THE IDEAL OF WOMANHOOD.

It is the Eve of Christmas, and above the cheerful family circle that gathers about the hearth, the faces of the holy family look benignly down, and Mary’s own smile seems to brighten the genial light. All surely must call that mother blessed, who celebrate the birth of the Holy Child. The Angel of the annunciation seems always to be speaking anew in the anthem of the Nativity as if the voice which told Mary of her high destiny celebrated also its fulfilment, and the “Hail Mary” were but the prelude of the “Glory to God in the Highest.”

Our thought this evening turns upon the Mother of Christ, as illustrating the ideal of woman and the sources of her power. In the manger at Bethlehem, the mother and child were together—together during the years of preparation for the public ministry—together at the cross. We honor both in honoring either. Especially in calling Mary blessed, do we honor Christ, for we remember not merely what she was to him, but what he has been to her and her sex and her race.

Let us look at the subject from our own point of view, nor try to put on the mask of affected sentiment or to stand on the stilts of borrowed dogmas. There is much beauty and power in the Catholic notions of the Blessed Virgin, but they are not our convictions. The sweetest hymns in the Breviary are in her praise, and her heavenly face has been the chief charm of Catholic art, else altogether too grim with spectral monks and ghostly confessors. This one fact it is most interesting to remark, that as Christianity was divested of its genial and humane graces, and our Saviour himself was removed from the personal sympathies of men by a faith too forgetful of his humanity in vindicating his divinity, the affections of Christians sought in the Blessed Mother the solace denied them by prevalent views of the Divine Son. As the monkish spirit grew darker, the face of Mary beamed more brightly. The age that embodied its terrors in the “Dies IrÆ,” breathed its tenderness in the “Stabat Mater,” the exquisite hymn whose authorship, strange to say, has been with show of reason ascribed to the most thorough-going of the Popes, Innocent the Third, the man who dared to put England under an interdict. It is not for such reasons that we are moved to speak of Mary now. We are not oppressed by a religion that so crushes the natural affections and rebukes the domestic feelings, that we need to look for solace to one taken arbitrarily from her place among women and invoked as Queen of Heaven, above all saints and angels, next to God. Looking upon our homes, so pleasant and so genial with woman’s graces and children’s gladness, we prefer to say the “Hail Mary” as the gospel gives it, and not as the priest has understood it. We can say, “Blessed art thou among women”—among them, not above them—among them to illustrate their mission from God, their work on earth—their part in heaven.

Think of Mary first as illustrating true womanhood in its mission from God. Fathers and sons, as well as mothers and daughters, think. In our notions of education, society, reform, we are all afloat unless we start with right ideas; and whence are they but from the Eternal Mind. We know God as he reveals himself, and creation in its highest aspects reveals the thought of God. The Divine Being is Self-Existent, Almighty, All-wise, Ever-blessed, dwelling in light and love unspeakable. But the moment that we pass from the contemplation of his attributes to the survey of his works, we see every where partial manifestations of his fulness. Only as we bring together the various elements and beings of nature, do we comprehend the universe as expressing the mind of God. Throughout the whole we observe a law of duality, a harmony of contrasts, the two parallel footprints in the majestic march of Him who is the infinite Wisdom and Love. We see this form of development from the lowest to the highest plane of nature—in the affinities of the gases—in the strange and mighty forces of electricity and magnetism—in the rays of light—in the kingdom of plants—in the animated kingdom. In the human race it has its fullest expression. There the Most High has left most clearly the image of himself, and recorded the might and the loveliness of his own attributes. To the one sex he has given, in largest measure, strength,—to the other, beauty; to the one, aggressive force—to the other, winning affections—to the one, the palm in the empire of thought—to the other, the palm in the empire of feeling. We need not pursue the parallel, nor rebuke the folly of those who would make the line of separation too sharp, and deny heart to man or wisdom to woman, forgetting that in man thought should be pervaded with feeling, and in woman feeling should be guided by thought. It is enough to look to Mary as she stood in the hour of her joy, and listen to what she said, who has been called beyond any other of her sex, to be their benefactor and interpreter:—

My soul doth magnify the Lord,
And my spirit doth rejoice in God, my Saviour,
For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden;
For behold! from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

Various ages may have various degrees of culture, and in knowledge and accomplishment the daughters of Christendom may now far surpass those taught in the simpler homes of Israel. Yet where among those favored with education or gifted with genius, shall we find a better interpreter of womanhood in its mission from God, than that trusting Hebrew in her filial faith and unwavering devotion. Of her, the Aspasias proud of the society of sages and orators, might learn that there is a faith passing knowledge, and a purity more refining than any literary taste; from her the Cornelias might learn of a kingdom greater than that to which they vowed their sons; from her the Sapphos might hear of a vision beyond that of any impassioned fancy; and the Cleopatras of a gem brighter than any in their crown. Her soul attuned to devotion by the Psalms of her great ancestor, David, and inflamed with hope by the visions of prophets, and schooled to patient charity by the choicest examples of the mothers in Israel, she stands at the centre of Providential history, receiving from the former ages their mantle of honor, and transmitting it to the new ages enriched with a divine grace, destined to brighten with time.

