But though the exigencies of war make more obvious the fine possibilities of men, it does not need a continent in deadly strife to indicate their existence. There are sacred hours in every life when that which is of the earth is held in abeyance and celestial influences reign. No man, perhaps, has ever lived who has not had his better moments,—moments when the spirit of God moved upon the turbid waters of his soul and brought light out of darkness and beauty from chaos: silent moments it may be, and solitary, or hallowed with a companionship dearer even than solitude; moments when helplessness, loveliness, innocence, or suffering thrilled him to the depths with pity and tenderness, with indignation or with adoration. Have you never seen the sweetest ties existing between father and daughter, or brother and younger sister, when the wife has been removed by death, or, through some fatal fault, is no mother to her child? What love, what devotion, what watchful care, what sympathy, what strength of attachment! The little unmothered daughter calls out all the motherhood in the great, brawny man, and they walk hand in hand, blest with a great content. “‘Tis the old sweet mythos,”—the infant nourished at the father’s breast.
Every-day occurrences reveal in men traits of disinterestedness, consideration, all Christian virtues and graces. My heart misgives me when I think of it all,—their loving-kindness, their forbearance, their unstinted service, their integrity; and of the not sufficiently unfrequent instances in which women, by fretfulness, folly, or selfishness, irritate and alienate the noble heart which they ought to prize above rubies. I have not hitherto made a single irrelevant remark, and I will therefore indulge in the luxury of one now. It is this: Considering how few good husbands there are in the world, and how many good women there are who would have been to them a crown of glory and a royal diadem, had the coronation but been effected, but who, instead, are losing all their pure gems down the dark, unfathomed caves of some bad man’s heart,—considering this, I account that woman to whom has been allotted a good husband, and who can do no better than spoil him and his happiness by her own misbehavior, guilty, if not of the unpardonable sin, at least of the unpardonable stupidity. If it were relevant, I could easily make out a long list of charges against women, and of excellences to be set down to the credit of men. But women have been stoned to death, or at least to coma, with charges already; and when you would extricate a wagon from a slough, you put your shoulder first and heaviest to the wheel that is deepest in the mud,—especially if the other wheel would hardly be in at all, unless this one had pulled it in! I can understand and have great consideration towards those men who, gentle, faithful, and true themselves, possibly disheartened by long companionship with a capricious, tyrannical woman, should fail to acquiesce with any heartiness in the truth of the views which I have advanced. Their experience is of long-suffering men and long-afflicting women, and they can hardly be expected to entertain with enthusiasm a statement which has perhaps no bearing upon their position. Still, when facts meet facts, the argument is always on the side of the heaviest battalions. It is the rule that generalizes, exceptions only modify.
There is another circumstance which makes strongly against any assertion of man’s necessary moral inferiority to woman. The manly ideal is often one to which no woman takes exception. In poetry and romance, men, as well as women, paint heroes; and I hold that no one can project from his imagination a better character than he is himself capable of attaining. He can be all that he can portray. The stream through his pen can rise no higher than the fountain in his heart, and out of the heart are the issues of life which he may keep as pure and clear as poesy. It was no woman’s hand which limned the grand, sad face of that “good king,” who
“Was first of all the kings who drew
The knighthood-errant of this realm and all
The realms together under me, their Head,
In that fair order of my Table Round,
A glorious company, the flower of men,
To serve as model for the mighty world,
And be the fair beginning of a time.