“THE BEST IS YET TO BE.”

Why should women regret the golden period of youth? There are things finer and more precious than inexperience and a fair face. When a friend of Petrarch bemoaned the age revealed in his white temples, he replied: “Nay, be sorry rather that ever I was young, to be a fool.” Joyous and lovely as youth is—and it always seems a pity to be old in the springtime when everything else is young—how many of us would be willing to be again in the bonds of crudities, the embarrassments, the unreasoning agonies, and to the false values youth ever sets upon life? Youth longs for and cries out after happiness; it would wrest it from the world as its divine birthright; it does not understand itself or anybody else; and the pity of it all is that youth is gone before it has grasped the fact that its chief concern is not to be loved but to be lovely.

Age is content with comfort. “Content,” did I say? Nay, old folks are always wanting more and more comfort, until they seem out of harmony with surrounding objects and circumstances. I think it is Ruskin who says that there are “much sadder days than the early ones; not sadder in a noble, deep way, but in a dim, wearied way—the way of ennui and jaded intellect. The Romans had their life interwoven with white and purple; the life of the aged is one seamless stuff of brown.” And this is true, so far as beauty of existence is expressed by variety.

Perhaps there are few periods of keener suffering to any one than when he first realizes that he is growing old. This experience is none the less sharp for being universal; but it comes with peculiar poignancy to a woman, because of the fictitious estimate that has always been placed upon her good looks. They are her highest stock in the market, not through her own valuation but by man’s. If she has never had beauty, still less can she afford to lose any charm which youth alone confers. This pain of loss with the majority of women is not an expression of mere vanity, but—as with a man—it arises from a fear of waning power, the dread of inability any longer to be a factor in the world’s value; from the horror of having no longer an aptness to attract, of being no more desired, of filling no true place in life—any or all of which is enough to make a soul cry out for death.

That there is something wrong with our social structure is not more surely indicated than by the present demand in all fields of labor for only the young man or woman. The span of life is perceptibly lengthening for most civilized peoples; yet, with increase of days, old age is set forward instead of being proportionally postponed. Thirty years ago it was considered that a man must make his success by fifty years of age, if he made it at all; now it is said that unless a man has made his mark at thirty he is already written down “a back number.” No profession to-day, perhaps, chronicles so many tragedies as that of the teacher; for school and college give the preference to the young applicant who has yet to prove if he have the making of a teacher in him, while rejected experience dies of a broken heart. Not long since, it was stated in The Outlook, in reference to the ministry, that a man over forty years old was not wanted to fill important charges. Last year I heard a conversation between a young missionary from China and a woman of superior attainments, a wide knowledge of life, high spiritual culture, and who was not yet old; who, moreover, was one of the sort who never grow old. They talked of the advisability of older women entering the foreign mission field. The missionary advised that the other make application to the Board, but frankly stated that the missionaries abroad did not wish anybody of her age because she would have established opinions which might conflict with the younger members’ control of the mission. The church no doubt can well account for its preference for young people; but it has seemed to me rather hard on the heathen that they must be the subjects of untested enthusiasm, however “consecrated” and zealous it may be.

The tendency to fasten old age prematurely on our people by the rejection of practical knowledge for the brawn of youth, seems to find an explanation mainly in the all-prevailing commercialism of the day. The herding of productive industries in syndicates and trusts has destroyed the individual in the industrial world: it is not the man who is employed, but “the hand”—so many hands in the office, so many at the machine; and these are “put on or knocked off” according to the sum totals of the ledger. Manhood is the football of the dividend, and grows less and less as the latter grows more and more. Everywhere it is the same; the young with few ties and responsibilities are most plastic to the interests of the business; pawns have widest range of movement, and whoever can cover the most ground for the least money is the person in demand.

“Trade! is thy heart all dead, all dead?
And hast thou nothing but a head?——
O Trade! O Trade! would thou wert dead!
The time needs heart—’tis tired of head.”

It is more than shocking to think of the effects on the English-speaking people—ever inclined to sadness—of saddening them still more by pushing into the background those who have passed the first flush of youthful vigor. It is even worse to reflect upon the over-confidence, the over-consciousness and the irreverence of youth increased by a preference which does not point to intrinsic value. Whoever has lost his reverence is already degenerate; that soul which has lost hope and courage is dead to achievement, and is unproductive for himself and his country. Let us give to youth all its due for its keen curiosity, its vivid expectation, its unreflecting daring, its joy of pure existence, its all-the-world-is-mine spirit, and let us give it opportunity and ever growing privilege; but, as we value reverence, as we honor knowledge, as we cherish a well-tried faith, as we trust a noble courage born of proof, let our customs teach that “Youth ended—what survives is gold.”

