(d) To accept Miss A’s alleged “purity” as a fact is to remove from purity all its positive, potent value. The pure virgin is she whose pride and self-mastery together have protected her from condescending except to the man who has thoroughly captivated her heart, her imagination, her sense of the ideal, and her body. But Miss A is not pure in this sense at all. She is simply virgo intacta because no deep instinct, no deep impulse, no wild desire, has ever driven her forth to seek her normal adaptation.
(e) To accept Miss A’s mild amusement at life as that of a creature who, having tasted and tested all life’s joys, concludes that they are worthless, is to run the danger of scorning life without the advantage of Miss A’s inferior physique to help one—an experiment which, if one is positive, can only lead to disastrous results. The fact that Miss A’s influence on young girls may lead many to try the experiment is one of the most perilous consequences of the negative spinster’s existence in our midst. She, in her own person, constitutes a lure to the negation of life’s joys, to the contempt of the body and its demands, and to the disdain of the other sex, which is next door to sex-antagonism. Her mind is merely an instrument seeking intellectual justifications for her body’s inferiority.
So much for the misunderstandings of the negative spinster’s true nature, and their corresponding dangers. We may now examine her outlook a little more narrowly, in order that we may recognize her when we meet her, and measure her various boasts at their proper worth.
She will usually gravitate almost automatically to the Christian Church, and become an eager exponent of its principles and an ardent supporter of its work. She will do this, not because, like her positive sister, she will require to sublimate impetuous reproductive instincts, that will find expression, but because the negative character of the Church’s teaching will naturally appeal to her, and strike her as offering to people like herself a philosophy which might have been “cut to measure.”
“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.”[127]
“Flesh is death, Spirit is life and peace. The body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die, but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.”[128]
“For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God.... So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.”[129]—And so on ad infinitum.
These texts will appeal to her. They will help her to a conviction, to which she is already predisposed—that she is more godly than her positive sister, and superior to the rest of the fleshy world. She will notice that “body” in the text from Romans is spelt with a small b, whereas Spirit appears in the pompous parade dress of a capital letter. She will understand this perfectly. She instinctively thinks of her body with a small b, and of her great, lofty spirit with a capital S.
What effort is it for her to mortify the flesh, seeing that her own flesh came to her half mortified by nature? (See Gal. v. 24.)
Like the positive spinster, she is conscious of her own unimportance, of being cut off from the main stream of Life, consequently she exerts every effort—even at the risk of making herself a perfect nuisance—to prove herself most important. She will try to be foremost in the work of the Church, in the work of the parish, or in the work of the Borough Council. If she be wealthy she will endow special missions, and back missionaries with more zeal, but with a far more disastrous result, than that with which most people back horses. What does she know about the virtues, the good order, the content, the peace of Indian women, Chinese women, or the females of the Mohammedan harem? She lives in a country, England, where there is more misery, more disorder, more sickness and more misunderstanding in connexion with sex than in any country on earth; and yet by means of her wealth she is determined to guarantee that this same misery, chaos, sickness and misunderstanding shall be spread by her minions, the missionaries, to every quarter of the globe.[130]