; fond of dress, of admiration, of display, and who is anxious to wed a fortune large enough to permit her to gratify all her frivolous tastes. Her husband had the ambi¬ tion to succeed in business,—that ambition is now gratified ; but he had other and nobler aims which he had to forego in the hard striving after wealth, and which now possess his soul. He would fain cultivate his mind, he would in¬ dulge his taste for such of the fine arts as make home beau¬ tiful and home enjoyments more delightful. In the wife’s family were several persons noted for their culture and scientific attainments; indeed, an accidental acquaintance with one of these had led to a first introduction to the wo¬ man whom he had made his bride, and in whom he hoped to find a perfect sympathy for the intellectual aspirations which served to brighten the future before him. But the literary tastes and scientific pursuits of her rela¬ tives had been this woman’s aversion from girlhood; and her husband was not slow in discovering that there was not one particle of intellectuality in her composition. Her 36 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. honeymoon, instead of being spent in traveling, was taken np with an unbroken round of receptions and parties. Her powers of endurance, when the ball-room or the theater were concerned, seemed to be unlimited ; but, once in her privacy, she seemed never to think that her husband wished to enjoy her companionship, or that she was expected to converse with him, to play or sing for him, or to make a single effort at being his companion for a single hour. The afternoons were spent in the park, when her equipage had to outshine the richest, and her toilet was made to eclipse the most fashionable. The evenings, for the most part, were consumed in interminable sittings with her French maid, who decked her mistress out with incomparable art for the ball or the theater. The bridegroom had hoped that this thirst for display and dissipation would be quenched by the unlimited indulgence of the first year of married life, and that after this necessary infliction he should have the quiet of his home and the sweet company of his young wife. Besides, his health could not stand the serious disturbance caused in his regular habits by late hours and this unnatural changing of day into night and night into day. The second and third years of his matrimonial life found him disappointed, dispirited, and utterly miserable, with the certainty, moreover, of having bound himself for life to a woman who never could be a companion to him, who had neither head nor heart, nothing, in fine, to recommend her but a pretty face, like a painted mask covering an empty skull. His beautiful home became intolerable to him ; and there is no knowing what desperate or downward course the heart-broken man might have pursued, if he had not been asked by one of his wife’s relatives to accompany him on a scientific expedition to our Western territories. This offer kindled once more his purest ambition ; and, after limiting to a very generous amount the monthly expenditure of his young wife, he was glad to escape from his home and to seek knowledge and fame in the field of science. She, meanwhile, had but one purpose in life, to dress. THE ABSORBING PASSION FOR DRESS. 37 At the death of a distinguished fellow-citizen she literally spent three whole days and nights visiting the most fashion¬ able warehouses and closeted with the most reputed mil¬ liners, to find out what style of hat and what dress she might wear at the funeral, so as to throw the whole of “Vanity Pair” into the shade. When the springtide of that heartless beauty had passed away, it was already autumn for her. The complexion which was her only charm had been early ruined by the reckless and needless use of cosmetics, much more even than by her feverish life of enjoyment. No splendor of dress could conceal the fatal decay, and no depth of paint could mask it. And with the consciousness of this prema¬ ture decline, her fretfulness and peevishness made her inter¬ course intolerable, unrelieved as its dullness was by a single mental accomplishment, or a solitary conversational grace. There are showy trees in our American forests whose brilliant flowers attract the eye in spring; but the flowers themselves are of an offensive odor, and they bear no wholesome fruit, while the wood itself is unfit for any use¬ ful purpose. The husband, on his return from the West, sought relief from the dreariness of his home-life in the speculations of the stock-exchange, heeding little, if at all, the remon¬ strances of a wife he heartily despised. When last heard of, his name was mentioned as one of many ruined by some sudden fall in railroad stocks. His house and furniture passed out of his possession, and he was left alone with poverty, obscurity, and a wife without head or heart or even beauty. CHAPTER Y. I liave seen on earth angelic and heavenly manners, admirable beauties in this world, insomuch that the remembrance charms and afflicts me ; for all that I now behold seem but dreams, shadows, and smoke. Love, wisdom, merit, sensibility, and grief, formed, in weeping, a sweeter concert than any other ever heard on earth, and the hearers were so attentive to this harmony, that not a leaf trembled on the branches, such was the sweetness which pervaded all the air around. —Petrarch. It is strange and amazing that those very women who are so delicate that the mere humming of a bee is sufficient to chase them from the most delight¬ ful garden of the world, should have the courage to introduce discord into their houses.—L e Moir, La Devotion Aisee . HOW HUSBAND AND WIFE TOGETHER MAKE A HAPPY HOME. In one of the exquisite books written by a contemporary author,* many examples and extracts are given, all tending to show how blissful is the condition of every family in which the principles of the Catholic religion are sedulously practiced by parents and children. In the house of Count St. Elzear—the son of a saint and the husband of another, the tutor of a king, the governor and savior of his kingdom ; the gentle knight, the great-souled statesman, and skillful general, who died at twenty-eight, the idol and model of two nations—we have the perfect mirror of domestic gov¬ ernment. It is not easy to say, whether his wife, St. Del- phine, and her saintly husband, are more to be admired for the supernatural virtues which shone in their lives, or for the practical common-sense which dictated the rules they * We mean Kenelm Digby. We here borrow from his Compitum, or the . “ Meeting of the Ways at the Catholic Church,” book i., chapter iv. 38 WHAT A PATIENT WIFE GAN DO. 89 established over their household and over their princely domains. But, though Elzear had been reared as a saint from in¬ fancy, and had scarcely emerged from boyhood when they were affianced and married,—Delphine, who was by two years his elder (though only fifteen), became thenceforward the guiding and controlling spirit. Although intrusted, at so unripe an age, with the government of large estates in France and the kingdom of Naples, and finding himself at the head of so numerous a household, it was affirmed bv the unanimous testimony of his servants, retainers, and subjects that not a sign of ill-temper or impatience ever betrayed a disposition naturally passionate and fierce. His wife, who studied him. so closely, wondered at this extraordinary mastery over self, and said to him one day : “What kind of a man are you, never to show anger or emotion when treated with insolence or seriously wronged ? . . . Are you incapable of feeling resentment ? Wliat harm could it do to the wicked men who occasionally do you foul wrong, if you manifested a little indignation at their con¬ duct ?” “Why should I betray temper or give way to indignation, my dear Delphine?” was the reply. “Anger never serves any good purpose. Nevertheless, I shall let you into a little secret of mine. Know, then, that often enough, when wronged in word or deed, I do feel my anger swell up within me. But I never fail to recall how our dear Lord was treated in his passion ; and say to myself, 4 Even if thy servants did buffet thee and pluck thy beard, how much more outrageously was he treated ! 5 ” He died in 1323. THE WRATHFUL HUSBAND TRANSFORMED BY PATIENCE. In 1355, lived at Sienna, in Italy, a nobleman, Giovanni (John) Colombino, who was quite the opposite of St. Elzear. He was extremely irritable, and took no pains to master his temper. Coming home one day at his dinner hour, and finding that the meal was not ready, he flew into a furious 40 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. passion, and began to upset and break the furniture in the dining-room. His wife—a holy woman—endeavored to pacify him, and, while urging the servants to hurry forward their preparations, she argued sweetly with her husband on the unseemliness of such displays of anger, and begged him to read a book, while she would go to aid the cook. He fiung the book away from him, and stalked back and forth in his rage, while the lady hastened to the kitchen. Presently, however, he began to cool down and to feel heartily ashamed of his weakness. So, picking up the book, he began to read it. It was the Lives of the Saints, —and in the mirror of their conduct he beheld the horrible deformity of his own life. From that hour there was a total change in Giovanni Colombino he became the won¬ der of Sienna, died in odor of sanctity, and added one more name to the long roll of Christian heroes, who owed, under Providence, their greatness and heroism to the irresistible influence of a saintly woman. WHAT AN ANGELIC DAUGHTER AND SISTER DID. In the year 186-, a family, composed of father and mo¬ ther, with three children, came from afar to live in a quiet suburb of one of our great Eastern cities. The father, Mr. S-, had been the heir to a considerable fortune, which he had first impaired by mismanagement, and then com¬ pletely lost by involving it all in unwise ventures. He had been induced to come to the East by the offer of employment as bookkeeper or accountant in a large shipping firm. He took possession of his modest little suburban house under peculiarly distressing circumstances. His wife, a woman of uncommon beauty and goodness, was in the last stage of consumption, and the fatal termination of the malady w r as hastened by the fatigues of a long journey, the bitter cold of an unusually severe autumn, and the material discom¬ forts of her new home. The cottage which the family had rented was old, damp, had been for some years untenanted, and was but scantily furnished and insufficiently warmed. AN INTEMPERATE FATHER. 41 “I trust in you, Nora,”—gasped the dying mother, as she held the hand of the kneeling girl in one of her own, and with the other touched the bent golden head half in blessing and half caressingly,—“and I know God will help you.” The priest, who had just brought to that death-bed the Divine Pledge of the eternal possession, was standing near, deeply moved by all that he had seen of these inter¬ esting strangers. The simple, enlightened faith and exalted piety of the mother, the angelic grace of the eldest daugh¬ ter, and the helpless, hopeless expression of the poor father, as he supported the younger child,—fragile, fair-haired, and dazzlingly beautiful, but with consumption written on her wan cheek and wasted form,—all that went to his heart and kept him there till the divine messenger, Death, had per¬ formed his errand. An only son, a lad of eighteen, appren¬ ticed to a civil engineer, was absent, and could only reach the house of mourning as they were about to set out for the church and the cemetery. When the priest, with moist eyes, summoned- courage to say to the remaining parent and his offspring, that all was over, and that one more saintly soul had gone to her rest and reward,—Nora, startled by an exclamation from her father, turned round to see her sister apparently lifeless in his arms. “O my darling, my darling!” she said as she raised the rigid form and covered its face with her tears and kisses ; “you must not leave me now ! Oh ! God will not take you from me ! . . .” The priest, with a few earnest words of sympathy in the father’s ear, hastened away, when the fainting girl revived, promising to return soon and obtain for these afflicted ones all the aid they needed in their bereavement. A few weeks deepened immeasurably the gloom which had fallen on that now motherless household. Mr. S-, naturally irritable, had become intolerably peevish in con¬ sequence of his many disappointments. His temper had sorely tried his sick wife; and after her death it proved a source of continual suffering to her children. The boy, William, was seldom at home, and so escaped these domes- 42 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. tic discomforts ; but poor Nora and her little suffering Fan. ny were made to feel their bitterness daily and almost hourly. For, to add to the pinching poverty they were enduring, their father lost his place of accountant. His haughty man¬ ner, which misfortune had not softened, his censorious and prying disposition, which a certain scrupulosity had only made more troublesome and intolerable to others, gave offense to every subordinate in the office. He also took it on himself to lecture his employers on certain transactions with the custom-house which excited his suspicion. Just as December was beginning to tax to the utmost Nora’s resources in housekeeping, her father was dismissed. This was terrible news for the poor child of fifteen, who knew not where to look for the means of keeping a roof above them in a season rendered exceptionally severe by intense cold and the great dearth of all things. She was a stranger, too, in the city and their immediate neighborhood, —and to no human being, not even to her confessor, had she breathed a word of the utter destitution which had fallen on them. With the tidings of her father’s dismissal a new enemy to her peace appeared. She had,—strange as it may seem, —never known by any experience of hers what drunken^ ness was, had never seen an intoxicated person. What was her horror and dismay to behold her dear parent in that condition! Hitherto she only had eyes for his vir¬ tues ; in the light of her perfect innocence and sinlessness his imperfections had been overlooked or viewed only as the shadows inseparable from the bright sides of his char¬ acter. It was a fearful revelation to the care-burdened girl. But her womanly instinct and true nobleness of nature impelled her, even when this first manifestation of infirmity was renewed again and again, only to treat him whom she loved and reverenced so singularly, with the tenderness, the respect, the delicacy due to a sick and helpless father. She hid him away from every eye, even from those of her THE DA TIGHTER'S TRIUMPH. 48 young sister, who was encouraged to believe that the change she could not but remark was due to grief and exhaustion. Nora spent hours of the night in prayer, when all was still in her cottage, bedewing with her tears her mother’s cruci¬ fix, and conversing with the Court of Heaven as if the vail had been withdrawn, and she were permitted to plead for her dear ones at the Mercy Seat, and face to face with the Divine Majesty. From that Presence she always arose overflowing with comfort, with peace and light and strength; and the morn¬ ing ever found her armed with increased courage for the struggle before her. It had been the invariable custom of her parents to perform together their night and morning devotions. Nora, by a happy inspiration, took her mother’s place by his side from the beginning of his bereavement, and to his unspeakable satisfaction. Even when half stupe¬ fied by drink, he would be persuaded to kneel with her and lift his soul to God: the morning never failed to find him humiliated, conscience-stricken, and self-accusing, but irritable and despondent. She never uttered one word of reproach or so much as hinted, in their conversation, at the growing habit which filled her with undefinable terror and foreboding. One night he returned late,—she knew not whence,—and unable as he was to say his night-prayers, had lain down half-undressed on his bed,—his angel-daugliter watching wearily near the half-opened door of his chamber. On awaking, he was struck to the heart with sorrow, and when his pale and hollow-eyed child made her appearance, he cast himself on her neck in a mute agony of tears. She kissed him, soothed him, lavished on him words of love and comfort such as God puts on the lips of the pure and brave- hearted. At length—“O Nora,” he said, “this must be no more!” and kneeling by her side they both prayed in silence. God heard their united prayers. That trial was thenceforth spared to Nora. Another blessing, a few days afterward, rewarded her filial piety. She wrote to her father’s late employers, soli- 44 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. citing an interview, and received a favorable answer. Re¬ commending, as was her wont in every serious undertaking, the success of her visit to the Father of the orphan and afflicted, she presented herself at the office, surprised and charmed the chief partner with her beauty, her artless sim¬ plicity, the rare culture in one so young displayed during the interview, and especially by the eloquence with which she pleaded and won her father’s case. Mr. S- was given an occupation more suitable to his years and antece¬ dents, and the daughter was delicately told of his former unpopularity and its causes. These, with all a woman’s tact, Nora set about correct¬ ing ; and, wonderful to relate, in good time she succeeded in effecting a great change in her father’s temper, his bear¬ ing toward his associates in business hours, and his dispo¬ sition to fault-finding. The humiliation which the old gen¬ tleman felt at his late weakness made him as docile as a child to his daughter’s training. And so Nora was left free to devote herself to her sick sister, and to a long and earnest correspondence with her brother, whose duties com¬ pelled him to long absences, and whose health as well as conduct began to cause her watchful heart no little alarm. Fanny’s constitutional debility had suffered much from the long journey the family had recently made to their new abode, as well as from her mother’s death, and the loss of many luxuries and comforts the child had till then been accustomed to. About Christmas-tide the physician pro¬ nounced her case one of chronic spine disease, but the sweet sufferer was not allowed to know of it. She seemed, however, to brighten, revive, and gain strength under the warm sunlight of her sister’s love, and the tender nursing of that gentle and cunning hand. But just then Mr. S- caught cold, and the illness soon assumed the form of vio¬ lent pleurisy, leaving but little hopes of recovery, as the New Year dawned on them. When the priest was summoned hurriedly on the evening of the great feast of Christmas, his impression on entering the cottage was,—as he afterward declared,—one of reve* flORA’S FORTITUDE SORELY TRIED. 45 rential awe; for a something heavenly seemed to pervade the atmosphere which tilled it. The door was opened by Fanny, looking, in her simple dress of black, and with her dazzling complexion, like an angel just descended to tarry a brief space with the mourners. The whole house was decorated with evergreens and artificial flowers, but a re¬ fined taste had presided at the decoration, and was evident in the few simple ornaments of the mantel-piece, in the ex¬ quisite neatness of the sick-chamber, and in the preparation of the temporary altar for the sacrament. The patient was in a deep slumber when the priest entered: Nora was kneeling by his side, her hand held in her parent’s with so tight a grasp that she could not or dared not withdraw it without interrupting the repose which powerful narcotics had procured him. As she turned her head to greet the priest, he was struck with the rapt look of gratitude for his coming and of adora¬ tion for the Gift of which he was the bearer. The poor slumberer soon awoke, and his spirit was prepared for the reception of the divine and awful graces ordained for the Christian’s death-struggle by Him who is the Author and Finisher of our faith. Nora moved about the sick-room like some one of the virgin train who evermore accompany the Lamb ; and her sister knelt at the foot of the bed, silently pouring forth her tears and prayers. When Holy Yiaticum had been administered and the last benediction given, the elder spoke to the priest with an air of quiet but preternatural fortitude. She knew what was coming, and trusted in the Comforter for strength to sustain her. Both on quitting and entering the cottage the priest had remarked that there was only fire in the sick-room ; his previous inquiries about the circumstances of the family had elicited from the neighbors information enough to make him feel certain that Nora had to contend with great distress. From herself he could obtain no answer to his timid and indirect questions. But it so happened that Mr. S-’s employer, hearing of his serious illness, called, with his eldest son, on the priest, and begged the latter to 46 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. accompany them to the cottage. It was a timely visit—a glance satisfied the merchant of the urgent want of relief. The cottage was his property ; he resolved at once on mak¬ ing it most comfortable ; and besides begged Nora to draw at once her father’s full year’s salary, which was trebled without her knowledge. The most skillful medical aid was also secured, and a lively interest was created by the good priest’s frequent praise of these afflicted strangers. William hastened to his father’s sick-bed, traveling night and day from the upper Mississippi, where he and his patron were superintending the building of a bridge. Whether he had inherited his mother’s constitutional weakness, or his frame was not proof against the fatigue of so long a journey, and the discomforts and privations from which his very slender purse could not purchase an exemp¬ tion, he reached the house of death only to be prostrated with fever. His father died a few hours after his son’s arrival, and the good priest who had been the former’s con¬ soler in his last hours was called in to minister to the latter before his parent had been borne to the cemetery and laid beside his wife. Nora, with a woman’s fortitude, bore up against this new trial, and God, who has stored up in woman’s heart such treasures of love and enduring devotion’ enabled this tender girl, exhausted as she was by the grief and labors of all these weary months, to be for her brother all she had been for both her parents. There were no Sisters of Charity at hand; but the merchant’s wife, a Protestant lady of rare goodness, had visited Nora under her new affliction, and in¬ sisted on remaining with her for a few days. The principal Catholic ladies, also, touched by what they heard, came to sympathize and to admire; and- to see the lovely orphans was to become attached to them. But Nora would devolve on no one her duties toward her sick brother, on whom both she and Fanny now centered their entire affection. Their brother was saved. And now, why delay the reader ? William’s convalescence was a long and painful one. He had inherited his father’s peevishness, and had THE SISTERS VICTORY AND REWARD. 