“I’m very glad, sir, if you think so,” said Bradly, “I’ve had chaps crying up to me now and then some such sort of views as the vicar and yourself have been talking about; but I’ve felt sure of this, however well they may look on paper, they’ll never act. What’s the use of a guide, if he’s blind and don’t know where he’s taking you to? I remember I were once spending a night at a gent’s house, and the next morning I had to walk to a town twenty miles off. It were quite a country-place where the gentleman lived, and when he were saying good-bye to me I axed him for directions, for I’d never been in that part of the country before. So he said, ‘You must go for about a mile and a half along this road, and then you’ll come to a wood on your left hand. You must go through that wood, and then any one’ll be able to direct you for the rest of the way.’—‘And pray,’ says I, ‘which path must I take through the wood? For I daresay there’s more than one.’—‘Oh, you can’t mistake,’ says he; ‘you’ve only to follow your nose.’ So I set off, supposing it was all right. I found the wood easily enough, but when I got to it I was quite at a nonplush. There was three roads into the wood, each one as distinct as the other. It was all very well to say, ‘Follow your nose;’ but if I looked down one road that would be following my nose, and so it would be when I looked down either of the other roads. I had to chance it; and a pretty mess I made of it, for I completely lost my way, and didn’t get to my journey’s end till after dark.—Now, some of these scientific gents as has got too wise to believe in the old-fashioned Bible and its plain meaning, what sort of directions would they give us through this world, so that we might do our duty in it, and get happily through it, and reach the better land? It would be much with poor sinners as it was with me. If we’re to have a religion without doctrines and without a revelation, or if we’re only to pick out just as much from the Bible as suits our fancies and our prejudices, we shall be just following our nose. And where will that lead us? Why, into all sorts of difficulties here, and the end will be nothing but darkness.”
“Just so, Thomas,” said the vicar; “I feel sure that you speak the truth. We want the plain, distinct teaching of the doctrines of God’s Word, if we are to be holy here and happy hereafter. We want to know unmistakably what to believe, and how to act out our belief. What a blessing it is that, when we take up our Bibles in a humble and teachable spirit, we can say, ‘Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.’ But we are come upon strange times indeed, when professed teachers of the Christian religion can propound to us ‘a gospel without an atonement, a Bible without inspiration, and an ignorant Christ.’—Well, Thomas, shall we come into my study? Dr Prosser will excuse me for a few minutes.”
An evening or two after this conversation, as the whole vicarage party lingered round the table after supper, Dr Prosser turned to his host and said, “Judging from all I see and hear, Maltby, a parish like yours must be a famous place for testing the working value of many modern theories of morality and religion.”
“Yes,” was the reply; “what you say, my dear friend, is true indeed. Learned and amiable men sit in their libraries and college rooms, and weave out of their own intellects or consciousness wonderful theories of the goodness of human nature, the charms of a more genial Christianity than is to be found by ordinary seekers in the Scriptures, and the need of a wider entrance to a broader road to heaven than the strait gate and narrow way of the Gospels. But let such men come to Crossbourne, and have to deal with these people of shrewd and sharpened intellects, strong wills, strong passions, and strong temptations, and they will find that the old-fashioned gospel is, after all, the only thing that will meet all man’s moral and spiritual needs. I have never been more struck with this than in the case of a reformed-infidel amongst us: the change in that man has been indeed wonderful, as even his bitterest enemies are constrained to acknowledge,—he has indeed found the gospel to be to him the ‘pearl of great price.’ The change in that man’s character, home, and even expression of countenance, is truly as from darkness to light.”
“I wish,” observed Miss Maltby, “there was less of the theoretical and fanciful, and more of the practical and scriptural, in many of the modern schemes proposed for the acceptance of my own sex in the matter of education. I wish wise men would let us alone, and allow us to keep our proper place, and follow out our proper calling, as these may be plainly gathered from the great storehouse of all wisdom.”
“Pray give us your thoughts a little more fully, Miss Maltby,” said the doctor. “I think there may be one here at any rate who will benefit by them.”
“Two, John, at least,” said his wife, laughing: “for if I am the one who am to benefit, you will be the other; for whatever improves me will be sure to improve your home, so we shall share the profits.”
Her husband held out his hand to her, and while they exchanged a loving pressure, Miss Maltby said: “Woman seems now to be treated as an independent rational being, whose one great object ought to be in this life to outstrip, or at any rate keep on a level with, the other sex in all intellectual pursuits. Did God put her into the world for this? Did he give her as a rule faculties and capacities for this? I cannot believe it. This ambition to shine, this thirst for excessive education, this craving after female university distinctions, why all this is eating out that which is truly womanly in hundreds of our girls, and turning them into a sort of intellectual mermaids, only one half women, and the other half something monstrous and unnatural. And what is the result? Let me read you the words of a high authority—Dr Richardson: ‘These precocious, coached-up children are never well,’ he says. ‘Their mental excitement keeps up a flush which, like the excitement caused by strong drink in older children, looks like health, but has no relation to it.’ And if this overtasking the mind is so injurious to the body, what will our women of the next generation be if things go on with us as they are doing at present? I must just quote again from the same authority. Dr Richardson says, ‘If women succeed in their clamour for admission into the universities, and like moths follow their sterner mates into the midnight candle of learning, the case will be bad indeed for succeeding generations; and the geniuses and leaders of the nation will henceforth be derived from those simple pupils of the Board schools who entered into the conflict of life with reading, writing, and arithmetic, free of brain to acquire learning of every kind in the full powers of developed manhood.’”
“You make out a very gloomy case and prospect for us,” said Mrs Prosser sadly and thoughtfully.
“I do,” replied the other; “and what makes all this far worse is, that this mental overwork cannot go on without depriving the sufferers—for they are sufferers to an extent they little dream of—of that sweet privilege of being a true blessing to others which Christian mothers, daughters, and sisters enjoy, whose work inside, and moderately outside the home, is done simply, unostentatiously, and in a womanly manner. Verily, those women who sacrifice all to this mental forcing, to this race for intellectual distinction,—verily, they have their reward. But they can look for no other.”