en men exhibit it. In days to come,
when women can choose, as they should be able to choose to-day, they may
well be counselled to use as a touchstone of their suitor's quality that
line of Wordsworth, "Wisdom doth live with children round her knees." A
man who thinks that "rot" _is_ rot, or soon will be.

But in the minds of men and women there is a half implicit assumption
that tenderness is incompatible with manliness. "Let not women's
weapons, water-drops, stain my man's cheeks," says Lear. But it is quite
possible for a man to be manly and yet tender, and to the highest type
of women it is the combination of strength and tenderness in a man that
appeals beyond aught else.

It has always seemed to the present writer that the followers of Christ
have done him far less than justice in insisting upon one aspect of his
character disproportionately with another. They speak of him as the
"Gentle Jesus, meek and mild "; they tend to describe him as almost or
wholly effeminate; and the representations of him in art, with small,
feminine and conspicuously un-Jewish features, with long feminine hair
and the hands of a consumptive woman, join with sacred poetry in
furthering this impression. Nothing can be truer than that he was
tender, and that he had a passion for childhood and realized, as we may
dare to say, its divinity, as only the very few in any age have done.
But this "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild," was also he whose blazing words
against established iniquity and hypocrisy constitute him the supreme
exemplar not only of love but of moral indignation, and of a sublime
invective which has been equalled not even by Dante at his highest. We
forget, perhaps, when we use such a phrase as "whited sepulchre," that
we are quoting the untamable fierceness, the courage, fatal and vital,
of the "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild," who was murdered not for loving
children, but for hating established wickedness. Why have Christians not
recognized that it is this perhaps unexampled combination of strength
and tenderness which makes their Founder worthy for all time to be
regarded as the Highest of Mankind?

One more counsel to the girl who can choose. It is contained in the
saying of Marcus Aurelius that the worth of a man may be measured by the
worth of the things to which he devotes his life.

We must now pass to consider the sociological fact that, under present
conditions, the sole use of this chapter for a very large proportion of