47 apparently lost in his somewhat wandering life as a civil engineer every trace of the early piety inculcated by his mother. People wondered that such an unamiable and God-abandoned youth could have come of the same parent¬ age as the two angelic beings whom he called sisters. Nora, while he was slowly recovering his strength, had been casting about for some occupation which might enable her to maintain the two now entirely thrown on her care. The merchant’s wife continued to be devoted to the orphans, and had occasionally brought her son to visit William dur¬ ing the latter’s convalescence. When able to bear exercise in the open air, the young men drove out together, and so an intimacy gradually sprang up between the two families. It was remarked, not without wonder, that under Nora’s influence William became gradually transformed into an¬ other man. But few traces of his petulance and irrita¬ bility remained. Indeed, after the first weeks of his recov¬ ery, the frequent oaths which startled the echoes- of that pious abode were heard no more, and the old habit of night and morning prayer was resumed, William from his bed or his arm-chair heartily joining in his sisters’ devotions. A new moral sense seemed to be growing up in him, refining not only his language but his very features, so that before spring had passed into summer the neighbors, who at first could see but a slight resemblance between the sisters and their coarse and burly brother, were struck with the re¬ markable likeness he bore them in features and expression. It was not all: the merchant’s son had seen too much of Nora not to have been charmed with her beauty of soul much more even than with her graces of person. His mother shared his admiration of such extraordinary w^orth, nor was his father indifferent to the virtues which he had himself more than once warmly eulogized. Nora, after imploring the divine guidance and consulting the priest who had been her counselor and benefactor, listened favorably to the young merchant’s suit, and accepted gratefully his mother for her own. When the days of mourning were ended, just as another spring v r as spreading her fairest charms over 48 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. \ earth and sky, she became the wife of this lover, having her sweet Fanny with her as the angel of her home. They are both, at this day, the models of Christian mothers and maidens in another land, whither the young husband’s ex¬ tensive business forced him to transfer his residence; they are the idols of the young and the worshiped benefactresses of the poor and suffering, blessed in hundreds of homes to which they bring light and comfort, prized in their own above all earthly treasures, and more and more reverenced daily by those who daily and hourly witness their goodness and humility. how woman’s selfishness ruins the home. It may be that many of the class we are most anxious to benefit by the suggestions herein conveyed, the over-bur¬ dened with toil and care and poverty, will think and say that these lessons point not to the improvement of such a miserable lot as theirs. If they only knew how many a poor home is a paradise of heroism, of spotless purity, of truth and honor and contentedness ! It is especially with the homes of the laborer, the mechanic, the struggling pa¬ rents with a numerous family and scanty sustenance, that the writer of these pages has been all his life familiar. For one man of wealth, or high birth, or distinguished social, position with whom he may have been acquainted, there are hundreds of the hard toilers, of the over-burdened and the hard driven, whose hand he has grasped, whose brave true hearts he has read, and whose humble homes he has found adorned with virtues and merits a prince might envy in vain. It is to this loved class of readers that he would bring light and comfort by the perusal of such examples as are here set forth. Eugene F-was the seventh son of a stone-mason, who had begun his married life with a sum of five dollars over and above all the expenses of his wedding. But he had what was more to him than five thousand, a soul which was in- HOW WOMAN'S SELFISHNESS RUINS THE HOME. 49 capable of wronging God or the neighbor willfully and know¬ ingly, a pair of strong arms, a brave and trustful heart, a firm determination to improve himself in his craft and to conquer independence for himself and his wife—and, more than all that, he had in that young wife a soul as spotless as his own, and a treasure of devotion, sound sense, and unalterable sweetness, which made his life one long bridal day of unclouded joy and unmixed bliss. Thirteen chil¬ dren blessed the home of this laborious couple, six of whom were girls, and all of whom, inheriting the untainted blood and robust constitution of their parents, survived them, and were worthy of them. In the home in which Eugene was born, there was indeed independence, comfort, abundance for all the need of the large nestful,—but never affluence. Eugene had been early apprenticed to a worker in brass, had mastered his craft with singular ease, and at the age of twenty had several thousand dollars,—his own earning,—placed to his account in the savings bank. Three of his brothers were happily married. They had not only taken every precaution which their religious train¬ ing suggested in choosing their companions, but had been guided by the wise counsels and the judgment of their ad¬ mirable mother. Not so Eugene: he had been attracted by the fair face and lively manners of the only daughter of a neighboring family, and had set his heart on marrying her, without much consulting his parents in the matter. This was the very point where he failed in his duty, and in which a prudent mother’s judgment and advice would have saved his life and happiness from utter shipwreck. Henrietta B-, being an only daughter among six chil¬ dren, had been allowed her own way from infancy. She had been a sickly child, and her natural peevishness and hatred of all restraint had been at first tolerated on account of her many ailments. When she arrived at girlhood she became the pet of the whole family. Innocent, open- hearted, impetuous, her sallies and outbursts of temper were laughed at by her brothers, and overlooked by the too 4 50 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. fond and indulgent mother, in the hope that her real good¬ ness and piety would shake off these imperfections as the girl grew into the woman, just as the heated metal in the furnace purges off its dross at a high temperature. Unfortunately, the pure gold of her nature was subjected by her unwise parents to no sort of tempering or chastening of any kind, and the dross remained there to give, in due course of time, its coloring and quality to the gold which it was sure to overlie and conceal. Eugene’s mother had detected this want of training in her future daughter-in-law, and warned her son in the mild¬ est and most affectionate manner, that she feared his hap¬ piness would not be safe in the keeping of a woman who was not sweet-tempered, and who was also, she suspected, selfish and vain in no common degree. Passion is blind and deaf and headlong. The mother’s warning was mistaken for prejudice and resented as a foul wrong done to the loved object. It only served to impel Eugene to hire and furnish a comfortable residence, and to hasten his marriage with Henrietta, without any regard to his father or his mother’s advice to weigh well the question. There was added to this want of filial reverence a total neg¬ lect of the duties which piety toward God imposes on Cath¬ olics in the reception of the august sacrament of matrimony. It was treated by the bridegroom and the parents of the bride as a eeremony on which religion does indeed bestow a blessing, but which, after all, is, in too common estimation, but a joyous family festivity. Still, not without admonition from his venerable father, from the admirable mother who had taught him his duties well, and from his married brothers, did Eugene fail to im¬ plore on his own nuptials the blessing of that God and Lord without whose aid they “ labor in vain” who set about building up the house of their own prosperity and happi¬ ness. The honeymoon was soon ended; but before the end Eugene had discovered that the woman of his choice was but little like his own mother—from whose lips, amid all her cares and unceasing activity, he had never heard one HOW WOMAN’S SELFISHNESS RUINS THE HOME. 51 loud word ; whose sweet features, even when under bodily or mental pain, he had never seen clouded for a moment with anger or passion of any kind. To him, to all his brothers, as to her doting husband, that dear mother of his had ever been a true companion, sharing, from infancy upward, his every joy and hope and fear, receiving his un¬ bounded confidence, as if his whole soul had been laid bare to her motherly eye. And she was more than companion : she was a friend, a counselor, directing his studies, encour¬ aging his ambition, and guiding his labors. But his pretty wife, though loving him as well as she knew how, expected him to devote himself to her every caprice, while she had never been taught to devote herself to any one, or to seek any other s happiness at the expense of her own comfort. In his mother’s home, which resembled a beehive where every inmate worked from early dawn till sunset, amid the most perfect order and the pleasant hum of happy voices,—Eugene had been accustomed, at his return from each day’s toil, to find the bright faces of mother and sisters all aglow with the welcome of true affection. His room, like those of his brothers, was the picture of restful comfort; and a sisterly hand, the whole year round, would daily place a tiny vase of fresh flowers beneath the picture of the Virgin Mother over his mantel. The supper or dinner table was, in the truest sense, a feast of soul much more even than a re¬ past for the body, to all the members of the household. La¬ bor gave to each a keen appetite for the delightful meal, and a hearty relish for the warmth, the joyousness, and the deep repose of that most blessed fireside. So much so, that the young men as they grew up could not bear to be away from that family board at which true love presided. Eugene expected, most naturally, that the woman he had chosen from among all women would hold toward him the place of mother and sister, just as he resolved to be for his young bride the tenderest and most devoted of husbands, compensating, by the thousand devices of his affection, for the loss to her of her parents, home, and kinsfolk. The first week of their home-life had not passed, ere Eugene 52 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. discovered, to liis dismay, that not only there was no com¬ panionship between them, but that Henrietta was totally careless of her husband’s comfort, totally untrained to the management of a household, and averse to every thing relating to domestic cares. Her husband’s business was a thriving one; he loved it, and was now more than ever ambitious to push his way to the foremost rank as a mechanician. His past economies had been nearly exhausted by the furnishing of his little home and the lavish expenditure of his month of honey¬ moon. He had returned to his workshop with a new zest for exertion, and bent himself to the task before him with all the more ardor that he hoped to find praise and encourage¬ ment from her to whom he had given his life. As he came back from his work on the very first day after resuming it, his hands and face covered with the honorable dust and stains of his toil,—his heart was chilled by the greeting, “ Oh! dear ! how dirty you are ! Do go and wash and change before anyone sees you!” Hor did she ac¬ company him as he hastened, with a strange sensation at his heart, to comply with his wife’s desire. Hot so had he been ever treated in the old home by the noble woman he called mother, to whom his begrimed face and soiled hands had always been a motive for a warmer and more loving wel¬ come home. When he had put on his wonted home-clothes he found his wife surrounded with a bevy of young female friends. They had dined, without waiting for him ; nor did Henrietta so much as offer to accompany her husband to his cold and solitary meal. When the evening was over, the young mistress of the home complained of a headache, complained of the intolera¬ ble length of the day, without having her husband to con¬ verse with her and amuse her, and ended by declaring that she thought the lot of a mechanic’s wife a hard one. There was not the slightest attempt at cheering him after his long day of unusual exertion, brightened, too, by the thought of the sweet rest he looked forward to at its close. The days and weeks which followed only served to dispel IIOW WOMAN’S SELFISHNESS RUINS THE HOME. 53 one illusion after another. True love is founded on esteem, as esteem rests on respect; when respect fails, there is no ground for love. Poor Eugene was soon doomed to discover that his young wife was utterly untrustful, and had not the slightest scruple in deceiving him, even where deception was unnecessary. What would he not have given to open his heart to his mother and take counsel with her on the terri¬ ble difficulty which beset his path in life at the beginning ! But he knew that one of the rules inculcated by his parents on all their married children was never to allow their do¬ mestic trials to be made known outside their own roof ; and especially, not to have the families of husband or wife made acquainted with secret troubles, which the young people must themselves learn to settle between them and beneath the eye of God. Eugene’s mother had studied Henrietta’s disposition care¬ fully, and read clearly in her son’s sad and thoughtful face how it fared with him and his wife. In her first visits to her daughter-in-law she discovered the whole truth; but with admirable tact she not only concealed the grief she felt, but forced herself to praise every thing she saw in Henrietta’s management, feigning to see in the single ser¬ vant’s handiwork the result of the mistress’s housewifery. She feigned to believe that the latter superintended in per¬ son her kitchen, pantry, and laundry, and would go to help Henrietta there, forcing the other thereby to see how every detail of domestic economy should be managed; she had the choicest and most fragrant flowers brought from her own house to Eugene’s, and made his favorite sister, Mar¬ garet, plan and dispose them where they should best thrive and be most ornamental, culling a little bouquet of the most delicate for Henrietta’s own room, and another for the din¬ ner table, as if it were a matter of course. Music was Hen¬ rietta’ s sole accomplishment, and Eugene, himself a profi¬ cient on the violin, was gifted with a voice of uncommon power and sweetness. His fond mother purchased his fa¬ vorite songs, and wished to hear the young people play and sing together on the very first evening she and her husband 54 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. spent with them. But Henrietta pretended a headache, and would neither sing nor play. Nor, for months after their union, could she be coaxed to sit at her piano. The other pious industries of her mother-in-law were equally unavail¬ ing ; she never set her foot in her kitchen, though not born far above her cook, nor ever busied herself with any one of the household duties. Her one servant had to do every thing or to let it alone. More than that: she hated Eugene’s mother and his sis¬ ters for their very virtues, and took the very first oppor¬ tunity of telling her husband that she hoped his mother would stay at home and keep her daughters there, as she did not intend to allow any one to teach her what she had to do in her own house. And so the clouds gathered and grew darker above that little home, which had been unhallowed by the blessing of Him who should ever be first and middlemost and last in the thoughts and designs and affections of those who call themselves his children. The gulf which had been opened by the young wife’s utter selfishness between her husband and herself grew wider day by day. His spirit drooped, his business was neglected; his first babe was born in his fa¬ ther-in-law’s house, whither his wife persisted in going some weeks before her illness. To her husband’s home she never returned ! In his turn, Eugene found its solitude intolera¬ ble, and sought solace and distraction elsewhere. Happy had it been for him if he had betaken himself in his dark¬ est hour to the light and warmth of his mother’s hearth! He yielded to far different attractions ; and soon the house to which he had taken his bride was closed, and, like a forsaken dwelling in a valley inundated, it was swept away with all his substance by the ill fortune which ever follows fast on the heels of ill conduct. The wretched young man migrated to California, where he soon perished, broken in heart and energy ; while his wife continued in her parents’ home to nurse her idle regrets, and to accuse the dead of the ruin and the misery which were of her own making. CHAPTER VI. THE WIFE IN THE CHEISTIAN HOME. Man first enters on the forest of life from the paternal house, where, if tbs will of God were done on earth as it is in heaven, the divine commandments would he known and dear and familiar to all; for the precept was thus given : Thou shalt tell them to thy children, and thou shalt meditate upon them sitting in thy house, and walking on thy journey, sleeping and rising. And thou shalt bind them as a sign on thy hand, and they shall be and shall more between thy eyes. And thou shalt write them in the entry and on the doors of tliy house. Such is the ideal of the Catholic home ; and wherever this type is realized, it is evident that its members are even already in possession of the truth and of the blessed life which constitute the pledge of the supreme good of man.— Kenelm Dijby, Compitum. The Church, among her solemn benedictions, had one for every dwelling-house, being the same for that of the poorest man and for that of the wealthiest, for the lowliest cottier on his little plot of ground, as well as for the royal palace. Just as she lovingly blessed and guarded near her temples the bodies of her children without distinction of rank, even so she was desirous of hallowing by her prayers every spot in city or in country where her dear ones were born and reared, and where she would have God’s angels live with them as their unseen guardians, companions, and helpers. “We send up our supplication to Thee, O God the Al¬ mighty Father (one form of blessing begins) in behalf of this dwelling, of all who live therein, and of all things within it; praying that thou do bless and sanctify it, and till it with all good things. Grant them, O Lord, plenty from out the dew of heaven, the sustenance of life from out the fat of the earth, and fulfill their desires in thy mercy. On our entering this house, therefore, do thou deign to bless and 55 56 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. sanctify this abode as thon didst vouchsafe to bless the house of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: and within these walls let the angels who behold thy light abide, to guard this home and its inmates.” Another ancient benediction added: “ Abide ye in peace in your home : may the Lord grant you rest and peace and comfort from all your enemies round about! May he bless you from his throne on high, as you rest or walk, sleeping and waking; and may your family flourish to the third and fourth generation!” Elsewhere the Roman Ritual says in another form of blessing: “Bless, O Lord, God Almighty, this house, that in it may abide health, chastity, victory, fortitude, humility, goodness angi meekness, the fullness of the law, and thanksgiving toward God the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” In the design of God’s fatherly providence, as well as in the intention of the Church, the Christian family-home is a place “blessed and sanctified,” over which, with its in¬ mates, angels keep watch and ward. This divine protection and angelic watchfulness secure “ peace,” and safety from all surrounding dangers ; the blessing is fruitful in 4 ‘ health ’ 5 of body and soul, in that purity of life which renders the inhabitants of the home worthy of being the fellow-servants and citizens of the angels, in victory over self, in that forti¬ tude which ever strengthens man to bear and to forbear, in that humility which keeps us like little children in presence of the Divine Majesty, in “goodness and meekness,” in the loving accomplishment of the law which is only the expres¬ sion of his will, and in devout gratitude toward that Trinity of Persons whose blissful society in the life to come is to be the completion and reward of the home-life sanctified and made most happy by every duty fulfilled. In thus setting forth the sanctity of the Christian home, and the exalted nature of the duties and the virtues which should adorn it, we are only endeavoring to recall men’s minds to the venerable ideals so dear to our fathers, and to those u ancient paths” from which modem free-thinking would lead the young generation to stray. WOMAN’S DUTIES AS WIFE. 57 ANGELS GUAED THE CATHOLIC HOME. It is for every father, who is by the divine law of nature, king in his own family, to consider well the truth here presented to him, and to conceive of his own little kingdom the pure and lofty notion, which is that of the divine mind as well as the mind of the Church. When a father, though never so poor, firmly believes that his little home and his hearth-stone are a thing so precious and so holy that God will have 4 4 his angel keep, cherish, protect, visit, and defend it, and all who dwell therein,” he, too, will lift up his eyes and his heart to that Father over all and most loving Master, and exhort himself daily and hourly 4 4 to walk before Him and be perfect.” But it is to his companion,—the queen of that little king¬ dom, the wife,—that it is most necessary to have high and holy thoughts.about the sacredness of her charge, the obli¬ gations incumbent on her, the incalculable good which she can do, and the many powerful helps toward its accomplish¬ ment that the All-Wise and Ever-Present is sure to multiply under her hand. To every true man and woman now living there is no being on earth looked up to with so pure, so deep, so grate¬ ful, so lasting a love, as a mother. Let us look at our mother, then, in that dear and holy relation of wife which she bears to him who was for us in childhood the repre¬ sentative of the God 44 of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named.” woman’s duties as wife. The first duty of the wife is to “study to be in every way she can the companion, the help, and the friend of her hus¬ band. Indeed on her capacity to be all this, and her earnest fulfillment of this threefold function depends all the happi¬ ness of both their lives, as well as the well-being of the whole family. Hence the obligation which is incumbent on parents providing for the establishment of their children,— 58 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. to see to it, so far as is possible, that the person chosen to be a wife in the new home should be a true companion for their son, a true helpmate in all his toil, and a faithful friend through all the changes of fortune. t SHE OUGHT TO BE A COMPANION TO HEE HUSBAND. One half of the unhappiness of married life comes from the fact that the wife is either unfitted or unwilling to be a true companion to her husband. This companionship re¬ quires that she should be suited by her qualities of mind and heart and temper to enter into her husband’s thoughts and tastes and amusements, so as to make him find in her company and conversation a perfect contentment and de¬ light. Persons who are perfectly companionable never weary of each other,—indeed, they are never perfectly happy while away from each other ;—they enter into each other’s thoughts, reflect (and increase by the reflection) the light in each other’s mind ; cultivate the same tastes, pursue the same ideals, and complete each other in the interchange of original or acquired knowledge. But there is more than that in the companionship of the true wife. She studies to make herself agreeable, delight¬ ful, and even indispensable to him who is her choice among all men. If true love be in her heart, it will suggest to her, day by day, a thousand new devices for charming the leisure of her husband. Woman has been endowed by the Creator with a mar¬ velous fertility of resource in this respect: it is an unlim¬ ited power, productive of infinite good when used for a holy purpose and within her own kingdom ; but produc¬ tive of infinite evil when employed in opposition to the de¬ sign of the Giver, or allowed to lie idle when it should be used to promote the sacred ends of domestic felicity. There are wives who will study certain languages, sciences, arts, or accomplishments, in order to make them¬ selves the companions of the men they love, and thus be THE WIFE MUST BE A TRUE COMPANION. 