There are still further causes of uneasiness for women.
Twenty-four years of security in Catholic certainties, and in the enjoyment of such countless consolations as flow from the acceptance of Catholic verities and guidance, have not obliterated from our memory the discomforts formerly experienced from some of these. American women cannot abide the patronizing and condescending tone assumed by the men of society toward them. For our own part, the air of lofty contempt for which it was exchanged after our profession of the Catholic faith was truly refreshing in comparison. They want no such ostentatious toleration. They glory in the consciousness that woman may claim as inalienable a right to be sharply criticised as men enjoy, and have no thanks for such forbearance and namby-pamby nonsense as would be extended to a spoiled child. Nor would men offer it, if they possessed the robust hardihood and manly frankness of their grandfathers.
These women, many of them intelligent and thoughtful, are restless with an unrest which comes from being tossed upon the heaving waves of vague uncertainty from point to point, without the power to attain any fixed position.
Men regard their efforts to gain terra firma with a blending of pity and contempt—in which the contempt is ill concealed and largely predominates—and the question whether a party rope shall be thrown out to draw them ashore, only to offer them before the car of some new political Juggernaut, hangs in the balance. Woe to the women of America should that question be decided in the affirmative!
In all the perplexing “changes and chances of this mortal life,” it is much to stand upon the firm basis of a well-defined and secure position, with the assurance that, so long as one is true to the duties and requirements of that position, a power fully competent to sustain its own guarantees is pledged to shield and protect it in every exigency.
This is the situation in which the Catholic woman is placed at the present juncture. She occupies an elevated standpoint, from which she can watch with great serenity and confidence all the strifes and agitations, moral, social, and political, that convulse this nineteenth century. She knows that the firm and consistent action of the church of Christ, as the champion and protector of woman’s rights, from the period of its first establishment to the present time, is a sufficient assurance of its future course; and she need not fear that an institution through which the Almighty sways the moral forces of the world so potently as to bring to naught the raging of the heathen, and render all the fractional efforts of Protestantism powerless, will prove a broken reed to lean upon in the hour of danger.
But the church requires from her daughters a quid pro quo. Nor does she leave them in doubt as to its character. Every duty of the Catholic woman of whatever age, relation,
or state in life is so simply and clearly defined for her, that to mistake or err is impossible, except through wilful dereliction: For the child, reverence and submission to parental authority; for the maiden, humble devotion to the plain everyday duties of home, and a modest reserve that seeks the seclusion from which she must be
“Wooed,
And not unsought be won”;
for the married woman, respect for him who is “her head, even as Christ is head of the church”; entire devotion to his spiritual and temporal interests; and a loyal fealty to the sacred gift of maternity, by which the First Great Cause brings her into most intimate communion with himself; permitting her through its penalties, as one of Eve’s daughters, to offer her portion of expiation for the sin of that first parent, before his holy altar. For the mother, this tender Mother of souls provides abundant consolations and counsels in every hour of need, with measureless grace and strength to enable her to discharge perfectly every duty towards the young immortals committed to her keeping.