We do not disguise the fact that our hopes for the future, in great measure, rest on these conventual schools; if they are multiplied, and the number of their graduates increase, and enter upon the serious duties of life, the ideal of female education will become higher and broader; a nobler class of wives and mothers will exert a healthy and purifying influence; religion will become a real power in the Republic; the moral tone of the community, and the standard of private and public morality, will be elevated; and thus may gradually be acquired the virtues that will enable us, as a people, to escape the dangers that now threaten us, and to save the Republic as well as our own souls.
Sectarians, indeed, declaim against these schools, and denounce them as a subtle device of Satan to make their daughters "Romanists"; but Satan probably dislikes "Romanism" even more than sectarians do, and is much more in earnest to suppress or ruin our conventual schools, in which he is not held in much honor, than he is to sustain and encourage them. At any rate, our countrymen who have such a horror of the religion it is our glory to profess, that they cannot call it by its true name, would do well, before denouncing these schools, to establish better schools for daughters of their own. These modest, retiring Sisters and Nuns, who have no new theories and schemes of social reform, and upon whom a certain class of women look down with haughty contempt, as weak, spiritless, and narrow-minded, have chosen the better part, and are doing infinitely more to raise woman to her true dignity, and for the political and social, as well as for the moral and religious, progress of the country, than the Woman's Rights party, with all their grand conventions, brilliant speeches, stirring lectures and spirited journals. By way of parenthesis, we dare tell these women who are wasting so much time, energy, philanthropy, and brilliant eloquence in agitating for female suffrage and eligibility, which, if conceded, would only make matters worse, that, if they have the real interest of their sex or of the community at heart, they should turn their attention to the education of daughters for their special functions, not as men, but as women, who are one day to be wives and mothers—woman's true destiny.
Undoubtedly the special destiny of women is to be wives and mothers; but we are told that there are thousands of women who are not and cannot be wives and mothers. In the older and more densely settled States of the Union, there is an excess of females over males, and all cannot get husbands if they would. Yet, we repeat, woman was created to be a wife and a mother, and the woman that is not fails of her special destiny. Under the Christian dispensation honorable provision has been made for that large class of women who, either from preference, or from any other cause, do not marry. Virginity, which was regarded as a reproach, became an honor under the Christian law. Those women who do not wish, or cannot be wives and mothers in the natural order, may be both, in the spiritual order, if they will, and are properly educated for it. They can be wedded to the Holy Spirit, and be the mothers of minds and hearts. The holy virgins and devout widows who consecrated themselves to God, in or out of religious orders, are both, and fulfil in the spiritual order their proper destiny. We hold them in high honor, because they become mothers to the motherless, to the poor, to the forsaken, to the homeless. They instruct the ignorant, nurse the sick, help the helpless, tend the aged, catch the last breath of the dying, pray for the unbelieving and the cold-hearted, and elevate the moral tone of society, and shed a cheering radiance along the pathway of life. They have no need to be idle or useless. In a world of so much sin and sorrow, sickness and suffering, there is always work enough for them to do; it is on the poor and motherless, the destitute and the downtrodden, the sinful and the sorrowful, the aged and infirm, the ignorant and the neglected, that, under proper direction, they can lavish the wealth of their affections, the tenderness of their hearts, and the ardor of their charity, and find true joy and happiness in so doing, ample scope for woman's noblest ambition, and chances enough to acquire merit in the sight of heaven, and true glory, that will shine brighter and brighter forever. They thus are dear to God, dear to the Church, and dear to Christian society. They are to be envied, not pitied. It is only because you have lost faith in Christ, faith in the holy Catholic Church, and have become gross in your minds, of "earth earthy," that you deplore the lot of the women who cannot, in the natural order, find husbands, and call them, contemptuously, "old maids"—a miserable relic of heathenism or Protestantism, neither of which have anything to hold out to old maids. But Jesus Christ has provided for them better than you are able to understand.
The Father of our country, then, was right when he said, in his farewell address to the American nation, that religion and morality are the "props" of society, and the "pillars" of the State. Let us, then, rest assured that the best way to check the torrent of infidelity and immorality, to avert impending evils, to prepare the golden age of our Republic, is to infuse good morals by the most powerful of all means—Christian Education.
FOOTNOTES:
[F] Prof. Aggassiz.