Of Mary’s life and work, few particulars are given—but those few are expressive of her whole character. She who kept her faithful watch on the night of the nativity, never belied the promise of that time. With mingled solicitude and reverence, tenderness and fortitude, she guarded her child, marked the gradual rising of the consciousness of Divinity within him, and waited between hope and fear for the development of his mysterious life.

One of the most gifted women of our age, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, thus portrays Mary’s feelings as she looked upon her child sleeping:

“Sleep, sleep, mine Holy One.
****
I am not proud—meek angels, put ye on
New meeknesses to hear such utterance rest
On mortal lips, ‘I am not proud’—not proud!
Albeit in my flesh God sent His Son,
Albeit over Him my head is bowed,
As others bow before Him, still mine heart,
Bows lower then their knees! O centuries
That roll, in vision, your futurities
My grave athwart!
Whose murmurs seem to reach me while I keep
Watch o’er this sleep!
Say of me as the Heavenly said, ‘Thou art
The blessedest of women!’ blessedest,
Not holiest, not noblest—no high name,
Whose height misplaced may pierce me like a shame,
When I sit meek in heaven!—
For me—for me—
I often wandered forth, more child than maiden,
Among the lonely hills of Galilee,
Whose summits looked heaven-laden!
Listening to silentness, that seemed to be
God’s voice, so soft, yet strong—so fain to press
Upon my heart, as Heaven did on the height,—
And waken up its shadows by a light,
And show its vileness by a holiness!
Then I knelt down, as silent as the night,
Too self-renounced for fears;
Raising my small face to the boundless blue,
Whose stars did mix and tremble in my tears!
God heard them falling often—with his dew.”

Think of the lot of Christ, and remember how closely another heart beat in unison with his heart—how nearly parallel her life ran with his life. Pass from the manger to the Cross, and those two scenes are enough to suggest the outlines of her experience during that eventful interval. Listen to the words—“Woman, behold thy son”—and to the disciple, “behold thy mother.” Think of what followed—the joy at Christ’s rising to dwell in visible presence with his own, and after his ascension to dwell with them in his witnessing Spirit. Among those who remembered the promise: “Lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the world,” there was one who added a mother’s love to a disciple’s faith, as in the coming of the Comforter to her soul, she received her new birth into the kingdom of God, through him who had his birth on earth from her. Confided as she had been to the disciple whom Jesus so loved, a guest in his household, the constant companion of the growing circle of believers, how could she be without great influence on their faith and fellowship? When she passed away, a new light rose for them in the heavens. Their religion was not a code of moral precepts, or a set of theological propositions, but a gospel of speaking facts and living words. Their religion was Christ and all that is Christlike. Their heaven was no ethereal abstraction, no pantheistic merging of spirits in infinity; but the home of true souls—the mansions of the Father opened by Christ to all the faithful, and surely unto her who guarded his infant weakness and wept over his dying agonies. On earth and in heaven the blessed mother stood to them for the ideal of true womanhood, and early Christian antiquity is full of traces of the tender and beautiful affection felt for her, before superstition seized upon the lovely sentiment and hardened it into a priestly dogma. Yet under the dogma, the true feeling has never been wholly lost sight of, and with many who are called idolatrous, the homage to St. Mary is but an exalted form of reverence to a moral loveliness, now in heaven. Our own Germanic ancestors shared more deeply in the sentiment probably than any other people, as they came from their cold homes in northern Europe—received the gospel of Christ from the missionaries of the church, and rejoiced to find their national feeling of chivalrous respect for woman confirmed and spiritualized by the honors paid to her, whom angels hailed as full of grace, and whose name all Christendom spoke with blessing. This high sentiment, somewhat sobered by our Protestant faith and our household utilities, has come to us with our religion and our homes.

