woman takes the first step. Only, it is a country where she is degraded to the rank of the brute, and men are cannibals. If nature is in harmony with revelation as to the place which becomes your sex- one of humility-it is equally so as to the task belonging to it-one of charity. Here again, here above all, that which is within the Book is confirmed by that which is within the heart of woman. For what is your natural inclination, if it is not to love? I forget not, in speaking in this way, that your sex is no more exempt than ours from the egotism which reigns in fallen humanity. But try to recollect yourself, and to withdraw into the depths of your being; penetrate beyond the ravages which sin has made there, even to that primitive ground (allow me the expression), which came forth from the hands of God, and tell me if love is not its essence and base. "More superficial than man in everything else;" a Christian thinker has said, "woman is more profound in love." We are familiar with that touching word of a woman. "Love is only an episode in the life of man, it is an entire history in the life of woman."* She might have said yet more it is her whole being. Your origin itself, as Moses narrates it, sufficiently indicates this. That of man, formed from inanimate dust, has something more supernatural, more striking, more magnificent about it; that of woman, taken from the throbbing flesh of sleeping man, seems more intimate, more loving, more tender. But, as regards love, it is less the degree than the character that is important. Love is the depth of your being, but what love? Think, and you will find it to be that which most predisposes you to the vocation of benevolence assigned you by the Scriptures. There are two kinds of love the love which receives, and the love which gives; the first delights itself in the feeling which it inspires, and the sacrifices which it obtains. The second satisfies itself in the sentiment which it approves, and in the sacrifices it accomplishes. These two kinds of love *Madame De Staël. hardly exist separate, and woman knows them both. But do I presume too much of her heart in thinking that with her the second predominates; and that her device, borrowed from the unselfish love of which our Saviour has given us an example, is this: "It is more blessed to give than to receive ?" To be loved, I know it well, my sisters, is the joy of your heart; alas! a joy perhaps refused; but to love, to devote yourselves out of love, is the need of your soul, it is the law even of your existence, and a law which no one should hinder you from obeying. Man also knows how to love and must love; it is in love, that St. Paul sums up all the obligations that married life imposes upon him: "Husbands love your wives," as he sums up those of woman in submission: "Wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands." But we are now occupied, not with the faculty of the obligation, but with the inclination. Now love, it must be acknowledged, is less spontaneous, less disinterested in man than in woman. It is less spontaneous. Man often needs to conquer himself before he can love; woman only needs to listen and to follow her inward impulse. This is the reason, perhaps, why Scripture, which frequently commands the husband to love, refrains from enforcing it upon the wife, as if she were competent, from her nature to supply it. But above all, it is more disinterested. Man loves woman more for himself than for her; woman loves man less for herself than for him. Man, because he is not sufficient unto himself, loves her whom God has given to him: woman, because she feels herself impelled to love him whom God has given to her. If solitude depresses man, it is because life has no charm apart from an "helpmeet;" if woman dreads to live alone, it is because life is without an aim, unless she can be an "helpmeet" to some one. We might say of her, if I may be permitted this reference for the sake of the serious spirit in which I hazard it, We love her because she first loved us. Moreover, what is the sentiment which has become among all nations and languages of the earth, the type of a love at once pure, living and profound? It is woman's love, maternal love; maternal love, which exhausts life without exhausting itself, and which, after suffering everything, labors by day, and watches by night, considering itself sufficiently repaid with a caress or a smile; maternal love, celebrated as well by moralists as by poets, but whose praises, we believe, may be included in this one : that paternal love, itself, gives it the preeminence. What do I say? This same love is that of which God made choice, when he sought among all human affections an emblem for the love which he himself bears to his people. "But Zion said, the Lord hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me." We might expect to see our Father in Heaven replying to this doubt which offends him, by making an appeal to the love of a father for his child. But no, to a mother's love he appeals; and to this mother he gives the name of woman, as if to give honor to the treasure of riches deposited in the heart of woman, found in the heart of the mother: "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee." But