59 able to converse with them on the things they love most, or to charm the hours of home repose by music and song. The writer of these lines remembers, that, while a young priest in Quebec, upward of thirty years ago, he was much struck by seeing a young lady of one of the best families there, applying herself assiduously to study the sign-lan¬ guage of the deaf-mutes in order to converse easily with her husband—a wealthy young merchant, thoroughly trained himself in the admirable Deaf and Dumb Institution of his native city. They were devoted to each other, and the young wife’s earnestness in making herself companionable to her husband, must have brought many a blessing on the home in which the writer beheld them so wrapt in each other, so virtuous, and so full of bright hope ! It must not be concluded from this, that a woman who applies herself to acquire knowledge for the purpose of being more of a companion to her husband, should thor¬ oughly master either a language, a science, or an art. . . . In the case of the young wife just mentioned, a thorough familiarity with the language of signs was indispensable as a means of easy conversation with her husband. But this is evidently an exceptional case ;—and is only mentioned to show what difficulties love will overcome to be helpful or agreeable to its companion. The word helpful, just used, will furnish to every wife the true measure of the knowledge she may be prompted to acquire. Her husband has to know perfectly whatever he knows, because his success as a professional man or a busi¬ ness man depends on this thorough knowledge, whereas his wife only acquires to please and to help her companion. But there are other things beside this scientific, literary, or artistic knowledge, which may be more needful to a wife, if she would make herself of all earthly beings the most delightful and necessary companion to her husband. She must study him,—his needs, his moods, his weak as well as his strong points,—and know how to make him forget him¬ self when he is moody and selfish, and bring out every joy¬ ous side of his nature when he is prone to sadness. God, 60 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. who has made the soul both of man and of woman, and who has united them in the duties and burdens of home-life, wills that they should complete each other. Man has bodily strength, because it is his duty to labor for the home and protect it; he has also certain mental and moral quali¬ ties which woman does not need, and which fit him for the battle of life and his continual struggle with the crowd. But she has, on her part, far more of fortitude, of that power to bear and to forbear, to suffer silently and uncom¬ plainingly herself while ministering with aching heart and head to the comfort, the cheerfulness, the happiness of all around her. At any rate, she has by nature the "power, the art, and the disposition to please, to soothe, to charm, and to cap¬ tivate. It is a wonderful power; and we see daily women exerting it in a wonderful way and for purposes that God cannot bless, and that every right conscience must con¬ demn. Why will not women who are truly good, or who sincerely strive to be so, not make it the chief study of their lives to find out and acquire the sovereign art of making their influence as healthful, as cheering, as blissful as the sunlight and the warmth are to their homes S Let us give an example of what is meant here—and this illustration will suggest, of itself, many other applications. We all know—a mother more than any one else—what a potent spell praise is in making children master whatever they are learning, and, what is far more difficult, acquire a mastery over themselves, both in repressing wrong incli¬ nations and in gaining the habits of the noblest virtues. A word of praise from a mother will stir the heart of every well-born child—and few children are ill-born, that is, with radically bad dispositions—to the most extraordinary exer¬ tions, and fill the whole soul with delight, when that word is sweetly spoken of successful efforts made. We say no¬ thing here of the stimulus which praise from the queen of the home gives to the zeal and conscientious labors of ser¬ vants. We are concerned with the master of the home. Do you THE WIFE’S “ COMPANIONSHIP” ILLUSTRATED. 61 not know that all men, even old men, even the proudest and coldest men, are only great children, who thirst for praise from a wife, a mother, or a sister’s lips? There are men—and they are the noblest, the most high-sonled—who care bnt little, if anything, for the praise or censure of the crowd, even of the learned or titled crowd ; but their heart is stirred through all its depths by one sweet word from the lips of mother, sister, or wife. Why, 0 women, are you so niggard of a money which you can bestow without making yourselves the poorer, and which your dear ones prize above gold and gems ? Give generously, but discerningly, what is held so dear as coming from you, and which will only encourage those you love above all the world to strive to-morrow for still higher excellence, and look forward to still sweeter praise. THE PHILOSOPHER HUSBAND. Without unlocking the door of a home dear to the hearts of American Catholics, and on whose hearthstone the fire is now quenched forever—we can say here that the most illus¬ trious of our Catholic publicists was ever prompt to attribute to his wife much of the success of his writings. She was in truth,—so say those who were admitted to the intimacy of the great philosopher,—in her gentleness and simplicity by the side of his sturdy and robust nature, like the Tine wedded to the elm; apparently all weakness and depend¬ ence, drawing her life from the strong man on whom she leant. But she gave more life than she received; she im¬ parted to her companion confidence in his own judgments, firmness and constancy of purpose through all the vicissi¬ tudes of his trying existence. He was a proud man;—but, like all who have been most buffeted by public opinion, he was easily and deeply touched by the praise of those whose judgment he valued and whose sincerity he had no reason to distrust. He would often say that he was never sure or perfectly satisfied with what he was preparing for the press, till he 62 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. had submitted it to his little wife and obtained her approba* tion. Her admirable common sense had been one of the qualities which won his esteem when he first knew her, —and that sure sense continued to be through life his chief guide and stay. A word of hearty praise from her would inspire him with a youthful enthusiasm, give fresh vigor to his thought and eloquence to his pen, even when past his sixtieth year. The praise, and not unfrequently the admira¬ tion of two worlds, were not half so sweet to him, as the simple words of that devoted wife and mother. 4 4 My dear Doctor, that is very good ! ” Nor would he hesitate to cast aside or tear up the pages which had cost him most labor, when she told him that she thought what he had written was dull, or not to the point, or exaggerated. From his early mental struggles, all through the phases of his long and not inglorious battle with error and ill- fortune, she was the angel ever by his side, consoling, en¬ couraging, enlightening, strengthening, and guiding him. The soul of his genius seemed to have departed with her ; and, though he made a brave battle in his last years in favor of the Church to which he had given his faith, and against the triumphant errors of the day, he felt that half his strength and half his heart were in the grave with his loved wife. The reader can offset this example by calling to mind wives who, though wedded to men of the purest virtue, the most heroic temper, and the most undoubted talent, became a life-long torture to their husbands, by the absolute ab¬ sence of all the amiable qualities which make a woman the companion, the helper, the friend and counselor of her husband. We have known men who rose to a proud pre¬ eminence from the lowliest beginnings without ever finding in the heart of their wives one pulsation of sympathy for their aims, their struggles, their defeat or success; who, while suffering most bitterly from the inconstancy or injus¬ tice of the popular voice, turned vainly to their own home for rest, or to the mother of their children for one word of sweet comfort. We have seen men on both sides of the THE WIFE AS HELPMATE IN THE HOME. 63 Atlantic at whose feet a whole people were willing to lay down the highest offices and honors in their gift, and who feared to go from the triumph and intoxication of the senate-hall or the public meeting to the coldness, the neg¬ lect, the misery which awaited them at home. Surely such women,—women who turn to ashes and bit¬ terness the fairest and sweetest fruits of hard-won success, —who turn a home that could and should be a paradise into a purgatory,—surely they must expect a severe judgment hereafter. But even here they are severely judged, and have their punishment in the censure of their own household and the condemnation of all right-minded persons. We shall find other and more touching examples taken from the laboring classes and the poor, when we shall have concluded what is to be said of the wife’s office as friend and counselor. Let us resume what we have been saying about companionship. All these arts and industries which make a woman’s companionship so dear, so useful, so ex¬ alting are only a part of her nature, of her true self, as the Creator intends her to be in order that she may shine in the home of her husband, and whose price is from “far, and from the uttermost coasts.” ** Ah, wasteful woman !—slie who may On her sweet self set her own price. Knowing he cannot choose but pay— How has she cheapened Paradise ! How r given for naught her priceless gift. How spoiled the bread and spilled the wine. Which, spent with due, respective thrift, Had made brutes men, and men divine ! ” * THE WIFE AS HELPMATE IK THE HOME. In the earthly paradise of the true Christian home, the wife is a helpmate, the equal of her husband, neither his inferior nor his servant. It is not in such homes that our modern theories or discussions about “Woman’s Rights,” * Coventry Patmore. 64 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. or “the Sphere of Woman,” have originated. No woman animated by the Spirit of her Baptism, filled with the humility and generosity which are the soul of that self- sacrificing love indispensable to husband and wife' in the performance of their undivided life-labor,—ever fancied that she had or could have any other sphere of duty or activity than that home which is her domain, her garden, her paradise, her world. There, if she is truly a wife, all are subject to her, even her husband. There never existed a true-souled Christian man who did not believe himself and demean himself from his bridal hour till his dying day like a willing and loving servant of his wife inside his own home. This is true especially of the home of the wealthy and the great, where reigns and should ever reign the infinite respect and reverence of man for woman, in whom Chris¬ tian faith bids us see the majesty and purity of her who is Mother of Christ. There is no excuse for the high-born and the wealthy, when they fail to honor themselves, by doing service inside their homes to mother, wife, and sister. The difficulty will here be with the poor man, the laboring man, coming home at evening worn out by the toil of the day, faint with hunger too, and fearful it may be of the morrow. Has he not to be served rather than serve % The answer is an easy one, and easily understood, where minds are enlightened and hearts are upright. If the poor man’s wife has done her duty throughout the day, she will have found in her home-work enough to weary. The very labor of preparing for her husband and her sons, perhaps, the meal which is to restore their strength, and the care re¬ quired to brighten up that home so as to make it look a paradise of repose for them, — is the task of her who is the natural helper in the household—and whose blessed help consists precisely in making the home what it ought to be, man’s heart-rest from all outside cares. But that is enough about the fundamental notion of equal¬ ity between husband and wife, the father and the mother in the Christian family. Both are necessary to each other, they ought to have but one heart and one mind in the TIIE WIFE AS HER HUSBAND’S FRIEND. 65 pursuit of the one great purpose of their lives,—the hap¬ piness of their home and the rearing to the practice of all goodness the children whom God sends them. Under¬ standing this, their only true position toward each other, the husband never can entertain any notion of domineering over his wife, nor the wife feel any sense of servile inferior¬ ity toward her husband. But the love which binds her to him is an enlightened love which makes her view their respective labors as only two distinct parts of one task. Beside all that she accom¬ plishes in ordering, brightening, and warming the home,— there are a thousand ways in which she can be a helpmate to her husband, beyond what is required for mere compa¬ nionship. For it is one thing to be delightful company to a person one is traveling with, by being able to converse with him in his own language, or to discuss with him every favorite topic, or to enter into his recreations and amusements with zest, and thus to lighten the weariness of the road and charm away its dullness; and another to be a helper. One’s companion may fail in strength, or be beset with dangers and difficulties:—and then it is that the office of the helper begins. It is precisely when man’s heart fails him, and his courage yields to disappointment or difficulty, that woman comes to his aid. And if this help is most sweet and welcome and above all price in moments of professional weariness, of business difficulties, or when all seems dark and bleak and hopeless to the stoutest heart,—how much more valua¬ ble is it in matters which concern the soul’s welfare, in trou¬ bles of the heart, in the dark and stormy hours of temptation ! But we must not trench on the next and dearest function of wifely love,—that of being the truest and most faithful of friends. THE WIFE AS HER HUSBAND’S FRIEND. A story very apposite to our purpose is told by a writer of the middle ages. A man who wished to make a visit to 5 66 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. Cologne, famed at that time as a pilgrimage, possessing as it did the tomb of the Three Wise Kings. He was a wealthy man, but not a wise one. He had an admirable wife, whose worth he knew not, and whose company he neglected for that of two neighbors, who played friends with him because he was rich and lavish of his money. As he was setting out on his pilgrimage, he asked his friends what he should bring them from Cologne: one answered that he would like a rich cloak, and the other begged him to buy a tunic of rare stuff. He next asked his wife what he should get for her, and she besought him to bring back sense and wisdom which might enable him to see and correct the evil of his ways. After having paid his devotions at the shrine of the Three Kings, he went among the merchants, bought the cloak and the tunic, but sought in vain for some one who would sell him sense and wisdom. They were not to be found in the market. As he returned crestfallen to his inn, the host in¬ quired why he seemed downcast, and, learning the cause, advised him on his return home to pretend to his friends that he had lost all his money and could give them neither cloak nor tunic. He followed this piece of advice, and both of the false friends turned him out of doors, abusing him as a fool and a vagabond. Not so his wife, however: he told her the story of his loss ; but she, seeing that he was w~eary from the road and filled with sorrow and indignation because of this ill treat¬ ment, tenderly embraced him, consoled and refreshed him, assured him that God would send him heavenly treasures for the money he had lost. So his eyes were opened to know what wealth he possessed in her true love and faithful friendship; and thus did he “find sense and wisdom from 3iaving visited the City of the Three Kings.” * ‘ 4 What is friendship ? ’ ’ asks Alenin, and he answers forthwith, “ A similitude of souls.” Where the wife labors conscientiously to be a true companion to her husband, there is little fear but she will also become a true, faithful, * Joannes, Magnum Speculum, 12. THE WIFE AS HER HUSBAND’S FRIEND. 67 and constant friend. For tlie successfnl effort made to establish perfect companionship must end in effecting that “ similitude of souls,” which constitutes the essence and ground of friendship. The reasons which will urge every right-minded and true¬ hearted woman to be the most delightful and constant of companions and the most devoted of helpmates, must also inspire her with the resolution of being the most cherished of friends. She must not be jealous of the men for whom her husband entertains feelings of real friendship. On the contrary, it were wise to vie with him in showing them every mark of regard, as if she were thereby the interpreter of his dearest wishes. Nothing pleases a man more than to see his old and true friends warmly acknowledged and treated with all honor and affection by the persons most dear to him. This, however, is only a passing admonition to which every woman who is careful of her home-duties will do well to attend. It is not only virtue but good policy in a wife to have the sincere good-will and respect of all who consider themselves to be her husband’s friends. Not only will they contribute much to the pleasantness of the home in which they are always welcome and honored guests, but they will not fail to spread far and wide the fame of its hospitality and the good name of its mistress. It happens but too often that women will take it into their heads to regard the friends of their husband as persons who steal away a heart which should exclusively belong to themselves, and through an unwise and narrow jealousy make themselves odious and their homes intolerable to men whom they ought to conciliate and to bind to themselves. More than one wife has lost for ever the heart of her hus¬ band and destroyed the peace of her fireside by such insane conduct. Let the young and the wise take warning therefrom, and learn betimes how a true wife can be • the counselor, the guide, as well as the sanctifier and savior of her husband. And here let a practical example dispense us from pursuing the subject further. 