It is becoming a somewhat practical, and in both hemispheres, an agitating question, how far the accepted Christian idea of true womanhood should be enlarged or amended to meet the demands of our own age. The voice of Mary Wolstoncroft, claiming masculine freedom for sex, has found a thousand echoes, and assemblies of women, no strangers to Christian culture, clamor for a new day of social and political emancipation. Their demands are not to be treated with ridicule, for under all their extravagance lurk truths of momentous import. Who can think of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of the sex, whose utmost labors hardly keep off cold and starvation—of the wretched notions of education and life, which so enfeeble the poor and corrupt the affluent—of the false social system which is so ready to smile upon the destroyer of innocence, and curse the victim of his arts; who can think of the scenes in the hovels of innocent poverty, the dens of loathsome vice, and the gilded saloons of painted misery, upon which the shadows of this blessed eve are now falling, and not be willing to pardon some thing to the spirit of mercy, even if its tones seem to us too shrill for gentle lips? Who is not willing to remember, moreover, that if they assert a folly, who claim for woman the political offices that must rob the home of her fidelity; they assert, and actually are diffusing a more dangerous error, who in more silken speech brand the household virtues as servile drudgery, and whose lives are a continued and studious round of elegant and jewelled vagrancy from the sacred uses and blessed companionships of their own fireside; nay, whose eyes seem only to open when the lights of the theatre and ball-room blaze, and whose pulses really beat only in exciting assemblies under the delirium of the wine-cup and the voluptuous dance. From both errors the true idea of womanhood may save our time, and, nevertheless, confer upon us the substantial good, which is so dimly seen by the rival schools of culture—the fashionable and the masculine. Well taught and trained, our daughters may have all true graces without Parisian levity, and all intellectual discipline without Amazonian boldness.

No greater mistake can be made than that which would take woman from her sphere of dignity and power, and make her the rival of man in pursuits which require his ruder nature and sterner will. Mary, the wife of Godwin, with her obtrusive band of far more extravagant followers, opens no path of honor and power compared with that pointed out by Mary of Nazareth, the light of her home, the guardian of her Holy Child; encouraging the disciples by a voice, the mightier on account of its not being heard in the streets, and to them and to all after them, a name for spiritual loveliness, and all gentle and confiding graces, among the souls exalted to heaven. Using present agencies, and following the guidance of the gospel, the mothers and sisters in our Israel, may deal more wisely and strongly with the social problems of our time, and do their part for the kingdom of God—than by crowding to the ballot-box, screaming in the caucus, or snatching at the staff of office. So deeply is this the conviction of the most judicious of the sex, that many words on the subject would be superfluous. Nor would we add any to the many words that have been shed upon the question of the equality of the sexes. As well let the rays of the solar light dispute for precedence, and the red ray, so blazing, presume to deny the equal worth of the violet ray, which, science teaches us, has power to make iron magnetic, and which more than its more bold companion on the other side of the prism, makes the impression on the silvered plate—itself the most magical pencil in the skilful hand of that unrivalled painter, the sun. God has united both rays in the sweet light of true humanity, and what He has joined together, let not man try to put asunder.

The greater danger is in a servile acquiescence in prevalent worldliness and mediocrity—a disposition to repeat the common pleas of precedent, and to live solely in the externals of society. In our own beloved country, where liberty, without example, is extended to woman, and a courtesy, without limit, is shown her, they who hold in their keeping the future of their sex should not be content to follow the rule of court journals, or bow to the dicta of Parisian modists, who are fond of ruling over morals, as over costume. Our liberty should give them a stronger and more rational intellectual discipline than in the lands more enslaved by precedent. Our courtesy, that national chivalry, which insists on deference as much towards the rustic maiden as the city belle, will be sadly abused if made the occasion of an obtrusive arrogance, which claims precedence as a right, and elbows its way through crowds of men who are more ready to yield by grace than by command.

Our country has from the first cherished a noble idea of womanhood, and under its influence the strength of its sons, and the refinement of its daughters have been nurtured. Kindly omens abounded in the first days of its history. Our continent itself is one of the omens. That you may not call me too fanciful or sentimental, let me quote from an eloquent writer on the philosophy of geography, as he compares the Old and New Worlds. “The number of the continents in the Old World,” which is double that of the New World, their grouping in a more compact and solid mass—make it already and pre-eminently the continental world. It is a mighty oak, with a stout and sturdy trunk, whilst America is the slender and flexible palm-tree, so dear to this continent. The Old World, if it is allowable to employ here comparisons of this nature, calls to mind the square, solid figure of man; America the lithe shape and delicate form of woman.

