All modern civilization rests on reverence for woman, both in her virginal and maternal character; the Mother of God, from whom that reverence sprang, being in both these relations alike its great type. In the restored, as in the first humanity, there is an Eve as well as an Adam; and it has been well remarked, that among the indirect benefits derived from this provision is the circumstance that there thus exists a double cord, by which the two great divisions of the human family are drawn to the contemplation of that true humanity. From the beginning woman found herself at home in Christianity; it was to her a native country, in which she fulfilled her happiest destinies, as paganism had been a foreign land, where she lived in bondage and degradation. In the days of martyrdom the virgins took their place beside the youths amid the wild beasts at the Coliseum. In the days of contemplative monasticism the convents of the nuns, no less than those of the monks, lifted their snowy standards on high, and, by the image of purity which they had there exalted, rendered intelligible the [{415}] Christian idea of marriage—thus refreshing with ethereal breath those charities of hut and hearth which flourished in the valleys far down. In those convents, too, the scholastic volume, and the psalm sustained by day and night, proved that the serious belonged to woman as well as the soft and bright. Since the devastations of later times womanhood has won a yet more conspicuous crown. Through the active orders religion has measured her strength with a world which boasts that at last it is alive and stirring. By nuns the sick have been nursed, the aged tended, the orphan reared, the rude instructed, the savage reclaimed, the revolutionary leader withstood, the revolutionary mob reduced to a sane mind. There are no better priests than those of France; yet they tell us that it has been in no small part through the Sisters of Charity that religion has been restored in their land. In how many an English alley is not the convent the last hope of purity and faith? On how many an Irish waste does not the last crust come from it?
The part of woman in Christianity might have been anticipated. For it she is strengthened even by all that makes her weak elsewhere. In the Christian scheme the law of strength is found in the words, "When I am weak, then I am strong." It is a creaturely, not self-asserting strength; it is not godlike, but consists in dependence on God. In proportion as self is obliterated, a Divine Presence takes its place, which could otherwise no more inhabit there than the music which belongs to the hollow shell could proceed from the solid rock. To woman, who in all the conditions of life occupies the place of the secondary or satellite, the attainment of this selflessness is perhaps more easy than to man. Obedience is the natural precursor of faith; and to those whose hands are clean the clearer vision is granted. Moreover, religion is mainly of the heart; and in woman the heart occupies a larger relative place than in man. Paganism, with the instinct of a clown, addressed but what was superficial in womanhood, and elicited but what was alluring and ignoble. Christianity addressed it at its depths, and elicited the true, the tender, and the spiritual. The one flattered, but with a coarse caress; the other controlled, but with a touch of air-like softness. In pagan times woman was a chaplet of faded flowers on a festive board; in Christian, it became a "sealed fountain," by which every flower, from the violet to the amaranth, might grow. Even the chosen people had forgotten her claims;—but "from the beginning it was not so." Christianity reaffirmed them; it could do no less. It addresses distinctively what is feminine in man, as well as what is manly. It challenges, at its first entrance, the passive, the susceptive, the recipient in our nature; and it ignores, as it is ignored by, the self-asserting and the self-included.
That which Christianity claims for woman is but the readjustment of a balance which, when all merit was measured by the test of bodily or intellectual strength, had no longer preserved its impartiality. Milton's line,
"He for God only: she for God in him,"
is more in harmony with the Mohammedan, or at least the Oriental, than with the Christian scheme of thought. It is as represented both by its stronger and its gentler half, that man's race pays its true tribute to the great Creator. The modern poet gives us his ideal of man in the form of a prophecy:
"Yet in the long years liker must they grow:
The man he more of woman—she of man."
[Footnote 61]
[Footnote 61: Tennyson's "Princess.">[
Singularly enough, this ideal of humanity was fulfilled long since in the conventual life. The true nun has left behind the weakness of her [{416}] sex. The acceptance of her vocation, implying the renunciation of the tried for the untried, the seen for the unseen, is the highest known form of courage—
"A soft and tender heroine
Vowed to severer discipline."
[Footnote 62]
[Footnote 62: Wordsworth's "Ode to Enterprise," ]