68 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. THE CARPENTER’S WIFE A TRUE WIFE. John and Eliza H-were both natives of England, and came, with their infant son, to settle in one of our thrifty manufacturing towns in 1849. He had learned the trade of a house carpenter, had had remunerative employment in London, but, being ambitious to rise to something higher, had come to America with the hope of improving his knowl¬ edge and becoming in time an architect. His education, unfortunately for his design, had never gone beyond that of an ordinary common school, while his wife, who had studied in one of the excellent normal schools taught in England by the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, had grad¬ uated there with the highest honors, and had further im¬ proved her opportunities by perfecting herself in drawing and other branches taught gratuitously in the government schools. The young people had known each other from childhood, and their union was one of deep and pure affec¬ tion. They were also most exemplary in the fulfillment of all their religious duties. The husband was too proud of his young wife, and too sincerely devoted to her to consent to her accepting even the most advantageous position as school-teacher. He had set his heart on rising in the world, and would be the sole provider for his family and the sole artificer of their fortunes. During the first ten months of their stay in America every thing went well with them, and John’s emoluments far ex¬ ceeded his household expenses—exceeded, indeed, anything which he could have looked forward to at home. He found, however, that men of his craft in America had received an education superior to his, and that his inferiority in this respect was a serious bar to his advancement. At this point began the incomparable services rendered to him by his wife. She proposed to devote a few hours daily, after his return from work, to teaching him all that she knew her¬ self. It was a loving offer, lovingly accepted, and love seemed to quicken the intellect both of teacher and pupil, THE CARPENTER'S WIFE A TRUE WIFE. 69 the progress made by John being marvelously rapid. God also blessed these studies, for the two never began or ended a lesson without kneeling to implore the divine light. It was a habit acquired in school and kept up through life by both the one and the other. Six months had not elapsed since the beginning of these lessons, when John’s expertness as a draughtsman astonished his companions and employers and obtained him promotion. But he did not relax his home studies. Not a little of his spare money was used to purchase the best works on archi¬ tecture, and the young man applied himself many months with enthusiasm to mastering every detail of that great science,—especially all that pertains to design and construc¬ tion. His wife, who now left him to himself, was neverthe¬ less made the companion of all this preparatory labor. He could not bear to have her out of his sight while he was making a plan, or calculating the strength of such and such building materials. A second child came to gladden the pair, while thus toiling together beneath the eye of God. And almost simultaneously with the birth of their babe a new blessing wa,s sent to them. It was proposed to build a new church in a remote part of the State, and John, after visiting the locality, had sent in a plan so well conceived, and an estimate of costs with specifications so carefully drawn up, that the construction of the church was awarded to him. This was John’s first triumph; it called forth his utmost gratitude, but it did not make him proud. He referred his success to the Divine Author of every blessing, to whom both he and his wife had most humbly and earnestly recom¬ mended it; and, after God, he thanked his dear helper and mistress, whose teachings and encouragement and bright affection had given him both the light to know how to do his new work, and the unfailing courage to undertake and accomplish it. She had a little oratory in her bedroom, with a water-color painting of one of Fra Bartolomeo’s sweetest Madonnas executed by herself, hangings of exquisite em¬ broidery the work of her own hands, a lamp of beautiful 70 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. design fed with the purest olive oil, and rare fragrant flowers which she cultivated in honor of her dear Mother. The little framework with its carving and illuminations was the work of John’s chisel. There they offered up together their night and morning devotions; and there John knelt when he received the tidings of his success, reciting with over¬ flowing heart the Te Deum , while his little wife made the responses from her sick-bed. With the first triumph came also their first trial—their first separation. For the building of the church required that the architect should be often on the spot; and beside his being charged with the construction, he w^as most anxious that this, his first building, should be perfect; so far as his skill and care could make it. It was a terrible trial for these young hearts. The clergyman for whom John was building, though not of his own faith, was much interested in him. He was shocked not a little at first to hear of John’s going on Sundays to the far-off little Catholic mis¬ sion-chapel, and his trustees murmured at having a Roman¬ ist to superintend the building of their beautiful and costly church. But the gentleness of the young man, his constant attendance at the works, his perfect control over the work¬ men, the exceeding beauty of his own designs as well as of the carpenter’s work, which he began to have executed in advance for the interior of the edifice, and, above all, the comparative cheapness of all that he did, soon silenced the murmurers. What most touched the clergyman, however, was the yearning which the architect felt for his home, and the emo¬ tion he could not conceal when speaking of his wife. The enterprise was happily brought to a close, and a handsome donation in money, with a vote of thanks from the parish¬ ioners, was added to the price orignally stipulated. There was more than that: during the progress of the works the name of the architect was mentioned so favorably in clerical circles, and the quality of his work elicited such genuine admiration, that he was asked for designs for two other churches. THE CARPENTER'S WIFE A TRUE WIFE. 71 His enforced absence from home now seemed to the hus¬ band and father so painful a sacrifice, so great a loss of all that a true man holds most dear, that he began to repent him of the ambition which had impelled him to soar above his carpenter’s craft: the reputation he had already acquired and the brilliant fortune which smiled upon him seemed too poor a compensation, he thought, for the loss of that dear companionship of his wife, his friend, his instructress ; for the caresses of his babes, and all the bliss of the peace¬ ful and sunny home for which his soul thirsted continually. Still, when he mentioned his regrets to his wife, she would not—though her heart was oppressed by the prospect of these long and frequent separations—allow him to repine or draw back from the career on which he was but entering. Without giving up their home, rendered doubly dear to both by their first struggles and John’s apprenticeship for his present profession, Eliza resolved to be with him as much as possible during the fine season. She wrote to him daily, sometimes twice a day, cheering him and encour¬ aging him especially to be more than ever faithful to those solid and soul-nourishing practices of piety, which main¬ tain the union of our spirit with the Spirit Creator, and give us the confidence to undertake and the power to accomplish every thing planned for his glory and in accordance with the duties of our avocation. You are impatient to know the end, gentle reader. It shall soon be told. Just as John was carrying out the most important of all his constructions, an accident in his work¬ shop (for he would persist in designing himself all decora¬ tions in woodwork, and in carving what was most difficult and delicate) maimed his right hand for life. Thencefor¬ ward he could never handle the chisel or the pencil. And hitherto he had not had any assistants or cared to form pupils. The blow was a heavy one to him, and all his prospects seemed to him blighted forever. His wife was soon by his side, however, to comfort and reassure him. She could draw, she said, if he could not, and he could direct her in filling up any design demanded of him. As his studies in 72 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. architecture had been carried on in her company and with her guidance and co-operation, she was more competent than he thought in all that pertained to his profession ; in¬ deed it was to her sure and excellent taste that he owed, without being aware of it, the originality and purity of his architectural designs. So the young wife and mother, acting under the inspira¬ tion of her love, and responding to his unbounded belief in her capacity, not only studied architectural drawing under her husband’s eye, but induced him to advertise for assist¬ ants and apprentices, and soon found herself with no less than six remarkable young men studying her husband’s noble profession in his house and under their joint superin¬ tendence. Alas, the season of unhoped-for prosperity which ensued was but of too brief a duration. Eliza had been, at the time to which our narrative has brought us, twelve years in America—twelve years of unmixed happiness springing from a love which increased with each successive year, be¬ cause each year revealed in the wife some new perfection her husband had not discovered, some treasure of goodness more precious than any possessed till then. Five children surrounded the board of the proud fond mother ; and every one of them she was herself educating. After the birth of her sixth child her health failed ; no scientific skill availed to stay the progress of the insidious disease which had de¬ clared itself. Her death was indeed a spectacle for angels and men to admire. To the last she would have her husband by her side, comforting him, instructing and strengthening him with a sweet and glowing eloquence which borrowed its light and warmth from the near vision of eternity. He was not crushed, because she seemed to have breathed into him in dying her own heavenly spirit of resignation. He understood that he must now take up her work, and be to his six orphans both father and mother. He was rich enough to give up his profession ; and devoted himself en¬ tirely to the education of his dear ones. THE CARPENTER’S WIFE A TRUE WIFE. 73 There was one service—greater than all the others—for which the widowed husband never ceased to thank her wdio had been to him companion, helpmate, and friend ; she had saved him from his own weakness. During his frequent ab¬ sences he had by degrees contracted convivial habits, which tilled her with unspeakable alarm. She eventually proved his savior; but it is only consummate tact and a love full of tender and most patient reverence for the diseased soul that can render the intemperate willing to he saved. Eliza’s ascendency over the heart which had never known any other love than hers, was that of the mother over a sick babe, which yields itself absolutely to the loved voice, the tender hand, and the encircling arms. Would that every wife who reads this book may thus learn to be to her husband a friend and a savior! She would thus be most truly the Angel of the Home, keeping the steps of all within it from straying to the right or the left, and guiding them through life toward the blissful goal of their pilgrimage. Speaking, as we do throughout this book, not of the monastic life of spiritual perfection, self-crucifixion, and apostolic labor, but of the home-life which is the nursery of true men and women, both for the common paths of worldly toil and duty, and for that other higher and more perfect road, we can safely say of the re¬ sults of a Christian wife or mother’s training: “No man ever lived a right life who had not been chastened by wo¬ man’ s love, strengthened by her courage, and guided by her discretion.” Looking to the influence for all good and honor and great¬ ness that a wife, in God’s design, is capable of exercising over her husband, and to the implicit obedience that every true-hearted husband yields through life to her he has made queen of his home,—we cannot but place here the beautiful words of a living author:* “Chivalry, to the original purity and power of which we owe the defense alike of faith, of law, and of love, . . . assumes that in this rapturous obedience (of the husband) to the single love of * Buskin. 74 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. his youth, is the sanctification of all man’s strength, and the continuance of all his purposes. “ You cannot think that the buckling on of the knight’s armor by his lady’s hand was a mere caprice of romantic fashion. It is the type of an eternal truth—that the soul’s armor is never well set to the heart unless a woman’s hand has braced it; and it is only when she braces it loosely that the honor of manhood fails.” The poor man and the rich man, the man destined to labor all his life as well as the man fitted to fill every public trust, needs more than at any period in the past to have his wife arm him for the daily battle against temptation; against the terrible corruption and dishonesty which rule over every class of public men ; against the contempt cast by modem public opinion on all that the Past held sacred, reverence for the home, for the church ; faith in God and in all that is most capable to make man God-like; against Christianity itself, and the civilization and manifold sancti¬ ties it created. Let every true wife daily brace more and more tightly round her husband’s heart the armor of the old principles which made our fathers invincible in their long battle against error and wrong. Thus “the honor of manhood” will not fail among us, so long as every wife-and mother aims at being the Angel of the Home. CHAPTER VII. DUTIES OF THE WIFE AS THE DISPENSED OF THE HOME TREASURES. Wlio shall find a valiant (brave-hearted) woman? . . The heart of her husband trusteth in her. . . She hath sought wool and flax, and hath wrought by the counsel of her hands. . . She hath tasted and seen that her traffic is good : her lamp shall not be put out in the night. . . She hath opened her hand to the needy, and stretched out her hands to the poor. She shall not fear for her house in the cold of snow .—Proverbs xxxi. Nothing so animates the head of a family to honorable exertion as the certainty, that his wife bestows her utmost care in providing for the comfort of his home, in dispensing wisely the store which he places at her disposal; making it her rule to be just to him by never exceeding his means when she cannot increase them by her industry, in being just to her children by supplying them with becoming rai¬ ment, food, and instruction, just to her servants, whom she treats with a motherly tenderness which never condescends to familiarity;—and just to God’s poor, whose claims she holds to be most sacred. But let us proceed understandingly. The first care of the wife is to establish discipline and order;—discipline, without which there may be much noise and agitation, but no work doneand order, because where there is confu¬ sion every thing is out of place, or done out of its proper time. To have discipline,—where there are children and servants,^—the mistress must have authority, and she must assert and establish her authority by being both firm and calm, and giving every one to understand that she means what she says, and that what she says must be done. 75 76 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. Order means that every work must be done in its proper time, and every thing in the house be put in its proper place. Order means economy both of time and of labor. For where every occupation has its own appointed time, the household duties are sure to be attended to and to be fulfilled with singular ease and pleasure. If this order and economy of time are necessary in large households, it is still more so in the home of the poor man, where every thing has to be done single-handed by the wife. There are poor households,—those of the daily laborer, the poor tradesman,—where the wife, with a large family of chil¬ dren to care for, will quietly get through an amount of work of different kinds that would seem to require the joint en¬ ergy of several persons. Gfo into these bright and orderly homes, where the housewife rests not from early dawn till long after sunset of the longest day, and see the cleanliness, the tidiness, the calm and the contentment that fill the place like an atmosphere! Of course there will be comfort for all where there is such order. For there can be comfort with poverty, or at least with little, though never with want. There will be comfort for the husband when he returns to that bright, warm, pleasant hearth, where the deep love of his companion fills the house with a spiritual fragrance more pleasant than all the flowers of spring; there will be comfort at the simple meal set on the board shining with cleanliness; and there will be comfort in the sweet conversation in which the out¬ side world is forgotten, in the joy of being all in all to each other; and there will be bliss in the night’s rest won by hard and hearty toil, and undisturbed- by peevish ambi¬ tion or by the dreams of a spirit at war with God or the neighbor. There will be loveliness, too, in the home where true love causes order and comfort to reign. For the poorest room can be made lovely by a woman’s cunning hand. She can have flowers at her window, and flowers on her mantel and her table. And the curtains of windows and beds may be beautified by some simple ornament devised by a woman’s MAN RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS STEWARDSHIP. 77 taste and executed in spare moments by the hand of even the busiest. There is not one among the readers of this book but has seen such homes—albeit lowly, narrow, and poor in the literal sense—in which this order, comfort, and loveliness gave the beholder the evidence of a womanly spirit that might have graced a palace. This remark, however, is only preliminary to what pertains to the wife’s stewardship in her home. MAN, IN EVEEY CONDITION, RESPONSIBLE FOE HIS STEWARDSHIP. We must not, especially in an age which tends daily more and more to deny that man owes any account to God for the use of the wealth he chances to possess—whether that be inherited from his ancestors, or obtained by his own thrift and industry—be carried away by the torrent of error. No matter whence derived, all that man has as well as all that he is belongs to God—his Creator and Lord and Judge; and to Him must he return to give an account of the use which he will have made of his being, his life, his time, his property. Reason, even without the light of su¬ pernatural revelation, teaches this truth as fundamental and unquestionable. The great and the rich will have to account for their stewardship,—for the uses to which they have put their time, their riches, their power, their influence, their oppor¬ tunities, just as the laboring poor will have to account for their thrift, and the awful uses to which one may see, day by day, our hard-working heads of families put their earn¬ ings in drunkenness, gambling, and all manner of vice. But, as we have said, it is the province of the housewife to be at home a wise steward in the use of her husband’s means, while his chief business is, outside of the home, to procure these means by honorable industry. Both are re¬ sponsible to God. The wife’s immediate responsibility how¬ ever is toward her husband. She is his minister, his eye, 78 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. his hand, his head and heart, in applying his wealth or the produce of his industry to the ends for which God wills it to be employed. THE STEWARDSHIP OF THE WEALTHY WIFE. Of persons of royal, princely, or noble rank, we do not think it necessary to treat in this place. We speak of wealth wheresoever it exists, and of the duties and respon¬ sibilities of the wife in its home-uses. Hers should be a wise economy. Wisdom consists in a clear perception of the ends or uses for which money is to serve, and in the careful adaptation of one’s means to one’s expenditure. You have so much and no more to spend each week, or each month, or each year ; you have so many wants to provide for : let your wisdom be proved by always restraining your outlay so as to have a little balance left in your favor. We know of a wife,—a young wife too,—who after her bridals was made the mistress of a luxurious home, in which her fond husband allowed her unlimited control. They were more than wealthy, and his business relations and pros¬ pects were such as to promise certain and steady increase for the future. Still the young wife did not allow herself to be lavish or extravagant. She provided generously for the comforts of her home, for the happiness of her servants, for the duties of a generous hospitality ; she had an open hand for all charities and good works. But she was also, young as she was, mindful of the future ; and this wise fore¬ thought is eminently the characteristic of women. With¬ out ever whispering a word of her purpose to her husband, she resolved from the beginning of their housekeeping that she would lay by in a safe bank her weekly economies. The husband, in all likelihood, would have deemed this saving an ill omen, pointing to future calamity. It was, however, only the prophetic instinct of the wise woman, who, in the heat of summer and the overflowing plenty of autumn, looked forward to “the cold of snow,” and made THE STEWARDSHIP OF THE WEAL1HY WIFE. 79 store for the need and warmth and comfort of her house¬ hold. The “ calamity” came after a good many years ; it came by a fatal chain of circumstances in which the misfortunes or dishonesty of others brought ruin on the upright and prudent and undeserving. One day the husband came home with heavy heart, and tried in vain to hide his care from the penetrating eyes of love. He had to break to his wife the dreadful news of their utter ruin. She listened unmoved to his story : “ All is not lost, my dear husband,” she said; “I have been long preparing for this. If you will go to such a bank, you will find enough laid up there to secure us either against want or poverty.” In order to secure this wise and provident economy, even in the midst of wealth, two extremes must be avoided, par¬ simony, which destroys domestic comfort and makes the mistress of the proudest house despicable in the eyes of her cook, her butcher, and her grocer,—and w~aste or extrava¬ gance, which is ruinous to the largest fortunes and most criminal in the sight of God. u Waste not—want not,” used to be inscribed on the huge bread-platters of our fa¬ thers, both in the servants’ hall and the family dining-room. “Waste not—want not,” ought to be the rule of every housewife in all departments of household economy. Waste is always a sin against God, against your husband and children, as well as against the poor, who have a right to what is thus thrown away: and, forget it not,—waste never fails to lead to want, as surely as stripping a tree of its bark is followed by its pining away and withering. Another rule, which a wise woman will never violate, is to tell her husband when she exceeds her means or allow¬ ance. It is fatal concealment to allow debts to accumulate without one’s husband’s knowledge ; it tempts the woman w^eak enough to do so to have recourse to most unworthy and most dangerous expedients, which are sure to be known in the end, and to lower the culprit or ruin her for ever in her husband’s esteem. The equivocations and the downright falsehoods which are often used as means of concealment, 80 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. cannot but be considered by every right-minded man as a greater calamity than the accumulation of the largest debt or the loss of an entire fortune'. In this respect, as indeed in every other, no concealment will be found to be the wife’s only true policy ; and to se¬ cure this policy of no concealment let her make it the study of her life to have nothing to conceal. THE WIFE THE DISPENSER OF HOSPITALITY. To the wife’s stewardship belongs also the discharge of a most important, not to say most sacred duty—that of hos¬ pitality. It is one of the chief functions of the divine virtue of charity. Of its nature, its necessity, and its importance w’e do not wish to discourse here. Few are the homes and the hearts to which hospitality is a stranger. Those to which this book may reach will easily understand what the word means without either definition or description. We can, therefore, convey our instruction by the simplest method. Whoever is received into your home as a guest—pre¬ cisely because he is your guest—forget every thing else to make his stay delightful. It matters little whether persons thus hospitably received may or may not appreciate your generosity, your cordiality, and that true warmth of a wel¬ come like yours, inspired by Christian motives much more than by worldly reasons ; it matters much for you that none should ever enter your home without finding it a true Christian home, or should leave it without taking away with them the pleasant memory of their stay and a grateful recol¬ lection of you and yours. Doubtless some will be found whom no courtesy, no kindness, no warmth of hospitality can change from what they are,—little-minded, narrow-hearted, selfish, cold, and unable to judge the conduct of others by any other standard than their own low thoughts and senti¬ ments. They are only like bats entering a banquet-hall by one window and passing out at the opposite, after having fluttered blindly about the lights, or clung for a few in- LEON DU COUDRATS WIDOWED MOTHER. 