While so much that is beautiful and attractive inheres in youth, it is maturity that possesses perfect charm. Women should remember this and begin early to cultivate faith in their power to grow. They should endeavor to learn to live along a line of steady development; to keep themselves in the forefront of thought and endeavor; to repudiate old age as more a matter of want of will than of necessity—and so abjure a statement I have recently heard from a young physician—that the only disease for which there is no remedy is old age. There is a remedy in living en rapport with the subtle forces of growth. Learn the laws of life and dwell in them; persevere in helping one’s self instead of being helped, and it will astonish the world how long one may live with “natural force unabated”—yes, and with beauty and power. It is unnatural to grow old and die; though everybody seems to do it, the bitter protest against it is a proof that it is against nature. There must be a better way out than by failure and decay. Live as an immortal here and now, and in fulness of time the fetters of the flesh will simply drop off, like the shell of a locust, and life will go on—from glory to glory.

I have grown old myself, but I could have kept younger if my attention had early enough been turned that way. All that I can do now is to tell other women to be wiser than I have been—and I wish to tell them, for:

“The best things any mortal hath
Are those which every mortal shares.”Perhaps all women do not know that the menopause of life is not a signal for old age. Released from her child-bearing functions, a new lease of life is taken out; intellectual power is greatly increased; women should then, in the ripeness of experience, the mellowness of judgment and the opportunity for comparison which the years have conferred, do their best brain-work; besides, there is usually an added beauty of person, a renewal of vigor of every kind. At the same time—just as then the look of some ancestor we have not before been thought to resemble begins to crop out in our faces—is there a tendency toward the return of natural defects of character; faults of youth long deemed dead rise up and defy us. As never before should women be aware that now their charms must be those of an inner grace, a spiritual beauty; as they have received during all the long past, so now must they give out fully, freely—keeping back not one jot or tittle of life’s riches for self; so will they get very close to the other world before they get in it.

Women have always interested me. I have studied them deeply. They have virtues and foibles which are equally a surprise—“and still the wonder grows.” After a long lifetime of comparison, however, I am persuaded that men and women are by nature neither better nor worse the one than the other. How often do we find some boy to be the sweetest-souled child in the house and the timidest, while his sister is the strongest, most unmanageable, and the leading spirit. We are our father’s daughters and our mother’s sons; and superiority of either—in mind, person or morals—is as it happens and not by reason of sex. Many differences are but the results of education and would disappear should the two sexes be treated under identical influences. Many so-called virtues of women and vices of men are but the fruits of environment and of the tone of the public thought.

The shielded, subject position of woman has originated as many weaknesses in her as excellences. She is the victim of her own devotion, as well as of her necessity to please the one on whom she and her children are dependent. If she is illogical, as is claimed, it is only because her deductions have not generally been made the rule of action in private or public. It were futile to run down a proposition to its legitimate conclusion when somebody else’s conclusions are to be in force. A man’s deductions have to stand the test of actual practice, and not only he but all dependent on him must sink or swim by their correctness. The logic of the condition is simply that of the trained and the untrained—as may be proven by the fact that proportionally as many women as men who have been thrown into business or professional life succeed. If women are not frank, as is sometimes charged, let me ask how any one can cultivate the high grace of ingenuousness who in all the ages past had to gain her ends by indirection, and who may utter not her own thought and opinion and will but that which shall be pleasing to another? The irresponsibility of her position in great things has created a corresponding irresponsibility in other scarcely less serious matters; for instance, in a freedom of expression about persons that a man would not dare to indulge in, because he knows he must be prepared to defend, with his life, if need be, the accuracy of his statement. I have sometimes thought the two most irresponsible of creatures in speech are a college boy and a woman; and for the same reason—that both hold a position of minority which never involves a strict accountability.

A distinguished physician once lavished upon a lady, both of them my guests at the time, such a superfluity of flattery that I afterward expostulated with him. “Oh, madam,” he answered, “I give her compliments as I would give a beggar a dime. It is what she baits and angles for, so I hand her out what she wants!” It is a human merit to desire to please; it is equally human to like to hear when we have succeeded; but excess of merit ceases to be meritorious. I have often wondered if woman’s subjection has developed such a slavish spirit in her as sometimes deserves the contempt conveyed in the above incident?

On the other hand the chief vices of a man are the result of his ruling attitude as head of the race. Where there is absolute power there is always abuse of power. The tyrant must be the chief sufferer for his tyranny. His absolutism has caused him to fix in law and custom the expression of his own desires and ideals without due regard to the interests of the rest of humanity—womanhood and childhood. Thereby, great vices inhere in social life of which man is the direct victim. He has not given himself a proper chance to develop into his best, because in the exercise of his unfettered rights he has fastened upon the social organism institutions, temptations and habits which start him out handicapped, and even with congenital obstructions to his legitimate evolution. This will be the case so long as it is considered proper that the little boy at his mother’s knee may hear and see and do things which it is wrong that his little sister may not hear and see and do.

