"Oaths, insults, filth, and monstrous blasphemies,
Sweat, writhings, anguish, laboring of lungs,
In that close mist, and cryings for the light,
Moans of the dying and voices of the dead";
what bloody conflicts through the long ages have not had to be fought out to gain this freedom! Truly we might apostrophize Freedom in the words of the Hebrew prophet: "Who is this that cometh with her garments dyed in blood?" Through what long centuries did not what Sir John Seeley called the "mechanical theory of government" survive, the theory which recognized no vital bond of blood and historical tradition between a people and its government, but looked upon nations as royal appanages, to be banded about with royal alliances and passed under an alien sway without consent on its own part! Did it not require a Napoleon to work out this false premiss to its bitter end, drenching Europe in blood to gratify his own greed of power, and reducing nation after nation to his alien and despotic rule, till it was felt to be intolerable, and with a convulsive struggle Europe threw off the yoke? Truly a struggle which was the birth-throes of national sentiment and the recognition that the tie between the governed and the governing must be an organic one, a tie of blood from within, not a force from without—in one word, the recognition of the great principle of national freedom which, when the nation is sufficiently developed and self-disciplined to be fit for it, is the great mother of progress. Sown in the corruption of those mangled and decaying corpses on many an awful battle-field, freedom is raised to the glory of an incorruptible truth of national life.
Once again, was it not in his age-long conflict with the great world evil of slavery that man worked out the true nature of a moral personality? Man started at the outset with the evil premiss of the right of the strong to possess himself of the weak and the conquered, and enslave him for his own use, shunting the toil and burden of life upon his bowed shoulders. Through long ages he had to work out this wrong premiss in disaster to empires through the laziness and worthlessness of their ruling classes engendered by slave labor, in the dumb suffering and bitter wrongs of millions of enslaved men and women. Through centuries the Church protested against these wrongs in vain, since the evil root, in the face of all protests, will go on bearing the evil fruit. England, herself the mother of free peoples, was stained with the guilt of being one of the first to originate the worst form of slavery that the world has ever seen, the African slave-trade, her great Queen Elizabeth not scorning to enrich her royal coffers out of the profits of slave-raiding expeditions conducted by her sea-captains. It needed the horrors of this latest development of the principle of slavery, the horrors of the middle passage, of whole regions of Africa decimated to supply the slave market, of mothers torn from their children, or, worse still, compelled to bear them to their slave masters, only to see them in their turn sold to some far-off station; of the degradation of men and women brought up in heathen ignorance lest they should use their knowledge to rebel—it needed all this weight of evil and disaster at last to rouse the conscience of Europe to recognize that slavery was wrong in itself and to cast out the evil premiss on which it rested. By the mere force of moral revulsion in England, by the throes of a great civil war engendered by slavery in America, at last the true nature of a moral personality got itself recognized,—the inviolability of personal responsibility, the sanctity of the individual, the sacredness of freedom,—those great principles on which the whole of our public and political life are founded. And I make bold to say that these principles were gained as a heritage for all time, not by the preaching of abstract justice, not by any consideration of the moral beauty of liberty, but mainly by a remorseful passion over the wrongs and the degradation of the slave. These great principles were sown in weakness and dishonor, to be raised in honor and in the power of an endless life.
When, therefore, the Church of the living God awakes, as she is just beginning to do, and closes in a life and death struggle with this far deeper and more pervasive evil of the degradation of women and children, which she has too long accepted as a melancholy necessity of human nature, may we not find in the course of that conflict that wholly new powers and new principles are being evolved, and that the apparent impossibilities of our nature are only its divine possibilities in disguise? May we not work out the true principles, not now of our public and political life, but of the home, of the family, of personal conduct and character—all those great moral bases on which the whole social structure rests for its stability? Granted that this is the deepest and strongest of all our world evils, that which is the most firmly based on the original forces of our nature, and of that part of our nature which has shown the deepest disorder—does not all this point to some great issue? That which has been sown in such deep dishonor, will it not be raised in some glory that excelleth?