81 stants to the walls or the ceiling. Let them come and let them go. The social and spiritual atmosphere of the place is not for them. Nor must yon complain of the number. It is wonderful how much place a large-hearted woman can find for her company, even in a very small house ! A hospitable spirit can do wonders in its way: it can make the water on the board more delicious than the wines of Portugal, Spain, or France or Italy ; it can make the bread which it places be¬ fore stranger or friend as sweet as the food of the gods ; it can multiply its own scanty stores—as the Master did with the loaves in the wilderness. For God’s blessing is with the hospitable soul to increase, to multiply, and to sweeten ; to fill all who sit at her board with plenty, with joy, with thanksgiving. “ There is,” says Digby, u a castle on the Loire held by a lady of ascetic piety and of noble fame, in the latest pages of French heroic annals. There one of my friends, received to hospitality, finding many guests, supposed himself sur¬ rounded by men of illustrious condition, till he was in¬ formed that they were all persons reduced to poverty, whose title to familiarity under that roof was founded precisely on their indigence and misfortunes.” * Ah, noble France, how many other homes along the Loire, the Mayenne, the Sarthe, and the Somme do we not know which are always open to the stranger and the pilgrim from other lands, while their generous masters and mis¬ tresses deem every sacrifice a blessing, because performed for Christ present in the guest of one day, or one week, or one month ! LEON DU COUDRAY’S WIDOWED MOTHER. More than one eye will read this page and share the feel¬ ings of the writer in recalling that hospitable home near Laval, where the widowed mother of an only son gave, yearly, hospitality for two whole weeks to fifty or more of the 6 * Compitum, book i., chapter vi., p. 177. 82 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. student-sons of St. Ignatius—young men from Canada and the United States and New Granada, as well as from Spain and Italy, from Great Britain and Ireland, from France and Germany—nay, even from Russia’s old Moscovite capital. How the son—not a priest yet, but one who had renounced a brilliant career in the world for the poverty and humility of a Jesuit’s life—would daily invent new forms of amuse¬ ment and recreation with which to make the mother’s lav¬ ish hospitality the more graceful and the more charming! How each evening found that band of apostolic youths (re¬ minding one of the “Schools of the Prophets” in the days of old) engaged in some new pastime on the green sward, blending needful recreation after hard study with some beau¬ tiful literary enjoyment! We still hear the glorious tenor voice of that thrice-blessed son, Leon du Coudray, rising above the loud chorus of song and hymn; we remember the pleasant open countenance, the ever sweet smile, the gracious words of heartfelt affection, as natural to the true-hearted youth as its native notes are to the nightingale. And then we bethink us, as we just read the latest accounts of his heroic death, * of this young man, become the Superior of the noblest Christian school in France, seized wuth several of his brethren as a hostage by the Commune, and turning to them as they were led to prison through the streets of Paris amid curses and insults, and saying aloud in the old joyous tones: “Ibant gaudentes . . . ‘They went, ... re¬ joicing that they were accounted worthy to suffer’—is it not so?” He went as joyously to prison, that only son of the widowed mother, as ever bridegroom to his bridals; and when the fatal 24th of May, 1871, had come, it was on his strong arm that the Archbishop of Paris leaned, as they were hurried forth to be obscurely butchered; it was by his side that the prelate stood facing their bloodthirsty exe¬ cutioners ; and when the first volley had been fired, only wounding the archbishop, who fell to the ground, and leav- * See Maxime du Camp, Prisons de Paris sous la Commune, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1st September, 1877. A DEVOTED WIFE SUSTAINS IN DIFFICULTIES. 83 inghis companion almost unhurt, it was Leon du Con dray’s strong arm that lifted him up, and on his brave heart that his sinking head was laid, when a second volley mingled their blood and freed both their souls at once. Ah, brave heart, true heart! Was the widowed mother still living to learn of her martyr’s death, and to receive in the bitter¬ sweet of that so glorious ending the reward of her profuse hospitality and of all her Christian virtues ? With Leon perished and was buried another young priest dear to the writer of these lines, Father Alexis Clercq, once a navy of¬ ficer, and, at the time of his arrestation, a professor in the College S. Genevieve, Rue des Posies. The writer had prepared him for his first mass, and assisted him at the altar during its celebration. May they both from near the throne of the Lamb beseech a blessing on these pages, and obtain for every mother who reads them the grace of being not all unlike that hospitable widow, and of rearing, like her, sons ready to sacrifice life itself rather than betray Christ and the faith of their baptism ! There are, however, examples nearer home, which if not connected with such tragic scenes as this, have also their touching record of heroic devotion crowned by the death of the saints. HOW A NOBLE HUSBAND WAS SUSTAINED BY A DEVOTED AVIFE WHILE PASSING THROUGH FINANCIAL DIFFICULTIES. One family in particular will help to teach the reader that woman] y excellence is no rare or recent flower on the soil of the New World: A young wife, born among our Western valleys, and wedded to the man of her choice, had encouraged him in a chivalrous literary enterprise which promised precious and plentiful fruit for the highest pur¬ poses of patriotism as well as religion. Their home had been blessed by six beautiful children, reared by the ac¬ complished mother with' inconceivable tenderness and care. It had been the delight of the grandparents to fill that home with every article of furniture and object of art which 84 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. could make it what it was in reality—a paradise for its inmates as well as for a large and devoted circle of friends. But the mind, the heart, and the hand of the happy young wife it was which gave to that home its bright look of refinement, of goodness, of perfect happiness. One day, while she and her eldest daughter were wreath¬ ing some flowers round the frame of a favorite picture, the husband and father came in, and received from both the usual rapturous welcome. “ Look, my dear,” the proud little housewife exclaimed, after the first greeting, “look and see if any thing can be more beautiful than this room ! Had we our choice from the richest stores and the rarest col¬ lections of art, what could we add to all this ! What dear object could we part with for a better?” The fond hus¬ band’ s eyes glanced rapidly round the room ; but they did not shine with the enthusiasm which fired his companion’s. A cloud of a sudden settled on his brow as if the question caused a pang in spite of the strong effort he made to re¬ press his emotion. To his wife’s enthusiastic queries he only answered by bending over her and kissing her in silence. She divined that some misfortune had befallen or was im¬ pending. And he, who had ever, since their wedding-day, found in her a trusty friend and most wise counselor,—now told her that the enterprise which had promised to be a most profitable as well as a most beneficial investment, had proved a most ruinous failure ! His friends, he said, had generously offered to come to his assistance and lend him all the money needed to meet his engagements. To cumber himself with this debt or to sell his home and its costly furniture, was the only alterna¬ tive left to them. He had not had courage to mention to her till the last moment the strait to which he was reduced; for he feared, and their friends feared, lest the parting with her beautiful home and the loss of so many precious things should crush her. “You cannot hesitate, dearest,” was the quick reply “ we must part with every thing rather than become depen- / AN IDEAL WIFE AND HOME. 85 dent on others by being their debtors. You shall see how easy it will be to me to part with these treasures, provided I have a little home for you and our darlings, into which no creditor may intrude or pry. Am I not too rich and too happy with the wealth of love you and my children bring tome?” There was not a moment lost; a little cottage was rented in another part of the city, and only the most needful arti¬ cles of furniture were provided for parents, children, and servants ; the busy hands of the young wife were never idle for several days beautifying the new home for the dear ones, who were kept, as well as friends and neighbors, in ignorance of the approaching change; and the little ones soon found themselves all of a sudden transported to the new nest! Then, to the astonishment of all in the neighborhood, and the regret of many, the auctioneer came, and piece after piece of the beautiful furniture—some of it made by the best upholsterers from the timber grown on the paternal estates far away—the objects of art and virtu , with which the young mother was wont to illustrate her lessons on the beautiful given to the oldest children, and the dear piano—the gift of a fond mother—all were unhesitatingly sacrificed. But what was the astonishment of friends and relatives, when, after a few days of pity or wonderment, they called on the brave little woman in her new home, to find it so fair, so bright, so beautiful! The carpets were plain, it is true, and the furniture was of the commonest kind; but chairs and sofas and ottomans had been covered with a chintz so pretty that no one stopped to inquire what was beneath the covering. There Avere white curtains to the windows, looped up wdth garlands of artificial flowers, and there Avere fragrant flowers on mantels and tables ; and the little mistress was there with her face all aglow with happi¬ ness, with her sunny smile and merry laugh, and the warm hospitable welcome for every friend and acquaintance;-- and there, too, were the rosy children, as unconscious of any change of fortune as the happy guests of Aladdin’s fairy 86 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD . palaces, who found in one snite of apartments objects so ravishing that they quite forgot what they had seen before. The little ones saw no change around them, save that the light of their mother’s smile was even more sunny than ever, that she loaded their dear father with fonder caresses and called forth from his big heart louder bursts of joy and mirth,—and that she had been busier than ever with her active hands and restless needle in transforming and beau¬ tifying the face of things in every room with the smallest possible expense. The change of residence, as well as the circumstances which occasioned it, only served to raise both husband and wife in the esteem of the community and to inspire their intimate friends with a warm admiration for their magna¬ nimity. And so the happy nestful increased, and the hus¬ band rose higher in public confidence and in his noble profession,—while his wife bestowed her whole care on the lovely children, whom she educated herself in every branch of learning and in every accomplishment necessary or suitable to their position. It was no small labor ; but she found it light,—such was the order which she had estab¬ lished in her household, so sure was she of the devoted zeal of every one of her servants, and so delightful did she know how to make to her worshiping pupils every step in the most arid pathways of learning. And yet the house was ever full of visitors. The numer¬ ous relatives belonging to both families were always ex¬ pected to make their home with these good young people while in town ; and there were friends who could not re¬ sist the attraction they felt for a family which seemed to them the ideal of human felicity. Limited as was their in¬ come, neither the husband nor the wife ever bestowed a thought on the expenditure consequent upon such an un¬ bounded and uninterrupted hospitality. The little wife managed to have a bountiful table at all times, never an extravagant one; and thus she never once allowed her household expenses to go beyond her means. What made her table, her drawing-room, the whole atmosphere of her THE WIFE AS THE FRIEND OF THE POOR. 87 home so full of an undefinable charm, was the love, the in¬ nocence, the paradisaical purity and charity which parents and children shed around them. The dinners were true feasts of love and joyousness, and the evenings in the drawing-room were festivals of song, in which mother and children had the chief part, but in which all guests who could play or sing were impelled to join by some powerful spell. Those who had been privileged to share once or twice in this genuine hospitality, or who had been during one or two evenings under the charm of that blissful family circle, would yearn to return. And now, it will be asked, does this blessed home still exist ? Alas, no ! The nest is empty, cold, and songless. Like many a sainted mother in the past, the brave-hearted little woman could truly sing: “ I pray you, wliat is the nest to me. My empty nest ? And what is the share where I stood to see My boat sail down to the west ? Can I call that home where I anchor yet, Though my good man has sailed ? Can I call that home where my nest was set. Now all its hope hath failed? Nay, hut the port where my sailor went, And the land where my nestlings he : There is the home where my thoughts are sent. The only home for me— Ah me ! ” * THE WIFE AS THE FEIEND OF THE POOR. We should have told how dear to the hearts of the poor, to the hearts indeed of all who were acquainted with mis¬ fortune and suffering in any shape, was the home into whose privacy we have been just glancing,—for every heart and every hand within it were ever open to the needy. We may intersperse through these pages many gracious acts of goodness and true charity originating with the queen of * Jean Ingelow, “ Songs of Seven.” 88 THE mirror of true womanhood. that blessed home,—just as the silversmiths of old would detach pearls and other gems from an over-rich crown to adorn the vesture of royalty or religion. So pass we now to that dear function of home-life in the good old Catholic times. And connecting here hospitality toward the poor with almsgiving, let us see what was in that respect the spirit of the ages of faith. “Padua,” Digby informs us, “had forty-five houses for the entertainment of poor strangers; in Venice all comers were entertained by many Doges; and, above all, say the old Italians, Vicenza was distin¬ guished for its munificence toward needy strangers. At Venice, the senators who presided over the public adminis¬ tration were so hospitable that the whole city resembled a hotel for guests, and a common home for all strangers com¬ ing to it. At Cesena every one used to dispute for the honor of receiving the stranger, till, to obviate such quarrels, the pillar was erected, having a ring for each noble family, so that to whichever the stranger on arriving fastened his horse, to that family was he to repair. ‘ Receive Itindly whoever comes,' says St. Francis in his rule,—the spirit of which ruled many castles as well as cloisters— ‘all, whether friend or foe, thief or robber .’ We read, indeed, of one proud castle standing near the road, over the portal of which the knight who built it, through the sole motive of vanity, caused lines to be inscribed . . . intending to signi¬ fy that no one should be received but knights, philosophers, or clerks, or noble ladies. But the ancient legend states that by a terrible vision this knight was converted, and so de¬ livered from his former error that he resolved thenceforth to entertain rather the poor, effacing that inscription and substituting for it words which signified that the naked and poor, the sick and infirm, and the exile and the pilgrim, would be thenceforth his guests.” * In Brittany a most beautiful custom still exists, in spite of modern legislation, which tends to forbid almsgiving of * Compitum, b. i., c. vi. THE WIFE AS THE FRIEND OF THE POOR. 89 every kind, and to prevent tke poor, even when they have a hovel of their own, from leaving it and making their dire need known to their neighbors. The day following mar¬ riage is “ the day of the poor.” They troop from every side to the door of the happy pair, and find tables spread for them in the vast hall of the nobleman, when the bride¬ groom is such, or on the greensward when he is of inferior degree. The tables for the men are set on one side, those for the women on the other, the bridegroom waiting on the former, and the bride attending to the comfort of those of her own sex. When they have had their fill, all dance together, and then take their leave, pouring blessings on their kind entertainers. Surely such blessings and the heartfelt wishes and prayers of the poor must be more profitable to young people entering on the married state and its doubtful fortunes, than the idle congratulations of a fashionable throng, and the selfish modern custom of has¬ tening from the foot of the altar to the railway train or steamboat, in order to escape from the irksome duty of re¬ ceiving friends or feasting the poor. If from Brittany you cross in imagination the broad ex¬ panse of sea which separates the westernmost shores of France from Spain, you will find among another proud and ancient race, the Basques, with a faith by no means less deep than that of the Bretons, Catholic notions about pov¬ erty and almsgiving which are full of eloquent meaning. Land at any point of that rock-bound shore, in any one of the fishing towns and villages so famous all through Chris¬ tian history, and you will see how the few native poor, in a country where nobody is ever seen idle, are treated with a sovereign respect and tenderness. A recent traveler * land¬ ing at the little town of Elanchove—which clings with its one street to the almost perpendicular face of a mountain two thousand feet high—saw, as he toiled up that ladder¬ like street, “a poor old woman all bent double with age standing at a door and asking for alms. A charming young * L. Loiiis-Lande, Trois Mois de voyage dans le Pays Basque. 90 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. married woman, her mouth all wreathed with smiles, has¬ tened to come out. I saw her take from her pocket a small brass coin, kiss it, and then give it to the old woman. The latter took the alms, made with it very devoutly the sign of the cross on herself, and then kissed it in her turn. Such is the custom throughout the Basque country, and does it not add a touching grace to charity \’ ’ Such noble and touching customs as this are not, how¬ ever, confined to Biscay or to Northern Spain; they are everywhere characteristic of the Spanish Catholic. The lofty spirit of self-respect which is the soul of the Spaniard, is shown in the reverence with which he treats the poor, whom word or look of his will never humble; but as his faith teaches him to consider Christ himself present in the person of the beggar or of the sick man, his respect for them becomes downright and heartfelt veneration. It will cheer and enlighten us to gather some of these choice pearls of Spanish custom to deck our own crown of merit withal. ‘ ‘ Cheating and extortion seem incompatible with the Spanish character. Even the poorest peasant who has shown us our way, and who has walked a considerable distance to do so, has invariably refused to receive any thing for his services; yet all are most willing and anxious to help strangers. The same liberal spirit seems to breathe through every thing, and was equally shown at our little posada (inn) at Elche, . . . where a number of maimed, blind, and halt collected daily to receive the broken viands from the table-d’hote, which the mistress distributed to them, and in the delicate blacksmith’s wife opposite, who keeps two lamps burning nightly at her own expense before the little shrine of ‘Our Lady of the Unprotected’ in her balcony. The temporal works of mercy—to give bread to the hungry, and drink to the thirsty, to take care of the sick, to visit prisoners, and to bury the dead, these are the common duties which none shrink from. As I write, a handsome, dark-eyed brown boy in rags, who looks as if he had stepped out of one of Murillo’s pic¬ tures, is leaning against the opposite wall in the moonlight, CATHOLIC CHARITY SUPERNATURAL. 91 watching a shrine of the Virgin. It is a picture typical of Spain, ruined and superstitious, but still most beautiful— and so is the cry of the watchman which is ringing through the silent air, ‘Are, Maria Santis sima! it is a quarter to twelve o’clock! ’ ” * Ah, give us back this superstition,—this living faith ra¬ ther, which built up Spain and Portugal till they were the wonder of Christendom. The ruin of the Peninsula is coeval, step by step, with the decline of that glorious spirit of 44 su¬ perstition.” But we can pardon this perversion of judg¬ ment in a Protestant who has the eye to see and the heart to appreciate so much that is beautiful in Catholic customs. It is well known that from time immemorial the sove¬ reigns of Spain visit the hospitals nearest to the royal resi¬ dence once at least every year. The rule is to go there with the entire court. On entering the sick ward royalty at once goes to the nearest bed and humbly kisses the hand of the poor patient. Then sovereigns and courtiers wait on the sick, performing in their behalf the most menial services, and addressing the suiferers with as much reverence as if they beheld the God of Calvary or the Divine Babe of Beth¬ lehem visibly present in every sick-bed. THE LEPEOUS INFANT CAKED FOE BY ELIZABETH OF HUNGAEY. Is not this the significance of a most beautiful legend from the life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary ? Her mother-in- law, Sophia, was, at the time of the occurrence about to be related, bitterly prejudiced against the saintly wife. 4 4 She neither shared nor approved Elizabeth’s charities and mer¬ ciful ministrations. In her son, however, she found no sympathy. Yet one account shows how even his kind heart was overtasked. One day a child afflicted with lep¬ rosy was brought to the hospital in the Wartburg ; but his state was such that even the most courageous attendants * Hare, “ Wanderings in Spain,” v., pp. 83, 84. 92 TEE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. in tlie institution would neither touch him nor admit him. Elizabeth, coming at her usual hour, no sooner beheld the little sufferer lying helpless and forsaken at the gate, than she took him up in her arms, carried him to the castle, and placed him in her own bed. “Sophia, indignant, flew to the landgrave. ‘My son,’ she burst forth, ‘come with me instantly, and see with whom your wife shares your bed ; ’ and she led him to his chamber, relating in exaggerated language the extraordi¬ nary occurrence that seemed to crown all the mad acts of his wife’s charity. The landgrave, though he said not one word, could scarcely conceal his irritation and loathing. He snatched the coverlet from the bed, and lo ! instead of the leper, there lay an infant, surrounded with a halo of light, and bearing the features of the new-born babe of Bethlehem!”