But slowly, slowly, this misinterpretation for the race is correcting. We are told that in 1827 (while I was yet in my infancy) “Von Baer discovered the ovule—the reproductive cell of the maternal organism—and demonstrated that its protoplasm contributed at least one half to the embryo child. Before this time man was said to be ‘the seed and woman the soil.’ The establishment of equal physical responsibility opened the question of the extent of the mother’s mental and moral responsibility.”—Like as the vegetable and animal kingdom are indistinguishable in their lower orders, so boys and girls differ little in their natural characteristics until they enter upon the period which marks their differentiation in function. There is nothing rudimentary in the formation of the female body; it possesses two entire organs—the uterus and the breast—which are wanting or rudimentary in the male. These organs, according to Webster, are “the seat of the passions, the affections and operations of the mind.” Their functions constitute woman’s special domain, her exclusive kingdom, where man cannot intrude, which he may not share.

Nature recognizes the importance of the mother by restricting the exercise of her peculiar office to the meridian of life—her ripest maturity—in order that the race may be protected in full vigor. Other parts of her being, which may have lain dormant or in partial disuse through over-estimated activity in other directions, now awake, and late in years women may perform wonders in an intellectual and business way. I recently heard a wise and brilliant speaker—a man—say, “I never try to make a man over forty years old grasp new ideas of action. He cannot. There’s something the matter with him—whether pride of opinion or rigidity of brain I know not; but I do know that it is different with a woman. She seems to be always receptive.”

The twentieth century begins with a reconstructed mental state toward the race. It does not believe in woman’s natural inferiority, nor in man’s exclusive ideals. It recognizes that the wellbeing of both man and woman consists in a whole humanity, and that there can be no whole humanity with anything less than perfect freedom for both halves of it. The right to freedom of thought and liberty of speech is established for a woman nearly as fully as for a man; but the past stretches out a ghastly finger, and looking back to precedent, delays full freedom of action; hereditary inertia, the chains of ancient prejudice and the strength of present customs are obstacles to be reckoned with in the rapidity of future development. But women and men are now both thinking, are both educating for the battle of life, are beginning to tramp side by side in the march of ideas and endeavor. Mothers realize intensely that if they had known how better to rear their sons there would already be a better race; but they have been so held down during all the ages that they have not understood how to make a free, noble son, and a daughter fit to mate with him.

Sometimes the way seems long and devious, and human apprehension is so dull that our hearts faint. There is so much to correct in creatures as well as in conditions that we wonder why even Divine patience does not despair. But there is to me logical encouragement in the reflection that actually up to the date of my own birth, girls were admitted into the public schools of Boston only during the summer months when there were not boys enough in attendance to fill the desks; science and all but rudimentary mathematics were considered beyond their faculties. Not only high schools but the chief colleges of the world are now open to women, and co-education is a growing determination. Women are now admitted—as reported by the Commissioner of Education—to one hundred and fifty colleges and universities in America. Of these one hundred and five are denominational—notwithstanding that the liberty wherewith Christ maketh free has been the root of woman’s emancipation. To-day all the professions except the ministry are open to women; yet there are many women evangelists, and others who have taken the course in theological schools. Woman has learned the power of organization, and her full political liberty is now in sight. Some persons are afraid that the activity in woman’s interests exhibited during the last quarter of a century will experience a reaction. Well, religious revivals, like showers on earth, are always followed by a dry spell. Still—let us have rain! We should not be disheartened because history always moves in spirals, and not by direct ascent.

The new century begins with a radiant idea which now seems a new-born impulse of the present day; yet nineteen hundred years ago it haunted the heart of the divine Judean philosopher and prophet. This hoary new idea is that love alone can

“Follow Time’s dying melodies through,
And never lose the old in the new,—
And ever solve the discords true.”

The true keynote of human harmonies is struck at last. Little by little the ages have caught the vibration until the listening heart can already discern the great anthem of the future—the “Hallelujah Chorus” of Equality, Brotherhood. Standing as we do midway between two centuries, to-day the music of the past and of the future is ringing in our souls. A new world looms into view. Along its bright and shining way we see a humanity ennobled because well-born, of a free and willing mother and a self-controlled, justice-loving father, and because in all its systems and customs it is “Thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” If I did not believe this I could not have written out my little life-story. Now in the sunset of my days I wish to sound out to all women full and clear the note of hope that is growing every day in sweetness and power in my own spirit: “It is daybreak everywhere.”

As a last word I know no more heartening comfort than Rabbi Ben Ezra’s:

“Grow old along me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life for which the first was made;
Youth shows but half; trust God;
See all, nor be afraid.
········
Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last.”

THE END.