Three Addresses to Girls at School

by J. M. Wilson

Well, I reply, they should all be regarded as the avenues by which our human nature as a whole ought to rise, and the only avenues by which it can rise, to its rightful and splendid heritage and its true development. We cannot be all that we might be without straining our efforts in this direction of aspiration towards God, towards all that is ideal, spiritual and divine.

We are often inert, effortless, and then the religion I have spoken of repels us because it demands an effort; we are often selfish, and it repels us because it calls us out of self; we are often absorbed in the small and immediate aims for present enjoyment, interested in our own small circles, and religion insists that these are not enough. It is for ever calling us, as all true education calls us, as literature and history call us, to rise higher, to see more, to widen our sympathies, to enlarge our hearts, to open the doors of feeling and emotion. Religion therefore may make great demands on us; it may disturb our repose; it may shake us, and say, look, look; look up, look round; it may be importunate, insistent, omnipresent, but it is not dull.

There is a sham semblance of religion which you are right in regarding as dull, for it is dull. When it is unreal and insincere it is deadly dull; when phrases are repeated, parrotwise, by people who have either never felt or have long lost their power and inspiration, then too it is deadly dull. When a sharp line, moreover, is made between all the various influences that elevate us, and place us in presence of the ideal and spiritual world; when the common relations of life, when art, poetry, criticism, science; when educated and refining intercourse and conversation, and all that occupies us on our intellectual sides is classed as secular, and the only helps to religion that are recognized are services and creeds and traditions of our particular church, then such religion cuts itself off from many of its springs, and from most of its fairest fields, and is barren, and unprofitable, and dull.

You are not likely to make this error. You are perhaps more likely to make the opposite error, by a natural reaction from this. Because, when all the world of interest and beauty and human life is opening before you, you cannot believe that religion is confined to the narrow sphere of ideas in which it was once thought to consist, and is still sometimes declared to consist, you may think that you can dispense with that narrow but central sphere of ideas; and there you are wrong. I am quite sure that there is no inspiring and sustaining force, which shall make your lives worthy, comparable to the faith which Christ taught the world, that we are verily the children of God, and sharers of His Divine life, heirs of an eternal life in Christ towards which we may press, and the appointed path to which lies in the highest duties that our daily life presents and consecrates. On this inspiring power of faith in Christ I shall not speak to-day. I mean to speak on one only of the duties which form the path to the higher life, which you may overlook, and yet which is inherent in religion.

The duty which I shall speak of is the necessity of entering into the life and needs and sympathies of others; of living not with an eye exclusively on yourself, but with the constant thought for others. It is the law of our being that admits of no exception. You may hope that the law of gravitation will be suspended in your case, and leap out of the window; but you will suffer for your mistake; and you will be equally mistaken and equally maim your life, if you think that somehow the law of the spiritual world would admit of exception, and that you can win happiness, goodness, and the full tide of life; become the best that you are capable of being, while remaining isolated, self-absorbed—by being centripetal, not centrifugal. It cannot be. Now this is worth saying to you, because you know here at school what a united social life is. All girls do not know this. You do. There is distinctly here a school life, a school feeling, a house feeling. No casual visitor to your playing fields and hall can mistake this. And you know that this enlarges and draws something out of your nature that would never have been suspected had it not been for school life. But when school life ends, what will become of this discovery that you have made? Boys, when they leave school and have developed the passionate feeling of love for their old school,—the strong esprit de corps, the conviction that in brotherhood and union is their strength and happiness,—contrive to find fresh united activities, and transfer to new bodies their public spirit and power of co-operation. Their college, their regiment, their football club, their work with young employés, their parish, their town—something is found into which they can throw themselves. And again and again I have watched how this has become a religion, a binding and elevating and educating power in the mind of young men; and again and again, too, I have noticed how without it men lose interest, lose growth and greatness; individualism creeps on them, half their nature is stunted. For the individual life is only half the life; and even that cannot be the rich and full and glorious thing it might be, unless it is enlarged on all sides, and rests on a wide social sympathy and love.

But how is it for girls when they leave school? It is distinctly harder for you to find lines of united action. Society tends to individualize young ladies; its ideal for them is elegant inaction and graceful waiting, to an extent infinitely beyond what it is for young men. You do not find at your homes ready-made associations to join, or even an obvious possibility of doing anything for anybody. And so I have witnessed generous and fine school-girl natures dwarfed, cabined, confined; cheated of the activities which they had learned to desire to exercise, becoming individualistic, and therefore commonplace; not without inward fury and resistance, secret remonstrance, but concealing it all under the impassive manner which society demands.