* This example is, however, more admirable than imitable- It is a rare thing to have to perform heroic acts of any virtue,—even that of charity. Where a miracle occurs, as here, Providence means to inculcate a lesson. The teach¬ ing, to the Catholic mind, is a plain one : it is only the repe¬ tition, under a different form, of the Master’s doctrine, that he is represented by the persons of the poor and the suf¬ fering. So, with this conviction firmly seated in the soul of the Christian mistress of a household, it will be easy for her to see with what reverence and generosity she must treat the poor. We say “reverence.” For if her womanly heart has schooled itself to behold Christ present in every one of the needy who come to her door, she will not have to be reminded to show to all, without exception, kindness. Kindness is something far beneath reverence; yet let us insist upon the absolute necessity of kind looks and kind words. Xo one better than a woman knows how far kind¬ ness goes, or how much and how long a kind word or a look of tender sympathy will be treasured up by those on * “Heroic Women of the Bible and the Church,” c. xxxiii., pp. 349, 350. TREAT THE POOR KINDLY AND REVERENTLY. 93 whom they are bestowed. If you have nothing else to give,—if your purse is empty, and your bread has failed,— open the spring of kindness in your heart and let it pour out on the hearts of the poor sweet words of compassion, often more needed and more rarely bestowed than food on the famishing or cold water on the faint and weary. Follow the rule of the great St. Francis, therefore : Be invariably and unfailingly hind to the poor. And this precious quality in the temper and bearing of man or woman can only be secured by the habitual practice of that “reverence’’ just mentioned. It is more needful than ever that in every Catholic home mothers should cultivate that ancient respect for husband and children which was inspired by a lively faith, and made every member of the Christian community view in his fellow-Christians the chil¬ dren of God, the person of Christ himself. This feeling inspired the father of the great .Origen,—a father found soon afterward worthy to die the death of the martyrs,— with a reverence for his infant son so deep and so sincere, that he was wont as he passed his cradle to uncover the child’s breast and to kiss it, kneeling,—knowing, as he said, that the babe was the living temple of the Holy Ghost. Surely Catholic fathers and mothers ought to find an ex¬ quisite pleasure in such elevating thoughts and sentiments as this ; surely they should so consider each other and re¬ spect each other as if they too were chosen vessels, vessels of grace, bearing about in their bosoms the Creator Spirit; and most surely ought it to be the mother’s chief delight to reverence in every child of hers a something far more holy, more precious than the chalice used in the Holy Sac¬ rifice, or the sacred vessel shut up in the Tabernacle and in¬ closing Christ’s divinest gift to our souls. Can we school and accustom ourselves so to reverence the poor as to sec in them the Person of Him who is represented as evermore standing in the night, wet by the dew or the rain¬ storm, at the door of every one of us, and gently knock¬ ing for admission to the light and warmth of our fireside ? This said, it is not our design to say either to the wealthy 94 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. or to the needy housewife what measure she is to follow in relieving the wants of the poor. Let our spirit be the royal spirit of the ancient Catho¬ lic charity of our fathers. To the rich let this suffice. “ A modern author relates that a merchant in Spain once said to him : A rich Spanish tradesman would laugh at you if you talked to him of keeping his carriage ; but ask him for alms , and he will think nothing of giving you a hundred , five hundred , or a thousand dollars * THE CHARITABLE PEASAHT-GIEL. In our own days we find in Catholic countries most illus¬ trious examples of unbounded charity among the poorest classes of laborers. At St. Etienne-la-Yarenne, in the south-east of France, lived a country girl named Magdalen Saulnier. “ Pious from her cradle, she used to distribute every day to the neighboring poor part of the provision that she received for herself to take into the fields ; though of a weak constitution, she used to walk long distances to visit other poor and give them alms, which she had begged from the rich. During fifteen years she supported in this manner a poor blind man and his idiot daughter, daily vis¬ iting them, though they lived a league and a half from her home. A poor woman afflicted with leprosy in the hamlet of Grandes-Bruyeres had no one, during eighteen months, to come near her but Magdalen, in whose arms she breathed her last. In 1840, during the inundations of the Rhone, she narrowly escaped being drowned while conveying her daily provision to another poor woman in the Grange-Ma- gon ; and, when reproached for her imprudence, she replied, 4 Why, what would you have me to do ? I had not seen her the day before.’ In the depth of winter, in 1835, she had discovered a poor woman, named Mancel, living far away in a hut, more like a wild beast’s den than a hu¬ man habitation. This poor creature was ill, and Magdalen * Compitum, b. iii., c. vii. j THE CHARITABLE PEASANT-GIRL. 95 would not leave her alone. Toward the close of a long night, a thick snow covering the ground, she lighted some sticks, which caused so great a smoke that she opened the door to let in fresh air, when a wolf stood ready to dispute with Death its prey. It required all her efforts, aided only with a large stone, to keep the door closed against the fu¬ rious animal, which howled and struggled for entrance till the dawn. Some hours after, the woman expired. Then Magdalen, fearing that the wolf would return, took up the body on her shoulders, and carried it to the house of the nearest peasant, who received it till the burial took place.” * What an example is here—in this poor girl whose whole life was consumed in the incredible hardships of a field-la¬ borer—for the wives and daughters of our laboring classes in town and country. There is not a narrow street, crowded with tenement-houses, in any one of our large cities,—nor a manufacturing population in any of our great industrial cen¬ ters,—in which every woman who reads these pages cannot find some poor mother burdened with a family who is al¬ ways busied in doing good around her to those poorer and more burdened than herself ; some factory-girl, sparely clad and poorly fed, who is an angel of good counsel, comfort, and all manner of help to her companions. Travelers over a sandy and treeless waste often chance upon green and shady spots rising like islands of the blessed in the midst of an ocean of death and desolation. When they come to ex¬ amine what has made these fairy spots so beautiful, they find a spring of living water gushing up from the bosom of the earth, overflowing its native spot, causing the grass to grow, and the shrub to flower, and the tree to take root and thrive, and thus the green carpet spreads round about that cool spring, and bird and beast and man himself hasten gratefully to enjoy the shade, the refreshing waters, the loveliness and repose of the spot. Examine well, in these moral wastes so frequent and so hideous amid our civiliza- * Ibidem , pp. 265, 266. 96 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. tion and onr Christianity, what is the source of the sweet and sanctifying influences you discover in certain neighbor¬ hoods : you will be sure to trace it to some womanly heart, in the poorest of hovels frequently, and not seldom in the coldest and most naked of garrets. FRENCH-CANAHIAN WOMEN AND THE IRISH ORPHANS of 1847. But let us point out, nearer home, some heroic examples, which we may hold up as a mirror to American woman¬ hood. And first must be recorded here, by one who was an eye- witness of what he relates, and before the generation wdiich beheld it has passed away, one of the sublimest instances of Christian charity known to ancient or modern times. jSTew York and Quebec have not yet forgotten the Irish famine of 1846-47 and its terrible consequences. But ’tis with the latter city in particular that this narrative has to deal. Fearful as had been all through the fall and winter of 1846 the tidings borne to America about the privations endured by a whole famishing people, and the mortality caused by fever and other attendant diseases, but little ap¬ prehension was felt in Canada when navigation opened with the early spring. Consequently nothing like adequate pre¬ paration was made by the local authorities either at the quarantine station below Quebec, or at any of the usual landing-places along the St. Lawrence. The result of this want of forethought was terrible both for the thousands of wretched immigrants cast all of a sudden on our shores, and for the populations among whom the poor fevered victims carried, whithersoever they went, the seeds of pestilence. The quarantine station on Grosse Isle, below Quebec, became a hot-bed of the most virulent typhus fever, and almost all the priests who were called in turn to minis¬ ter to the spiritual wants of the crowded sick on ship and shore, caught the disease, many of them dying, and the others carrying disease, death, and dismay back with them MEMORABLE CHARITY OF FRENCH-CANADIANS. 97 to their parishes. In the city of Quebec itself but compar¬ atively few ravages were committed by this dreaded ‘ ‘ ship- fever:” the steamers which conveyed the healthier immi¬ grants to Montreal and the upper St. Lawrence not being permitted to land. In Montreal, however, and in Kingston and Toronto their arrival and passage w r ere marked by a fearful mortality. In the first-named city Bishop Bourget, his coadjutor, Bishop Prince, his vicar-general, and some thirty priests were stricken down by the plague. The semi¬ nary of St. Sulpice alone lost eight of its members. Bishop Power of Toronto fell a victim to it, and its ravages were such, during the early summer, that they far outstripped those of the cholera. Of course thousands upon thousands of orphans were left behind, and that, too, at a time when to give them a refuge in any home in town and country, appeared to be bringing certain death into the family. Yet,—and this is what must redound to the eternal honor of the French Canadian popu¬ lation of the present province of Quebec,—not only was there no hesitation manifested in adopting these little cast¬ aways, but at the voice of their bishops and priests the people of the country parishes vied with each other in their zeal to share their homes with them. The author remembers returning from quarantine, in the second week of July, with the Bev. John Harper, rector of St. Gregoire, opposite Three Pi vers. They had spent a fortnight among the fever-sheds, and had, at the urgent request of their parishioners, brought home with them a large number of orphans. The parishioners of St. Gregoire (the descendants of the noble Acadians eulogized by the author of ‘ 4 Evangeline 5 ’) had chartered a little steamer to convey us and our orphans across the river. We had been delayed perforce on our way upward, and on our arrival about midnight at Three Elvers, we found a crowd of eager and excited women, mothers of families all of them, wait¬ ing and watching for us. Mr. Harper was among his parish¬ ioners, and on the spot these noble mothers were allowed to satisfy the yearning of their Christian hearts, and to take 7 98 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. each her little orphan to her embrace. It was a spectacle worthy of the admiration of angels, which was beheld on that wharf at that sultry midnight in July, these farmers’ wives, weeping every one of them with that holy emotion which sweetest charity creates, pressing around their pastor and choosing, when they could, in the uncertain light, the child that pleased them best, or accepting joyously and folding in a motherly embrace the little orphan allotted to them. The ladies of Three Rivers were also there, jealous of the happiness of their sisters and neighbors, and employ¬ ing in the darkness some pious stratagem to decoy to their homes some of the weary, wasted, or fevered little crea¬ tures. The author was a hundred miles distant from his own parish of Sherbrooke, and had only dared to select a few orphans to take with him all the way. So, after an hour of confusion and excitement we were all content to rest till the approaching daylight. When the dawn came, and we left our resting-places for the ferry, all Three Rivers and its neighborhood were abroad to see the priests, their orphans, and the happy mothers to whom God had given the prize of an orphan, wending their way in a procession to the steamer and the ferry-boat. The heat of the preceding days, and the sultry night with its excitement, had told on more than one of the bewildered little strangers : there were several cases of declared fever. But no one seemed to mind. The charity of Jesus Christ was abroad, like a river overflowing its banks. Two children who had fallen to the author’s charge were especially ill; one, a little boy, clung to his cassock as we set out from the hotel; the other, a little girl of four, he had to carry in his arms, as she was too sick to walk. The scene has remained indelibly impressed upon heart and memory. We were wending our way through the crowd of weeping or pitying spectators, when the wife of a distinguished lawyer of Three Rivers, childless herself, as we were told, approached the author to caress the little motherless one who clung to him in apparent insensibility. A HEROIC WOMAN. 99 As she kissed the child again and again, addressing it in the sweetest tones of womanly tenderness, the little sufferer looked into those appealing, tearful eyes, and stretched out her arms to that hungry heart which would not be refused. They were only separated by death thereafter. But when we reached the other shore we found the Bev. J. C. Marquis, with the entire population of St. Gregoire, and every available mode of conveyance waiting for ns; and so we proceeded some two or three miles to the beautiful parish church, where priests and people knelt in devout thanksgiving,—the priests grateful for their preservation from the plague, the people thanking God for the precious boon charity had bestowed on them. They did not rest contented with this, however: hundreds of other orphans were sought after subsequently and added to the happiness, and—let us hope—the prosperity of this excellent people. Not one of these stranger-children but became in every sense the child of the home into which it was received. All through the remaining months of summer, the autumn, and the early winter, this generous Same of charity spread and burned among the French Canadian parishes along both shores of the St. Lawrence ; and, strange to say, the good souls who thus vied with each other in opening their homes and hearts to the orphans of Ireland’s exiles, were wont to say that while the plague spared the families into which the strangers were admitted, it swept away pitilessly such as gave them a passing or a mercenary refuge. Ah, gener¬ ous people of New France, may the Saints of Ireland obtain for you length of days, with the richest blessings of true freedom, a constant increase in the noblest gifts of soul, and all the rewards of true piety ! THE WIFE OF A SHIP-CARPENTER A MINISTERING ANGEL OF MERCY. i One crowning instance must be selected, ere we close this chapter, to demonstrate what womanly hearts can and will effect for the suffering and the needy. It is November in 100 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. Quebec, in that same memorable year 1847, and November had set in with unusual severity. The country parishes all round had each received its colony of Irish orphans or young girls, who were adopted by the excellent farmers, Still the temporary asylums in Quebec attached to St. Patrick’s church remained overcrowded ; no provision had been made for their sustenance during the long winter which was setting in so fiercely ; and local charity, it was feared, had been exhausted by the extraordinary drain of the pre¬ ceding six months. At a meeting of ladies it was resolved that the most zeal¬ ous would go by sub-committees of twos and threes into all the neighboring parishes, and knock at every door to exhort every family to adopt one of the many hundreds of home¬ less waifs left behind by the retiring tide of disease and wretchedness. Women’s tongues are eloquent when fired by such a cause ; they were welcomed everywhere, and a day was fixed when the orphans should be brought to St. Patrick’s church, and all who wished to add one more stranger to their family circle were to go there and make their choice. So, on the day appointed, the ferries from Point Levi and the Island of Orleans were early crowded with farmers’ wives and daughters, while along the roads from St. Foye and Beauport, Cliarlebourg and Lorette, the vehicles of the country people streamed into the city as to some great public festival. It was near noon, and in the house of a French Canadian ship-carpenter, out near the banks of the St. Charles River, at the extremity of the St. Rocli suburb, the cheerful, active mother of six children was just concluding her morn¬ ing’s labor, sending off her oldest girl with the father’s din¬ ner to the ship-yard, leaving her infant nursling with a kind neighbor, and then hurrying away,—a distance of full two miles, to Patrick’s church. She had been delayed in spite of her utmost exertions, and her only feeling, as she almost ran along the road, was one of fear lest she should be too late at the church and miss the prize which she had THE LITTLE DEFORMED FINDS A MOTHER. 101 | promised her husband to bring home to himself and their dear ones. The silent empty streets through which she passed on nearing the church made her heart sink within her; and as she entered St. Patrick’s there was no one there but a few good old souls telling their beads before the altar, and some soldiers of the garrison performing “ the Way of the Cross.” The tears filled her eyes as she knelt a moment in adora¬ tion ; and then she hastened to.explore the two large sacris¬ ties behind the church. They were empty ! As she passed through the lower one, what she deemed a stifled sob struck her ear; but the distant corner whence it seemed to issue was very dark, and her eyes were still half-blinded by the brilliant sun outside and the glare of the snow. So, in her % excitement, she heeded not the sound, but crossed the court¬ yard to the rectory and knocked timidly at the door. The servant, on opening, saw this good woman in tears, and scarcely able to articulate one word. At length she gasped out, ‘ ‘ The orphans ? ”—“ The orphans, ma’ am ? ’ ’ replied the other; u there are none here!”—“ Where are they \ ” —“ All gone—all taken away by the ladies.”—“Have you kept none that you might let me have \ ”—“No, indeed,” ! was the answer ; and with this the poor woman turned away with a heavy heart. As she re-entered the lower sacristy on her way to the church, her ear was again struck with the sound of sobbing, and coming, this time, more audibly from the distant dark corner. She was there in a moment; and bending, or rather kneeling down, she dis¬ tinguished a female child, with its head between its hands, sobbing and moaning piteously. It was a little girl, some five years old, who on the voyage out had lost father and mother, brothers, sisters—all! The little thing, naturally a very beautiful child, had had in succession fever, dysentery, and small-pox; and beneath this complication she had almost sunk. She had partially lost the use of her lower limbs, and had been frightfully disfigured. In the church, whither she had been brought early in the morning with the other orphans, the charitable 102 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD women had invariably passed her by, choosing, as was natural, the most comely children for their adopted ones,— and the sensitive slighted little thing sobbed so piteoiisly that she was taken to the sacristy in order not to disturb the proceedings in the church. There she had sat in the corner, sobbing herself to sleep, and had been forgotten when the crowd left the church. So, as the opening of the sacristy door, a moment ago, had roused the forlorn one from her somnolency, she had looked up at the stranger coming in with a revival of hope, and a sob escaped her as the latter passed out by the opposite door. Once more hiding her face in her hands, she wept and sobbed with increased bitterness, as if the little wounded heart within would burst her chest. And thus the good carpenter’s wife found her, as she knelt in the gloom by her side. 4 4 What is the matter, dear child?” she said, with infinite tenderness in her tone. 44 Who has left you here?—Speak to me, my dear!” she went on, as she removed the hands from her face. The child looked up through her scalding tears at the sweet sound of that motherly voice, and all wms plain to the speaker. The face thus revealed was so disfigured that the woman drew back involuntarily. But recovering herself instantly, and,—as she expressed it,—indignant at her own cowardice, she extended both arms lovingly to the weeper: 44 Kiss me, darling,” she said, as her own tears flowed fast, 44 kiss me, come to my heart; don’t be afraid, I am your mother now.” And she folded her in her embrace, covering her face and head with tears and kisses. The ship-carpenter's family possessed a blessed treasure that night. No, this is not extraordinary charity: great hearts, like that of that noble woman, abound everywhere among our laboring people. O women, who read these lines, remem¬ ber, that your charity, your generosity will find in your every-day ordinary life rich opportunities for their exercise. Never neglect any occasion God sends you of doing the good you can. Great charity, like every other great virtue, DO THE GOOD YOU MAT MOST HEARTILY. 103 does not consist in doing extraordinary things, or waitin for extraordinary circumstances; it depends on our doin with all our heart the good we have the chance of doing at every moment within our own homes and outside of them. “ I have known a word hang starlike O’er a dreary waste of years. And it only shone the brighter Looked at through a mist of tears ; While a weary wanderer gathered Hope and heart on Life’s dark way. By its faithful promise, shining Clearer day by day. I have known a word more gentle Than the breath of summer air ; In a, listening heart it nestled, And it lived forever there. Not the beating of its prison Stirred it ever night or day ; Only with the heart’s last throbbing Could it fade away.” * * Adelaide Anne Procter. bJD biD CHAPTER VIII. THE wife’s CROWNING DUTY—FIDELITY. Ut nos junxit amor , nostro sic parta labore Unanimes animos operit una domus. As us love joined, so by our toil acquired, One-minded souls one mansion covereth. —Ancient inscription on a French house. Do you know where you are ? Do you know that this is the house of a man rich in virtue V ... Do you know that these marbles, these stones, these paternal ceilings, represent the ancient honor and the venerated virtue of the family ? The house of my father is the center of loyalty, and the sanctuary of honor. —Alarion. The home is the nursery of the nation, and the deep and sacred love that binds into one existence the hearts and lives of husband and wife, is the soul of the home life. Every thing which tends to lessen, to divide, to sully that sacred union of hearts, strikes at the very life of the family and aims at upsetting the foundations of the moral world. The sacred virtue, the immaculate honor of every family, is inseparable from the purity and perpetuity of the love pledged to each other by both parents ; more especially, in universal estimation, is the family honor dependent on the inviolable fidelity of the mother toward him to whom she gave her early love. Hence the deep significance of the prayer of the church in the solemn ceremony of marriage. She who had proposed to the imitation of all waves the undivided and unalterable love which she ever bears to Christ, her Spouse, —who gives 104 THE RING SYMBOLIC OF ETERNAL FIDELITY. 