if such is the heart of woman, how can we fail to recognize a soil prepared expressly for this vocation of charity, which the Scriptures assign to you close to man? Love not only inspires woman with a desire to furnish this career of devotion, but it also gives her the courage for it. Courage, that is the word. Yes, at the risk of seeming to advance a paradox; I was about to say there is a kind of courage, and that which is the most necessary to do good, which impels your sex much farther than ours. I speak not of active courage; here man excels you, and ought to excel. You yield to him without regret the merit of an intrepidity which would ill become your sex : and a man of spirit has dared to say, and that without violating the truth, that "women affect fear as men do courage." I speak of passive courage, which is more constantly required than any other in the daily and humble practice of good works, and of which woman furnishes the most beautiful examples. Man knows best how to do-woman, best how to endure. Man is more enterprising, woman more patient; man more bold, woman more strong. Would you be convinced of it? Behold her in that sorrow of sorrows reserved to her sex, at the cost of which is human life; see her and compare her with man, in solitude, in sickness, in poverty, in widowhood, in oppression, in secret martyrdom. I say designedly secret martyrdom; for in public martyrdom, man maintains himself in the rank of honor by the grandeur of the theatre; but, when it comes to that martyrdom cautiously and cruelly hidden in the subterranean cells of the inquisition, be assured the advantage is on the side of woman. God knew all this, when he portioned out life so that woman should have more of sufferings and less of pleasure than man; at least if we do not place in the first rank the pleasure of doing good. This pleasure woman enjoys even in suffering, and attaches herself, by suffering, to him for whom she suffers. To a being thus formed, who dare dispute her vocation of self-sacrifice?—a vocation which her heart revealed to her ages before a line of Scripture was given to the world! Tell me not that Scripture alone holds woman to the special obligation imposed upon her to labor for man's spiritual good, by a holy charity which seeks God and eternity for him before everything else. Admirable to behold! nature has provided for it: not, it is true, sufficiently to make up for the teachings of revelation, but enough to make up for their deficiency, enough to make them perceived. For who does not know that woman's keener sensibility, her more open heart, her more sensitive conscience, her less logical mind, her finer and more delicate temperament, render her more accessible to piety, while, at the same time, her occupations being less abstruse, less continuous, less absorbing, than ours, leave her more leisure for prayer and freedom for the service of God? Who knows not also that the first conditions of success in the spiritual mission which everything contributes to mark out for her, are found less in activity, in word, in direct action, which man almost entirely appropriates to himself, than in that penetrating influence of example, of silence, of self-forgetfulness, which is peculiar to the woman who is truly a woman? Yes, we declare it boldly, if Scripture is not right, if woman was not made for a mission of charity in humility, nature has missed its aim; for woman has been called to one work and prepared for another. Yet understand us aright: I have not entered this place to flatter woman, but to sanctify her. In saying that nature has prepared you for the duty which Scripture imposes upon you, I have not meant to say that you are, in your natural state, capable of fulfilling it. By one of those strange contradictions which the fall has introduced into our race, troubling the work of creation without destroying it, woman is at the same time prepared and unprepared for her vocation: prepared, inasmuch as she possesses peculiar qualities which wondrously adapt themselves to it unprepared, inasmuch as she has other qualities which interfere with it. "It is the enemy who has done this." In the same heart where the hand of God deposited the precious germs of a life conformed to the mission of woman, Satan has secretly sowed those noxious germs which choke, or neutralize, the first. He has done more. He has sought with his infernal skill, to corrupt these healthful germs in your heart, and to gather from good seed evil fruit. : Yes, these precious resources with which the Creator has endowed you to accomplish your work, the tempter knows how to convert into obstacles to this same work. Under his mysterious and formidable influence, we see this activity degenerate into restlessness; this vigilance into curiosity; this tact into artifice; this penetration into temerity; this promptness into unsteadiness; this gracefulness into coquetry; this taste into studied eloquence; this versatility into caprice; this aptness into presumption; this influence into intrigue; this power into domination; this sensitiveness into irritability; this power of loving into jealousy; this necessity of being useful, into a passion to please. |