But a time has come in the development of the race, when much of the teaching and judgment formed by one-half the race alone, is seen to be liable to error, and requires to be weighed and approved by the other half of mankind.
The women half is necessarily slower in development, from being appointed to bear that great altruistic burden, maternity. But the very shackles or sufferings thus undergone for the sake of the race tend gradually to produce in women special adaptations to the higher spiritual ends of creation.
When we now inquire into and weigh the value of the teachings offered to women as the guide of their human relationship to men, we are struck with its amazing contradictions. All classes and sections bring forth their varying opinions. The scientist and the theologian, the physician, the lawyer and the journalist, the literary and the business man, the official and the man of leisure, are all seen carrying their load of heterogeneous materials to help build up the Babel of advice to women. All assert their knowledge of ‘Nature and Instinct,’ of ‘Science and History,’ or ‘the tragical plea of material necessity,’ to justify opinions founded on misunderstood data. But the sectional opinions of a portion of the race must necessarily be either imperfect, arrogant, or sentimental, and God confounds the Tower which foolish mortals strive to raise to heaven. All those, both men and women, who retain their reverence for sex, turn away from this unseemly Babel of conceit and short-sightedness, and ponder these things in hearts earnestly seeking truth.
The great question now at issue is the Unity of the Moral Law. This unity is being attacked by the intellectual short-sightedness or unconscious intellectual dishonesty of those who should be its most enlightened upholders.
One of our leading family journals has lately stated that ‘the modern notion of equality impairs the responsibility of special classes for special virtues.’ There is a sense in which special classes may be said to hold special responsibility. Women who are so vitally affected by the relations of the sexes are especially called on to strengthen and guide the sexual virtue of a people. They must consider the conditions essential to such virtue, and when they clearly see the truth, an army of noble men will zealously help in shaping truth in practice. The great truth which women are now learning is the necessity that every man should be chaste. This is the truth so long unrecognised, but at last discovered as the solution of the great social problem. Without male chastity, female chastity is impossible.
Virtue is not self-righteousness. It is unconscious of self, because it has become a mode of individual existence, and it maintains its vitality by care for others. A chaste woman does not think of her own purity; she thinks of the poor girl drudging in cellars, or hurrying at night, waylaid by tempters, to her poor home, or ‘drilled’ in the rich man’s shop; she thinks of her cherished sons with their noble and innocent young manhood exposed to the influence of the corrupt adult. Women’s responsibility for the purity of society commands her to announce the conditions of purity, and unmask with a relentless justice—which is now the truest mercy—those destroyers of national purity, the upholders of a double standard of sexual morality. The fact that so many cultivated intellects resort to fallacy or metaphysical abstraction to palliate the destructive abuse of our sexual powers, is a direct call on women to help in spreading truth.
There cannot be one moral law for human beings, which is at the same time of unequal application to them. Moral law is not the creation of mediæval art, which, substituting a symbol for entity, represents the Great Creator as an aged man with long gray beard seated upon clouds. The moral law is not the arbitrary dictum of a man. The authority of the moral law springs from its adaptation by the Creator, to the nature of the beings subjected to it. It is the guide to the highest end of that nature, the necessary method by which its welfare is secured. Its authority is absolute, not relative, because it is the method of highest growth. Divine law admits of no exception, it cannot contradict itself. It is equally binding on the weakest as on the strongest, on the man as on the woman, or it is not law. If men are so constituted that they can grow to the full stature of manhood without obedience to the law of purity, then the moral law of purity does not exist for them, because it is not a necessary method of growth to their highest human development; their nature is not adapted by the Creator to the moral law; its influence over them is thus weakened, its absolute authority destroyed.
To profess to accept the unity of the moral law, but at the same time seek to avoid its consequences, is hypocrisy. The moral law cannot be evaded by any metaphysical creation of ‘noble moral paradoxes.’[15] Any attempt to define purity as unequally binding on the sexes by being ‘more for women, but not less for men,’ is worse than nonsense, it is dangerous sophistry. It is a confusion of right and wrong, placing men and women on diverging paths which will lead them ever farther apart. It is a strange spectacle, the nineteenth-century Adam cowering under the overpowering justice of the moral law, seeking refuge behind a paradox! But the weak and erring children of one Great Creator, bound to live together and help or injure one another, must not be turned away from each other by the arrogance or ignorance of any portion of the race. What mortal can determine the varying kind and quality of temptations which assail another mortal life? Who shall dare to say to another, You are not tempted as I am? Who can measure the weakness or the strength of another soul, and measure out judgment by shifting standards of right and wrong? Only by humility can we gain wisdom. Only by doing the will of the Creator shall we learn the doctrine of truth.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] ‘At a meeting of the British Association, held September 7, 1886, the eminent African explorer, Mr. Joseph Thompson, spoke boldly of the evil influence of Europeans in Africa, remarking that it has been terrible, and that for one negro influenced for good by missionaries there were a thousand who had been driven to deeper degradation. We supplied them still with an incredible quantity of gin, rum, gunpowder, and guns.’