105 them in her inviolable and eternal fidelity to him, to his honor and interests, the model of the true woman’s unwaver¬ ing, sustained, and devoted fidelity to her husband,—makes of this notion the central point in her magnificent marriage ritual. Throughout all ages known to history, the most refined peoples have looked upon the ring as the symbol of eternity —as the proper emblem, therefore, of the union of souls un¬ derlying the matrimonial contract. THE RING SYMBOLIC OF ETERNAL FIDELITY. • % When the Church has witnessed and sanctioned by her blessing the mutual and solemn pledge given by bride and bridegroom, she proceeds to bless a ring, which is given to the bride as a symbol and seal of the union into which she has entered, and of the enduring fidelity with which she is to feed the sacred fire of mutual affection and to watch over the honor of her hearth-stone. “Bless, 0 Lord, this ring,” such is the prayer, “which we bless in thy name, in order that she who wears it, by preserving unbroken fidelity to her husband, may continue in peace and the accomplishment of thy will, and also ever live in mutual charity.” Where the beautiful ceremonial is carried out in its in¬ tended fullness, the nuptial benediction is followed by the offering of the adorable sacrifice. Christ comes down on the altar, who so loved the Church, his Bride, that he “de¬ livered himself up for it, that he might sanctify it, cleansing it by the laver of water in the word of life, that he might present it to himself a glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing, but that it should be holy and without blemish.” There, at that altar and in that presence, kneel the two for whom the Saviour God comes down, his hands filled with blessing for these his children beginning life together, and his heart overflowing with untold treasures of grace,—* so needful to them on their pathway of pain and labor. 106 THE mirror of true womanhood. But there is more than this ; the Church breaks in on the most solemn portion of the liturgy,—that between the con¬ secration and communion,—to pronounce a further blessing on the bride. Turning toward the newly-married, the priest, as if his hands were laden with the blessings brought from on high, and his lips touched with the hallowed fire to prophesy good things to the suppliants prostrate there, thus prays: “ O God, who by thy might didst create all things out of nothingness; who, having ordered the first stages of this universe, and made man to the image of God, didst make man’s substance the principle of woman’s being, that she should thus be his inseparable companion, teaching us thereby that a union originating in such unity may never be broken without crime; O God, who didst hallow this conjugal union by so surpassing a grace as to make the primitive nuptial alliance the prophetic figure of the mys¬ terious union of Christ with the Church; God, by whom woman is thus united to man, and the primordial society thus formed is endowed with a blessing which alone survived the punishment of original sin and the judgment executed through the deluge; look down propitiously on this thy handmaiden, who, about to begin her companionship with her husband, beseeches Thee to grant her Thy protection : in her may the yoke of love and peace ever abide ; faithful and chaste, may she wed in Christ, and be evermore the imitator of holy women : may she prove lovely to her hus¬ band, like Rachel; wise, like Rebecca ; long-lived and faith¬ ful, like Sara; may the fell Author of (Eve’s) prevarication find no trace in her of the actions which he counsels ; may she be immovably attached to thy faith and law: the spouse of one man, may no other love ever touch her; may she school and shield her own weakness by home-discipline : may she be modest and dignified, chaste and venerable, en¬ lightened by wisdom from on high ; . . . may she win approval by her stainless life, and thus attain to the rest of the blessed and the heavenly kingdom.” * * The Roman Missal in the “ Nuptial Mass.” THE HONOR OF FAMILIES GUARDED. 107 THE WIFE’S HONOR THE FOUNT OF ALL HONOR. Pagans, in ancient times, were wont to attribute tlie origin of each mighty river to a peculiar deity ; so they built a temple at its head-waters, and there offered frequent sacri¬ fice in order that the stream throughout its course to the ocean might be pure and healthful, and fraught with all manner of blessings to the lands it watered.' This, like many other customs, was only the perversion of a deep religious truth. God has committed this earth and all therein that is most beneficial to man to the custody of those blessed spirits, who, destined to be in eternity the fellow-citizens of men made perfect in glory, take delight in watching over their welfare and being their companions in this life of trial. But if a perverse sentiment induced the heathen of old to consider as a something holy and divine the well-spring of mighty rivers, what must not a Religion which comes from the true God think of the home which he destines to be the source of a race of men and women designed to be his own adopted children ? What solemnity must the Church not employ to hallow that union, on the permanence and sacredness of which depend the honor, the unspotted name, the greatness and happiness of a family throughout all succeeding generations S Hence the inconceivable care with which the Church has, ever since the days of Christ,—the second and truest Pa¬ rent of mankind,—watched over the unity and sacredness of that bond which makes of father and mother the one, sole, loving and beloved well-spring of the family exist¬ ence, pride, and honor. HOW THE CHURCH HAS GUARDED THE HONOR OF FAMILIES. During nineteen centuries, as the history of Christendom attests, the Church has endured, in the East as well as in the West, many bitter persecutions at the hand of empe- 108 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. rors, kings, and other sovereign princes, because she would not permit them to put away their lawful wives, become distasteful to them, or sanction their unhallowed union with others, while the former were still living. Thus did she, who is here below the mother of the true life and of beautiful and chaste love, protect the weakness of the woman and wife against the unholy passions of all-power¬ ful husbands ; surely, being such as she is, she has a right, as she has a charge, to save woman sometimes from the tyranny of her own headlong inclinations. At no period in Christian history, however, has there existed such a blind and general conspiracy of governments and peoples to ruin the sacred institution of matrimony as in the present age. So long as Christendom was governed in things spiritual by the judicial decisions of the Roman Pontiff, no State dared pass a law contrary to the unity and indissolubility of the marriage tie ; no individual, whether sovereign or subject, prince or peasant, could violate with impunity the law which guarded the honor of every family. The sword of excommunication was as sure to reach the transgressor,—whether he sat on the throne, or lived in a palace, or dwelt in a shepherd’s cot,—as when Paul first drew it against the incestuous Corinthian in the first days of Christianity. MODERN LEGISLATION DESTRUCTIVE OF THE FAMILY HONOR. Now States, legislatures, sovereigns, and governments, abetted or unresisted by their respective peoples, have de- christianized and unhallowed the marriage contract and all its solemnities, and made it a civil act, deriving its value, sanction, and binding power from the civil authority. Non- Catholic sects and ministers have neither the power, nor, seemingly, the will to assert the sacredness of Christ’s insti¬ tution. Luther,—as he set out on his downward path as a reformer,—declared against the unity of the marriage tie, and further desecrated the solemn rite of matrimony by taking to wife a nun, both being previously bound by sol- IN WHAT THE WIFE'S FIDELITY CONSISTS. 109 emn vow never to marry, and thereby incapacitated from contracting valid nuptials. The Mormons of Utah have only pushed to its legitimate limits the liberty of Biblical interpretation invoked by Luther and the Reformation; and European governments and legislatures, like the sev¬ eral States of the American Union, are only consistent with the universal teaching of Protestantism,—denying to mar¬ riage among Christians any sacramental or supernatural character. Christian families still find in the teaching of the Catholic Church and the far-reaching authority of her Pontiffs, the only divine safeguard on earth against the invasion of their homes and their honor by Mormonism or State secularism. It is that same teaching, that same fatherly voice which, while protecting you, O wives and mothers, against the passions that would sanction the unfaithfulness of your husbands, ever bids and exhorts you to unwearied devo¬ tion and fidelity above reproach or suspicion. IX WHAT THE WIFE’S FIDELITY CONSISTS. In the two preceding chapters we have insisted much on the qualities which enable a wife to be, in the fullest sense, the most delightful companion, the most efficient helpmate, the most trusted friend and confidante of her husband. All this she cannot be, without being at the same time most truly devoted to him in thought and affection,—so that he alone, after God, fills her mind and her heart. We have touching examples of this inviolable fidelity,— springing, in the first instance, from that single-hearted and absorbing love of a good husband which leaves no thought of any other love being possible ; and, in the second, from a wife’s own high principle and fear of God, which keeps her true to the love she pledged, even when its object has be^ come most unworthy, or, possibly, most hateful. FIDELITY ILLUSTRATED. In the patriarchal ages before Abraham,—in the age of Noe and those preceding the flood,—there was no question 110 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. among the families of the blessed line of Seth of admitting a second wife into the family. That was characteristic of the evil brood of Cain,—his son, Lamech, being mentioned as the first who had departed from the unity of the institu¬ tion of marriage as it came from the hands of the Creator. But Seth himself, and every one of the blessed descendants who kept alive on earth the primitive faith in Jehovah and the belief in the promised Redeemer, also maintained in their households the faith they had pledged to the wife of their youth. Though these men lived five hundred, six hundred, or even nine hundred years and more, their hearts were content with the love, and their lives filled with the fidelity, of that one woman: it was a sacred fire in.these august patriarchal homes, burning undimmed century after century on.the hearth-stone,—an example, even at this dis¬ tance of time, deserving of the wonder and veneration of their degenerate descendants. Rebecca’s fidelity prefigures that of the church. The violation of that unity by Abraham, even at the so¬ licitation of his faithful Sara, was a manifest imperfection in him, who should have known better, and a want of faith and error of judgment in her, who had been brought up among the licentiousness of the Mesopotamian idolatry. But Abraham’s son and successor, Isaac, and his bride, Rebecca, departed not from the great primitive law. For Isaac, who bore the wood of his sacrifice up the mountain¬ side was the figure of Christ; just like Isaac’s early and only love, Rebecca, brought to him so wondrously from afar,— was the type of the Church. It is the love of both Rebecca and the Church that forms a model and a rule for every Christian wife. juditii’s example. We have nearer to us in the Old Testament history other touching examples of fidelity in wives to the husband of ANNA THE PROPHETESS. Ill their youth. Judith the Deliverer, “the Joy of Israel,” the glory and honor of her people, was widowed young, and, though surpassingly beautiful, and most wealthy, she remained true to the memory of her husband, inviolably faithful to the loye she had plighted to him. The sudden inspiration which came to her to offer herself to the admir¬ ing eyes of the Assyrian general, was no deviation from the law of fidelity which she had so scupulously followed till then. She trusted to God's angel to keep her honor safe in the Assyrian camp, and, as she afterward declared, he had watched over her coming and going till she had struck the blow which freed her country. The victory once won, and the national thanksgiving over, she put off her rich robes, resumed her sober widow’s weeds, buried herself once more in the solitude of her own house, and gave up the half- century of life which remained to her to prayer, fasting, alms-deeds, and the cherished worship of her husband's memory. ANHA THE PROPHETESS. So is it with that remarkable woman whom we meet with in the temple at our Lord's presentation therein,—Anna the Prophetess. She, too, had been left a widow after seven years of companionship with her husband; and “ she was a widow till fourscore and four years ; who departed not from the temple, by fasting and prayers, serving night and day.” She was rewarded by beholding in the flesh the Redeemer promised to Adam and Eve in the garden, and whose glory, like the first fires of sunrise above the eastern hills, patri¬ archs and prophets had only looked on “from afar.'’ She was also privileged to see in the temple the Mother most blessed who was prefigured by Eve as well as by Judith. These are only landmarks on the glorious pathway of true womanhood, pointing out in the inspired writings the honor paid to fidelity and the reward bestowed on it even in this life. 112 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD . IDEAL UNITY AND ETERNITY OF CONJUGAL LOYE. They teach this lesson, at all events: That the purest and greatest of women considered the love, which they had given to the husband of their youth as a something so sacred, a gift so divine, that they could allow no other love to intrude upon it; they had meant it to last for all time and for all eternity, and as such they cherished it, even when their loved companion had been taken early away from them. There is no doubt that this ideal eternity and unity of conjugal love is that upheld and blessed by the Church. But what is of the deepest practical importance, is FIDELITY TO THE LIVING. Of this we have most touching examples all through the pages of Christian history. Nor is it necessary to insist at length upon this, where matrimonial unions are well as¬ sorted, and where, on both sides, there is the fear of God, a love blessed of Him, and all the charities of the home-life ever fed by the reception of the sacraments. It is where a union is ill-assorted, unhappy, and where, particularly, the hus¬ band happens to be any thing or every thing save what the wife in her innocent dreams of goodness and manliness con¬ ceived as the real character of her lover. It is in the home where these dreams have been succeeded by a sad awakening, where the ideal sought after and loved turns out to be a hideous specter, and where the idol the bride worshiped so sincerely has been dashed to pieces on the hearth-stone,—that the young wife needs to look up to God, to call on his Name, to seek for his grace in order to be true to him and to herself,—in spite of the terrible de¬ ception of which she is the victim. Let us give, first, a few pregnant rules, which may serve for all, whether happy or otherwise ;—we shall afterward point out to the unhappy and sorely tried the only road on which they can find salvation. KEEP TOUR FAMILY TROUBLES TO YOURSELF. H3 RULES. A cardinal principle in home-life is, never to allow one’s self to suspect or to distrust one’s dear ones, save only when the evidence of guilt or unworthiness is irresistible. Even then, the terrible truth must be kept secret from every living soul; it is only when absolutely necessary and in an extremity that a wife should mention it,—though never so guardedly,—to an experienced and holy guide. From one’s relatives on both sides,—from father or mother, brother or sister,—the secret should be strictly and sacredly kept, so long as the reformation and salvation of the guilty one or the protection of one’s children, or some such weighty con¬ sideration, does not compel one to speak so much of the truth as is needful. KEEP YOUR FAMILY TROUBLES TO YOURSELF. It is impossible for a wife to be too reserved on this point: it would be fatal to seek confidants even in one’s nearest and dearest. Where conscience is concerned extreme care should be taken both in choosing the person to be consulted and in the manner in which the communication is to be made. Even a father, if he be a man of wisdom, experi¬ ence, and high principle, will rarely encourage a married daughter to make him her confidant in her secret troubles. If he has been a good husband, blessed with a good wife, his own heart will have taught him how jealous a husband is of seeing any man made his wife’s confidant. There must be extreme necessity, then, to justify a wife in revealing her troubles to priest or to father, —even with all the reservations made above. To make a confidant even of a brother, is most unwise under any but very extraordi¬ nary circumstances; but to go with one’s troubles to a stranger, be he what he may, is to court danger, and to go more than halfway to meet ruin. If confidence given to persons of the opposite sex is fraught with such certain peril, how much more so is friendship ? 8 114 THE Mill ROE OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. THE FRIENDSHIPS BANEFUL TO FIDELITY. Lady friends and lady confidantes unwisely chosen, and kept in spite of a husband’s remonstrances, have destroyed the peace of many a home where there was, otherwise, every element of happiness,—sincere mutual affection, compan¬ ionship, and faith in each other’s virtue. But gentlemen friends—where a wife is so bereft of sense, of discernment, of womanly tact, as to permit such a monstrosity to come into her life —gentlemen friends are the worst enemies of her honor, her home, and the happiness of all belonging to her. If a wife be already happy in possessing a husband who fulfills her ideal of manliness, who is all in all to her, she does him the foulest wrong and her own honor irreparable injury in transferring to any man living any part of her af¬ fections. If, as we suppose, she loves her husband with her whole heart, how jealous would she feel of any woman on whom her husband would bestow any thing like friendship ! Would she not resent it—and most justly—as a grievous wrong done to herself ? But she is not to forget, that, in a family, a husband’s friendships do not tend to bring dis¬ honor on the children, like the aberrations of a mother’s heart. We cannot affirm it too strongly, the honor of families de¬ pends chiefly on a father’s reputation and achievements; the dishonor of families on the unhallowed friendships of mothers. WHEN DANGER BEGINS. The greatest danger for the heart of the wife, till then blameless, unconscious, and unsuspicious of evil, arises in those seasons of deep domestic trouble, discord, and unhap¬ piness. It is in these seasons of trial that a wife should go to the heart of the Crucified for sympathy, light, and strength. Oh ! if women whose hearts are sore and whose troubled spirit yearns for consolation and counsel, only knew what THE CHRISTIAN WOMAN SUPERNATURAL. 115 light and sweetness and energy of soul can be found in one quarter of an hour’s secret converse with the Crucifix,— that most eloquent of books and most enlightened of all counselors and consolers! If they could turn aside from the hollow and dangerous sympathies of human friendship —even when least perilous—and betake them to the Divine Comforter, who evermore dwells on our altars, what a heart they would find there! And how they would rise from before the Vail and the Mercy-Seat refreshed, strengthened, and resolved to take up their cross and follow Him ! How many of our purest, bravest, best cannot put away from them the cross which is to be a life-long burden! Bear it they must. If they refuse to carry it, the weight crushes them; if they take it up willingly, joyously, as He did, it bears them forward, imparting to them an energy all divine, and heavenly joys amid all the bitterness of earthly trials ! CARRY YOUR CROSS AND IT WILL CARRY YOU. We know such mourners,—whose young lives have been blighted by a union with guilt, secret vice, and falsehood; but wdio have taken up the cross with unflinching courage, determined to make of the ever-recurring trials and humil¬ iations of each day a mine of merit with which to purchase the eternal joys. The pleasant and loved companionship about which their maiden dreams had been busy, had turned out, when viewed with carnal eyes and judged in the light of this world’s wisdom, naught else but being hopelessly tied to a loathsome leper. The love of suffering, to which, under the divine inspiration, the wife, on awakening from her dream, opened every avenue of her soul, is a divine companionship,—it is treading with our thorn-crowned King the bitter but glorious road of crucifixion. THE CHRISTIAN WOMAN IS BOUND TO BE SUPERNATURAL. This lesson addresses itself to Christian wives,—to women bound to be Supernatural ,—who are supposed to have 116 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. entered on their matrimonial engagements with superna¬ tural motives (and the not doing so is the source of untold and inconceivable miseries), who profess to lead a superna¬ tural life amid all the joys, the cares, the trials, and disap¬ pointments of their subsequent condition. Woe to them, if they are not supernatural and lovers of the cross and the Crucified, when the fair and fond visions of earthly love requited vanish from their early path like the golden clouds of morning! There is one book out of which every young wife, from her bridal day, would do well to read a daily chapter to her companion— u The Imitation of Christ:” it is brimful of the Spirit of God. Would that the wife on whose life the shadow of the dreadful heart-trials hinted at here falls for the first time, would take up this almost divine book, and read such passages as the following: 44 O Lord God, holy Father, be thou now and forever blessed! For, as Thou wilt, even so hath it been done to me ; and what Thou dost is good. 44 Let thy servant take joy in Thee, not in herself nor in any other being. For, Thou alone art true joy,—Thou art my hope and my crown,—Thou, O Lord, art my bliss and my honor! 44 O Father, just, holy, and ever to be praised, the hour of trial is come for thy servant. 