If God has suffered mighty empires and whole kingdoms to be wrecked on this one evil; if He has made it throughout the Old Scriptures the symbol of departure from Himself, and closely associated monogamic love with monotheistic worship, teaching us by the history of all ancient idolatries that the race which is impure spawns unclean idols and Phrygian rites; if Nature attaches such preciousness to purity in man that the statistics of insurance offices value a young man's life at twenty-five, the very prime of well-regulated manhood, at exactly one-half of what it is worth at fourteen, owing, Dr. Carpenter does not hesitate to say, to the indulgence of the passions of youth; if the tender Father, "who sits by the death-bed of the little sparrow," has not thought it too great a price to pay that countless women and children should be sunk to hell without a chance in this life, in a degradation that has no name, but which, in its very depth, measures the height of the sanctity of womanhood; do we think that all these stupendous issues are for no end and to work out no purpose? Do we not feel at once that we stand here at the very centre of the mighty forces that are moulding men to nobler shape and higher use?
Here, at least, is a force, if we will only use it, so weighted with public disaster, with national decay, with private misery, that it insists on making itself felt if there be a spark of life left and the nation has not become mere dead carcase for the vultures of God's judgments to prey upon. Here alone is a power strong enough to compel us to simplify our life and restore its old divine order of marriage and hard work, of "plain living and high thinking," which luxury and self-ease are fast undermining. Here, in the slain of the daughters of our people, is a stinging wrong that will goad us into seeing that the people are so housed that a human life is possible to them. Here, if anywhere, is a passion of conscience, and pity, and duty, and interest combined, strong enough, a heaped-up weight of evil heavy enough, to raise us to a self-giving manhood and a self-reverencing womanhood.
And from this secret place of thunder is not God now calling His chosen ones to come forward and be fellow-workers with Him? And when that call is obeyed, when, to summarize what I have already said, the wrongs and degradation of women and hapless children take hold of men, as, thank God, they are beginning to take hold, with a remorseful passion, that passion for the weak, the wronged, and the defenceless, which surely is the divine in flower in a human soul; when women rise up in a wild revolt against
"The law that now is paramount,
The common law by which the poor and weak
Are trampled under foot of vicious men,
And loathed forever after by the good";
when the Christian Church at length hears the persistent interrogation of her Lord, "Seest thou this woman?" and makes answer, "Yea, Lord, I see that she is young, and poor, and outcast, and degraded," and speaks to young men with something of the passion of the true Man—"It were better for you that a millstone were hanged about your neck and you cast into the depths of the sea, than that you should cause one of these little ones to stumble"; when the fact that a foolish, giddy girl's feet have slipped and fallen is no longer the signal for every man to look upon her as fair game, and to trample her deeper into the mire, but the signal to every man calling himself a man to hasten to her side, to raise her up again and restore her to her lost womanhood; when boys are taught from their earliest years that if they would have a clear brain, a firm nerve, and a strong muscle, they must be pure, and purity is looked upon as manly, at least, as much as truth and courage; when women are no longer so lost to the dignity of their own womanhood as to make companions of the very men who insult and degrade it; when the woman requires the man to come to her in holy marriage in the glory of his unfallen manhood, as he requires her to come to him in the beauty of her spotless maidenhood; then, when these things begin to be, will not God's order slowly evolve itself out of our disorder, and the man will become the head of the woman, to guard her from all that makes her unfit to be the mother of the race, and the woman will be the heart of the man, to inspire him with all noble purpose? As we stand by this great world-sepulchre of corruption our unbelieving heart can only exclaim: "It stinketh." But the Christ meets us with the words, "Said I not unto thee that if thou wouldst believe, thou shouldst see the glory of God?" That which has been sown in human weakness must be raised in divine power; that which has been sown in deep dishonor must be raised in glory. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, even the self-giving manhood of Him who is the Prince of Passion and the Lord of Love, the manhood lifted into God.