Good Form and Christian Etiquette

by S. M. I. Henry

“I am going to ask you something right out plain, because I think you will not laugh. I’ve never dared ask anybody yet, because everybody always laughs in such a mean way if you try to find out anything about such things; and I’d like to know how girls are going to know just what to do. Now it’s just this way: I am going with Charley, and he is a nice boy; he wants to do what is right, I know he does, but all the boys have such queer ideas about their ‘rights.’ When he takes me home from church or any place—and I’ve just got so I dread to have him; and sometimes I think I won’t go with another boy as long as I live, because, you see, when I go to say ‘Good night,’ he—he thinks I am so queer because I won’t let him kiss me. But I won’t; I never let anybody but my own folks. I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s nice to do that way unless it’s somebody you’re sure of, and love very much. He says I’m queer; and he gets provoked, and says it’s his right, if he goes with me. Now I want to know—is it?”

“No; it is not,” I said, positively, and perhaps with a little flavor of indignation. “And no properly instructed young man would make such a claim. He is not to blame, of course,” I added more mildly, “for he is young, too; but your instincts are all right; they are true; they are of God who made the kiss, and gave it its own place in common human language. It belongs to the home, and to the purest Christian fellowship between man and man, woman and woman; to society, never.”

“Oh, I am so glad I asked you!” she said; “for I was sure my feeling about it was right. But you know one doesn’t like to offend one’s friend, and one doesn’t like to be called queer. But what does make boys act so,—good boys, too, for Charley is a good boy?”

I can not bring into the compass of these pages all that followed in our talk, but I would like to give the points of truth to the young mothers for whom I write.

The answer to my young questioner is found in the fact that boys, as well as girls, have been left in ignorance of the principle, as it is in God, of which the kiss is one form of expression, and have been left to catch up its perversion as Satan has undertaken to work it into custom and habit, in the world. Anything which Satan can not wholly spoil, he will counterfeit; or, better yet for his purpose, make so common, if possible, that it shall become worthless, as was the case with silver in the days of Solomon, when it became as the stones of the street, and “was nothing accounted of.”

The kiss, made common, is ridiculous. To be worth anything, it must speak exclusively the language of a pure, changeless affection, such as is represented in the love of God for his children. It belongs more to the parent and child, brother and sister, than to friend and companion. It is, as before intimated, fraternal, not social. As soon as any attempt is made to drag it into society, it becomes disgusting, and is always soon driven out by storms of ridicule. Therefore good form has taken it in hand, and has determined its sphere and office with the most arbitrary insistence. And again the voice of society is but an echo of the voice of truth and purity. Good form has decreed that the kiss, public and indiscriminate, is either an indication of unmitigated rusticity, of shameless immorality, or is to be understood as a joke,—very funny on its first spontaneous utterance, but very flat if repeated. Indulged in private, outside the sacred boundaries of the family, between men and women, it is unpardonable,—unatonable, at least as far as the woman is concerned. Good form requires that every young lady shall be so well trained that she will keep her lips absolutely untouched for her husband, after the words have been spoken that make him her husband.

The “betrothal kiss” of the romancer has been brought under suspicion in real life by the fact that betrothal is, in our day, not by any means equivalent to marriage; and the young man who knows the world, and yet sufficiently regards truth and purity to seek them in a wife, would vastly prefer to find his lady friend rigidly determined to keep her lips to herself as long as they two are yet twain, rather than to find them always at even his command.

In the correspondence that has come to me as a result of “Studies in Home and Child Life,” is to be found pitiful evidence of the ignorance in which young people are allowed to grow up, even in a matter which may seem, like this one, trivial and bordering on the ridiculous.

The habit among children of kissing everybody is little short of vicious. Kissing games of every description are considered vulgar, anywhere outside the immediate family circle, and even then, because of the trend of habit, they are not good form.

There is great possibility of infection in the kiss. The remains of old teeth, the breath and lips of those who are in any wise diseased, make kissing dangerous. It is well-nigh impossible to find a clean, sweet mouth in these days of human degeneracy; and because of these facts the little children are exposed to every malignant disorder that is afloat, and many that are hidden deep in the foul cisterns of the broken-down body of grandparents, father, mother, and the strangers who straggle in and use their “rights” on the freely rendered lips of the little innocents.