Daily we make atonement,
Golgotha again and again.
“O happy Christ, who died for love,
Judge us who die for lust.
For thou wast man, who now art God.
Thou knowest. Thou art just.”
Now apart from the offence against religion in this easy comparison between the Saviour and the woman of the streets, and apart from the deplorable offence against good taste, which might repel even the irreligious, such unqualified acquittal stands forever in the way of reform, of the judgment and common sense which make for the betterment of the world. How is it possible to awaken any healthy emotion in the hearts of sinners so smothered in sentimentality? How is it possible to make girls and young women (as yet respectable) understand not only the possibility, but the obligation of a decent life?
There would be less discussion of meretricious subjects, either in print or in conversation, were it not for the morbid sensibility which has undermined our judgment, and set our nerves a-quivering. Even a counsellor so sane and so experienced as the Reverend Honourable Edward Lyttelton, Headmaster of Eton, who has written an admirable volume on “Training of the Young in Laws of Sex,” drops his tone of wholesome austerity as soon as he turns from the safeguarding of lads to the pensive consideration of women. Boys and men he esteems to be captains of their souls, but the woman is adrift on the sea of life. He does not urge her to restraint; he pleads for her to the masters of her fate. “The unhappy partners of a rich man’s lust,” he writes, “are beings born with the mighty power to love, and are endowed with deep and tender instincts of loyalty and motherhood. When these divine and lovely graces of character are utterly shattered and foully degraded, the man, on whom all the treasure has been lavished, tries to believe that he has made ample reparation by an annuity of fifty pounds.”
This kind of sentiment is out of place in everything save eighteenth-century lyrics, which are not expected to be a guiding force in morals. A woman with “lovely graces of character” does not usually become the mistress even of a rich man. After all, there is such a thing as triumphant virtue. It has an established place in the annals and traditions, the ballads and stories of every land.
“A mayden of England, sir, never will be