4 4 Father ever to be loved, it is right that in this hour thy servant should suffer somewhat for thy sake. 44 Father to be perpetually reverenced, the hour hath come which from all eternity Thou didst foresee as about to be sent to me ;—that thy servant should be outwardly borne down, but should, interiorly, still live unto Thee; that she should be for a little time held of no account, humiliated, and disappear from the sight of man,—that she should be crushed beneath the weight of suffering and helplessness ; in order that so she may rise as from the grave in the dhwn of a new light, and be glorified in Heaven. 4 4 Holy Father, so Thou hast appointed, and so willed, and this hath come to pass which Thou hast ordained. GLORIOUS EXAMPLES OF FIDELITY. 117 “ For this is a favor to Thy friend, that she should suffer and be afflicted in this world for the love of Thee, how often soever, by whom soever, and in what manner soever Thou permittest it to befall her.” * THE CRUCIFIX AND “ THE IMITATIOX OF CHRIST.” What soul will not rise from the foot of the crucifix, after such a prayer as this, with the consciousness, the deep-seated conviction, that God with her and in her will enable her to face and overcome the trials before her ? It is time that in every Christian household mothers should inculcate the lesson—morning, noon, and night—that their children—both sons and daughters—never will be or can be any thing, unless they study before and above all things else to be Supernatural men and women. They must be that, or they will become worse than pagans. But let us look into the mirror of a life tried by humilia¬ tions and sufferings such as no one of our readers (we may safely predict it) will ever be called on to endure ;—and we shall see therein how a brave womanly heart can find cour¬ age to be the light and benefactress of a whole country, while that same heart is riven by the most terrible domestic griefs. GLORIOUS EXAMPLES OF FIDELITY—THE CHILD-WIFE. We shall not give the names of the persons or the coun¬ tries till our glorious tale be told, and the lesson hath sunk deep into the mind of the attentive reader. A child of thirteen, reared with the most extraordinary care, and responding by every excellence and grace of mind and heart to this most careful culture, our heroine was given in marriage to one much her elder, and who to extraordi¬ nary qualities added passions and vices which threatened to make him the scourge of all who depended on him. * “The Imitation of Christ,” b. iii., c. 50. 118 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. In his heart, sullied and wasted by lawless affections, there was no room for any thing like pure and true love for the beautiful, innocent, and artless child which policy had made his wife ; nor could an intellect dulled and clouded by unbridled sensuality even begin to understand a soul which was as unconscious of evil in herself or in others as the babe newly born. So this child-wife was allowed to indulge amid her ser¬ vants, in the beautiful home to which she had been brought far away from her native country, all her tastes for piety and beneficence under every form,—while her husband spent, during months and years, the leisure which should have been devoted to her in the most scandalous indulgence and the most unworthy companionship. The light only dawned on the forsaken and outraged one by degrees. Hers was a most loving nature; for a pure love is the deepest of all. But, as she had been reared in childhood under the especial care of a grandfather, whom three kingdoms venerated as a living saint, she had been made to look upon offenses toward the Divine Majesty as the supreme of evils, and the hideousness of sin as a some¬ thing surpassingly loathsome. HOW THE CHILD-WIFE BOEE HEE TEIAL. Though the knowledge of her husband’s infidelity inflicted a wound so deep that her life was feared for, she never allowed one word of complaint or blame to escape her lips ; but she moaned unceasingly over the outrage done to God and the scandal given to the people. She undertook, with the thought of turning away the divine anger from him and from those subject to him, to expiate his guilt by protracted prayer, by austerities which her counselors could not pre¬ vail on her to mitigate, and by all manner of alms-deeds and works of mercy. The hoary sinners who had encouraged or tolerated her husband’s early wickedness, at first laughed at the young wife’s innocence, simplicity, and evident ignorance of all POWER OF PATIENCE AND SAINTLINESS OF LIFE. 119 moral evil. But they were touched by the greatness of soul which knew not how to utter one word in blame of the guilt that dishonored her home and her husband ; and they were awed into veneration and love by the courage which re¬ sented so openly the injury done to the Divine honor, and the splendid munificence that sought to make of the poor and the suffering intercessors between her offended God and her offending husband. PATIENCE AND SAINTLINESS OF LIFE ALL-POWEEFUL TO WIN BACK A IIEAKT. He, too, was touched by the sweet and uncomplaining sorrow of the injured wife. The sense' of wrong had suddenly transformed her, and, in a day, she passed from the guile¬ lessness of the child to the majesty of a woman sensible to her wrongs. Yet, not a word or a look betrayed the terrible grief which was gnawing away her heart’s core. The peerless flower of beauty and spotless purity which had been laid upon his bosom was drooping before his eyes ; the atmosphere of evil which surrounded him had blighted its freshness. He was conscience-stricken, and filled with reverence, if not yet with love, for the angelic creature of whom he deemed himself unworthy. His remorse gave her the hope that his heart was not dead. With the instinct of the true woman and the saint, which she was, she resolved to win that soul to God by patience, and by the irresistible power of prayer and charity. Of winning his love to herself she thought not. Thenceforward no opportunity was lost of doing on every side all the good she could in favor of the sick, the poor, and the erring. The false friends and companions who pandered to her hus¬ band’ s vices and shared in his criminal pleasures, were to her but a portion of the great host of the Evil One leagued together to destroy men’s souls and blight all that was fairest on earth : she was fain to enlist all she could under the banners of Goodness, which delighteth not so much in doing good as in making others good. And she was blessed. 120 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. THE ARMIES OF THE POOR AND SICK LIFTING UP THEIR HANDS IN PRAYER. The Hosts of the poor, the suifering, and the reclaimed who daily and nightly lifted up their prayers in union with hers, prevailed with heaven ; and heaven's grace, aided by the growing splendor of the young wife’s spiritual beauty, at length won the husband’s heart. The conquest was, however, only a slow one. The habits of evil had cast roots too deep and too wide into that rich nature to permit them to be plucked up in a day, or to prevent their often crop¬ ping out at the surface in spite of the prudent wife’s con¬ stant though gentle culture, and despite his own generous Mfrts at thorough amendment. The supernatural wisdom which sanctity bestowed- on one so young as she was, taught her a patient husbandry bcfdh in eradicating inveterate evil and in waiting for the growth *0if virtuous fruits. This, she knew, was the law in the natural world around her, and she also knew that a similar law regulated the supernatu¬ ral life of souls. c ' > v/ ■ ’i' ‘ * ’. ! A * THE HUSBAND’S HEART WON TO GOD ANjD HIS WIFE. \ • \ The day came, ere she had passed out of her early wom¬ anhood, when she was blessed with the certainty That her husband’s heart was all God’s and her own. Froim that hour her happiness was unspeakable, and her gratit ude to the Author of all heavenly gifts showed itself in hdr in¬ creased fervor and joyousness, and in her unmeasured generosity toward the poor. From that hour also her hus¬ band lost no opportunity of proving to the world that h e had determined to be in God’s hand a docile and faithful instrument for every blessed purpose which his own con¬ science and the wisdom of his wife might counsel. Of all the men who ever wielded power in that ancient Catholic land, none achieved what he and his angel-wife thenceforward planned and accomplished. He died with i ■ • „ v ' ‘ • « ’ . • . I ^.v v l THE CALUMNIATOR MIRACULOUSLY PUNISHED. 121 the title of “Father of his Country,” given to him by the gratitude of his contemporaries and confirmed by the ad¬ miration of after-ages. And she, his savior, his better self, the prompter of every heroic and patriotic enterprise l She needed not to be called the mother of her country: she */ 7 became its patron-saint and protectress, and the memory of her perfect life still helps to keep alive the light of faith and the flame of charity among the sad ruins of national greatness. THE wife’s HEART TRIED BY CALUMNY. Sorely tried as had been the fidelity of that young heart, it was not spared,—even when happier days had begun to dawn for her,—the most cruel pain that a faithful and sorely tried wife can endure. She was calumniated by her servants, and rashly suspected by her husband, but too prone to see the motives and actions of others in the light of his own guilty conscience. One most painful trial, in particular, is recorded by historians. A page,—perhaps a relative, or the young son of some most noble family, who had commended himself to his mistress by uncommon piety and tenderness toward the sick and poor,—was frequently employed on errands of mercy. This excited the envy or the malignity of some of his companions, men accustomed, in all likelihood, to serve their master’s worst vices, and who felt themselves ill at ease in the chaste atmosphere that surrounded his lady. THE CALUMNIATOR MIRACULOUSLY PUNISHED. However the calumny was insinuated, it was but too readily believed, and the instant death of the supposed culprit was resolved upon. It was an age of violence,— when might made law. But Providence interfered to save the innocent and punish the guilty. The calumniator per¬ ished by the hand of the assassin, and through the very device invented to take the life of his victim. The hand of 122 THE mirror of true womanhood. God was visible. Other and more touching instances of miraculous interposition are also recorded of the long pe¬ riod of heart-trial through which the young wife had to pass. One and the same truth shines forth from all: she had placed her trust in God, and God is bound not to deceive those who trust in him. THE MORAL CONCLUSION. And thus we come back to the moral purpose of our illustration. Let the wife whose eyes rest on these words, if Providence should ever permit her soul to be thus tried in the furnace, take well to heart these other words from the divine book already quoted : A DIVINE PRATER. “Without Thy counsel and providence, and without cause, nothing happeneth on earth. It is good for me , 0 Lord , that thou hast humbled me; that I may learn thy justifications (Ps. cxviii. 71); that I may cast away all pride of heart and presumption. It is for my profit that shame hath covered my face, that I may take Thee for my consoler rather than men. . . . There is not one among all who are beneath the heavens that is able to console me but thyself, O Lord God, the heavenly physician of souls, who strikest and healest, 4 who bringest down to Hell and leadest back again.’ Thy discipline is upon me , and thy rod itself shall instruct me (Ps. xvii. 36). . . . 44 Behold, O beloved Father, I am in thy hands ; I bow my¬ self down under the rod of thy correction. . . . Myself and all that are mine I commit to thee for chastening ; it is better to be chastised here than hereafter. . . . Grant me, 0 Lord, to know what I ought to know ; to love what I ought to love ; to praise that which is most pleasing to thee, to esteem that highly which to thee is precious ; and to reject and despise what thou deemest vile and worthless.” '* * “Imitation of Christ,” iii., c. 1. THE VANITY WHICH LEADS TO DISHONOR. 123 Such sentiments as these are like the fragrant air of the heavenly hills to one who has just passed through the valley of the shadow of death, like the sudden brightness and warmth of sunlight to one long imprisoned amid the snows and darkness of an arctic region. But He, who guided the pen and warmed the heart of the man who wrote them, will know, when you come to him in your sore need, how to whisper far sweeter words than man can write,—for he made the heart, and knoweth where lie the springs of its weakness as w^ell as of its power. LOVE TRIED IN THE FLAME. But if glowing words from the well-tried heart of the sweetest of Catholic singers in our tongue have virtue to warm and comfort, then read : “ Let thy gold be cast in the furnace, Tliy red gold, precious and bright. Do not fear the hungry fire, With its caverns of burning light: And thy gold shall return more precious. Free from every spot and stain ; For gold must be tried by fire, As a heart must be tried by pain ! • ••••• i “ I shall know by the gleam and glitter Of the golden chain you wear. By your heart’s calm strength in loving. Of the fire they have had to bear. Beat on, true heart, forever ; Shine bright, strong golden chain, And bless the cleansing fire, And the furnace of living pain ! ” * THE VANITY WHICH LEADS TO DISHONOR. Would it not be a most ungracious act to darken these pages with a description, though never so brief and lightly shaded, of the home, whether of rich or poor, ruined or * Adelaide Anne Procter, “ Legends and Lyrics.” 124 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. made desolate by infidelity ? Better far, so our readers will think with us, to paint the heroic constancy and preter¬ natural joys of the faithful wife,—faithful even while “ the hungry fire with its caverns of burning light ’ ’ was trying and searching every corner of her heart. Only let a priestly hand add, before concluding this most important chapter; a brief warning and as brief an exhor¬ tation. If it be most true, and the voice of experience attests that it is, that the danger for the womanly heart tried to its utmost by marital unworthiness, lies in the need of sym¬ pathy ; so, in happy homes, where there exists perfect love and neither unsuitability nor disappointment, ruin comes from vanity and from the appetite for display and enjoy¬ ment. THE HOME-PLEASURES WHICH ARE A SAFEGUARD TO HOHOR. Against this vanity there is no remedy, apart always from the grace of the sacraments and these aids which God may vouchsafe to some souls ; there is no remedy, we say, but in a wife’s never seeking to please any other eye than that of her husband, or valuing any praise on dress, per¬ sonal appearance, and accomplishment of any kind, but what falls from his dear lips, or caring for any amusement that is not shared by him, or in wishing to have any theater for the display of any gift natural or acquired, how tran¬ scendent soever, save the bosom of one’s own family. We have heard of women, most gifted and most accom¬ plished, who, blessed with a large family, and burdened with the care of a numerous household, made it a point of conscience to dress every day of their lives, even in extreme old age, with the greatest care, in order to please their hus¬ bands, and give them thereby an outward proof of undimin¬ ished love; and to please their children, by ever setting them an example worthy of imitation. With these admir¬ able wives and mothers it had been a life-long study how LOVE OF DISPLAY WHICH KNOWS NOT PERIL. 125 to make tlieir own gifts and accomplishments contribute daily to the delight of the family circle. Intellectual and artistic culture, music and song, and the charming illusions of private dramatic entertainments, all was made to serve the one great purpose of rendering home the sweetest, brightest, dearest spot of earth. THE LOVE OF DISPLAY WHICH KNOWS NOT PEKIL. One need not fear to display to the utmost within the home sanctuary and for the delights of one’s own dearest, every best gift of God ; the praise which comes from these dear lips is not that which intoxicates dangerously; the vanity which such praise may create is not that which is to be dreaded by mother or by daughter ; and the delicious satisfaction enjoyed both by the delight a wife and mother gives, and by that which she receives in return, is not one which the good angels may look on with displeasure. On the contrary, the love of praise and display, which is so common and so natural in a certain measure, will find its lawful and most healthful satisfaction in these home- pleasures and celebrations ; in these lie the antidote or pre¬ servative against the vanity fraught with peril. Home-life, home-pleasures, home-virtues, in this respect, as in so many others, are the great means Providence em¬ ploys, and religion counsels, to prevent or to counteract the tendencies toward finding one’s only or chief distractions and enjoyments outside of home and the family circle. There are men who only sleep at home, and spend the re¬ mainder of their time outside of it. They cannot be said to have a home, or to have any conception of what a home is or could be. If they are blessed with wives able and anxious to make their homes a paradise for them, what shall we say of their folly or their guilt 1 And who will pity them, if the home thus forsaken and absolutely neglected by its ap¬ pointed guardian should become a prey to the Tempter \ But of the women who only make their homes a brief breathing or resting-place in their unbroken and eternal 126 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. round of vanity and dissipation, we need only say what every body sees,—that the curse is upon them, and that shame is ever flitting round their homes,—like these legen¬ dary evil spirits that haunt the precincts of families doomed to perdition. To the nobility of true womanly natures we need not re¬ commend to be watchful over the sanctity of the homes in which they are the priestesses of the family religion, the jeal¬ ous guardians and loving teachers of the Ancestral Faith, and the custodians of that treasure,—dearer and more precious to every home where God is feared and men’s good opinion is valued than royal power or fabulous wealth,—the peer¬ less jewel, Honor. HONOR, THE TREE OF LIFE OF THE HOME PARADISE. When our first parents were thrust forth from Paradise, they might have seen, as they turned to have one last look at what they had lost forever,—cherubim set there to guard its entrance, “and a flaming sword, turning every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” To you, O faithful women, who read this, be this truth welcome: Your Paradise is your home, the tree of life is your honor, and from beneath its shade, from the sweet and safe center of .your bliss you can look to the gate of your Eden, and see with the eyes of faith, as certainly as you see your own right hand, God’s angels set to guard your home, and the “ flaming sword, turning every way” to defend you and yours from evil. So, when evil, overleaping the walls of your sanctuary, would threaten to desecrate its holiness and steal away its priceless treasures, remember the noble rebuke of the Spanish maiden to the invaders of her father’s home : “Do you know where you are ? Do you know that this is the house of a man rich in virtue ? . . . The house of my father is the center of loyalty and the sanctuary of honor! ” CHAPTER IX. THE MOTHETfc. When at some holy festival or eve the church at nightfall begins to be filled with confused steps and lighted tapers ; when, amidst the chant of men and children and women, a figure can be distinguished among all these, in a far recess, half obscured, having grouped around her near the sombre wall four young heads, on which she casts at times a look more sweet than solemn,—oh ! whoever you may be, bless her ! It is she—the sister, visible to the eyes of my immortal soul : my pride, my hope, my shelter ; the joy of my young years : the hoped-for treasure of my age ;—it is she—the wife who has no joy but my happiness ; who, if my children or myself ever seem to totter on the brink, without a severe word or a reproachful look supports them with the hand, and me with the heart ; she to whom I have said always, and who has said to me : “ through all ! ” It is she, in a word, a flower of beauty, which goodness has perfumed : the flower is of earth, and the fragrancy of Heaven.— Quoted by Digby in Compitum. The above poetic picture presents tne true woman in the twofold aspect of wife and mother,—young still and in the active discharge of her duties as such,—and hence this quo¬ tation serves as an apt transition to the all-important sub¬ ject which now solicits our deepest interest. The faithful love which clings to husband, home, and honor, “ through all,” through the storm, the flame, and the sea of bitterness, will not be apt to omit one sweet duty of motherhood. Even when all her womanly virtues are powerless to exor¬ cise the demon of evil from her household, there remains to her, in the discharge of her maternal office, an unfailing source of deepest consolation as well as of merit before God and man. 127 128 THE MIRROR OF TRUE WOMANHOOD. And here it is, most especially, that it behooves woman to be supernatural, so that the result of her motherly labors shall be to make of her dear ones men and women truly de¬ serving the name of children of God. MEANING OF THE TEEM u SUPEENATUEAL,” AS APPLIED HEEE. When the word supernatural is used, the entire non- Catholic world, as well as a great many Catholics—even ed¬ ucated Catholics—are but too apt to entirely misapprehend its meaning. There is in the modern mind, particularly where the masses are not Catholic, a disposition to look upon whatever is supernatural as contrary to nature, and therefore absurd, or as miraculous, and therefore outside of the common laws of action and beyond our ordinary reach. There is a general tendency to reject the supernatural or¬ der altogether, and to admit nothing as existing or possible but what is strictly in accordance with nature. This is not the place for a philosophical or theological dis¬ quisition. But every mother will be glad to find here 'clear and simple notions enabling her to seize at a glance what the supernatural order is, and so to convey the light in her own mind to that of her children all through her training. Looking upon the human race as one great family com¬ posed of the descendants of the one father and the one mo¬ ther, and considering them in their relation to God’s govern¬ ment over them in this life and the life to come,—we conceive that He who created them, could reward them after death in accordance with their degree of fidelity to the law of nature written equally on the heart of the savage and on that of the civilized man. This would be the' “natural order” in which God would impose upon men no duties beyond those of love, obedience, reverence and worship to Himself,—of the recipro¬ cal obligations and duties which bind together husband and wife, parents and children,—family to family, and toward the authorities lawfully acknowledged in civil society. The virtues of truthfulness, honor, honesty, and of the gen- MEANING OF THE TERM “ SUPERNA TER ALE 129 eral brotherly charity which should make every man look upon all other men as