Something is wrong: and your generation is finding this out, and finding out also its cure. Year by year greater liberty of action is open to educated women; and educated women are themselves seeing, and others are seeing for them, that they have a part to play in the world which none others can play; if they do not play it, then work, indispensable to the good of society, and therefore to their own good, is undone. I say to their own good, for we all want happiness: but happiness is not won by seeking for it. Make up your minds on this point, that there are certain things only to be got by not aiming directly at them. Aim, for example, at being influential, and you become a prig; aim at walking and posing gracefully, and you become an affected and ludicrous object; aim even at breathing quite regularly, and you fail.

So if you aim at happiness or self-culture or individualistic completeness, the world seems to combine to frustrate you. People, circumstances, opportunities, temper, everything goes wrong; and you lay the blame on everything except the one thing that is the cause of it all, the fact that you yourself are aiming at the wrong thing. But aim at making everything go well where you are; aim at using this treasure of life that God has given you for helping lame dogs over stiles, for making schools, households, games, parishes, societies, sick-rooms, girls' clubs, what not?—run more smoothly; wake every morning with the thought what can I do to-day to oil the wheels of my little world; and behold people, circumstances, opportunities, temper, even health, all get into a new adjustment, and all combine to fill your life with interests, warmth, affection, culture, and growth: you will find it true: good measure, shaken down, heaped together, and running over, shall men give into your bosoms.

Ah! but what can one do? It is so hard to find out the right thing. Yes; and no possible general rule can be given. You must fix the ideal in your mind, and be sure that in some way or other openings will arise. I will not touch life at school; you know more about that than I do, and perhaps need not that I should speak of public spirit, and generous temper, and the united life. I will only say that a girl who does not throw herself into school life with the generous wish to give pleasure and to lift the tone around her, does not get more than a fraction of the good that a school life like this can give, and does not do her duty. I speak of later years alone. And in the first instance, and always in the first place, stand the claims of home. I dare say you remember the young lady who wanted to go and learn nursing in a hospital, and was asked by the doctor why she desired this. "Father is paralysed," she said, "and mother is nearly blind, and my sisters are all married, and it is so dull at home; so I thought I should like nursing." I don't want you to emulate that young person. Grudge no love and care at home: no one can give such happiness to parents, brothers, sisters, as you can, and to make people happy is in itself a worthy mission; it is the next best thing to making them good. And remember also, that there are many years before you: and that though it may seem that years are spent with nothing effected except that somehow things have gone more smoothly, you yourself will have been matured, deepened, and consolidated by a life of duty, in a way in which no self-chosen path of life could have trained you. And if, as is quite possible, some of you are impatient already for the exercise of your powers in some great work, I will preach patience to you from another motive. It is this: that you are not yet capable of doing much that is useful, from want of training and general ability. I remember Miss Octavia Hill once saying that she could get any quantity of money, and any quantity of enthusiasm, but that her difficulty was to get trained intelligence, either in men or women. So, a few days ago, Miss Clementina Black, who is Hon. Secretary of the Women's Trade Association, said to a friend of my own that she had had many voluntary lady helpers of various degrees of education and culture, and that she had found without exception that the highly educated students were the most fitted to do the work well; that they alone were capable of the patience, accuracy, and attention to detail which were one essential quality to the doing of such work, and that they alone could provide the other essentials, which can only spring from a cultivated mind—viz., wideness of view, sense of proportion, and capacity for general interest in other important questions—social, literary, and intellectual. "It is this cultivation of mind which prevents you from being crushed under the difficulty and tedium and disappointment which must attend every effort to teach principles and promote ideal aims among the mass of ignorant, apathetic, uninterested, and helpless working women, who must themselves in the last resort be the agents in bringing about a better condition of industry."

You may rest assured that if you set your mind on a career of splendid usefulness for your fellows (and I hope every one of you here aims at this), then you will need all the training that the highest and most prolonged education can give you. Become the most perfect creature you have it in your power to become. If Oxford or Cambridge are open to you, welcome the opportunity, and use the extra power they will give you. If not, then utilise the years that lie before you, in perfecting your accomplishments, in self-education; in interesting and informing yourself on social questions, in enlarging your horizon, while you cheerfully, happily, brilliantly perform all your home duties.