So America stood like a fair bride in her ocean home, adorned for her husband, that mighty race from the East, that came in the path of the sunshine, as if following the lord of day, who is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber. Our heroes bore with them a Christian ideal of womanhood, and by it were gentle as they were strong. It came with Columbus in the cherished image of that noble queen, who gave gold and hope to an enterprise elsewhere rejected with derision; and the thought of Isabella mingled with that of the Blessed Mother, as he planted the cross on the western shores. It came with the cavaliers who gave Virginia its name and honor, and whose foremost and noblest chief found a counterpart of his own ideal in the Indian girl, who saved his life by risking her own, giving Christian mercy, to receive in return the Christian’s faith and home; owning, by the baptismal vow, the Great Spirit whom she had seen in cloud and heard in the wind, thenceforth, as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It came with the Huguenots of Carolina, the Catholics of Maryland, the Friends of Pennsylvania, the Hollanders of Manhattan, and not last nor least, with the Pilgrims of that Mayflower, whose seeds struck deep into the New England soil, and whose scions have borne beauty and fragrance to the hills and valleys, the farms and cities of our motherland, making the wilderness blossom as the rose, when the sweet Marys gave grace to Puritan homes.

Herein lies a great element of power and of hope for our country. Our soil is rich, our lakes and rivers are vast, our strength is great, our courage good, our schools are many, our wealth is unexampled. But these are not all—nor are these the elements that are to tame our barbaric borders, and lead to harmony our chaotic and scattered members. The church and home must go together, and unite our nation under the empire of Christ, as under the empire of civil law. The church and home are advancing together from the Atlantic to the Pacific shore. The farmer of Oregon, the miner of California, are not to be beyond the pale of Christian civilization. Even they shall hear the chimes that tell of the nativity of the Saviour—they shall find in their homes, rude cabins though they may be, pleasant faces, whose womanly grace and childish confidence shall reveal a light kindled of old by the Blessed Mother, and nurtured for ever by her Holy Child.

Here patriotism and Christianity blend in one. Anathema upon the false speculations and foul vices that assault the family institution. Blessed be the gospel of Him who asserts the uncompromising law of domestic purity, and opens most tenderly the Divine benignity, when most urging the Divine commandment.

There is a branch of this subject which I cannot treat—one, perhaps, that dwells too much in the region of higher sentiment to be the theme of popular discussion, and which no writer can easily handle, without seeming to be borrowing from the ancient theology its comments on the Song of Songs, or delving in the dark but rich mines of Swedenborg’s Arcana. Yet it would be no far-fetched topic, whilst speaking of her who has been called the Queen of Heaven, and regarded by the Fenelons and Catharines of faith, as the type of celestial loveliness, to treat of the ideal of womanhood in the spiritual world. Surely the higher a true culture rises, the more clearly each great family of souls becomes more true to its own genius, and the higher companionship known on earth, in the most refined society, and the worthiest families, illustrates the permanence of those traits that give man and woman their intellectual and moral characteristics. The earthly loves, which Christ came to consecrate, bear the germs of immortal uses, and are like Mary’s own emblem the rose, which, though born in the earth, lifts its bloom and wafts its fragrance to the heavens. I know no more elevated illustration of this view than that given by the Milton of Italy, the solemn Dante, who, in his vision of Heaven, wanders through the celestial courts with the spirit that had been the charm of his earthly life, and who, often as he stood confounded before some new mystery, found his perplexities solved by the readier intuition of his sainted companion. The higher companionship in literature, art, society, religion, which we enjoy in this world, and which is so incomplete when men or women are alone, gives some idea of the state of souls on high, where they that shine most, and they that love most, cherubim and seraphim, blend their holy ministries and bow together before the Eternal Presence.

A homelier view of the subject must end our meditation—a view, however, that opens into the heavenly world. The homelier the better—the nearer to our hearts. Let us call Mary blessed to-day for ourselves, and for our own families and friends. Bless her, now that we are thinking of all good mothers, whether the queen true to her children on her island-throne, or the faithful mother in the farmer’s cottage;—so many on the earth—so many who have gone from the world, and whose remembered faces now bring heaven near. Bless her now, that we are thinking of the happy children gathered together in the name of her Holy Child—as we think of the hosts of little children whom He has called and is calling to Himself. It is a time to be sober, and a time to be merry. In our soberness and our mirth, alike let us remember God’s love for us in Jesus Christ our Lord.

God’s blessing, readers, upon you all—mothers, fathers, children, brothers, sisters, friends—meeting or to meet in the sanctuary, or in your homes! His love bring all together at last around the tree of life, whose fruit is peace eternal!

Christmas Eve.