, even a degraded woman,
who by her kisses and her tears smote the Rock of Ages and the water of
life flowed forth for the world, who won for the world the words: "He
who hath been forgiven much loveth much," and the burden of guilt is
changed into the burden of Love. It was to a woman He first gave the
revelation of life, that He first revealed Himself as the Water of Life,
and first uttered the words, "I am the Resurrection and the Life." It
was women who remained faithful when all forsook Him and fled. It was a
woman who was the last to whom He spoke on the cross, to a woman that
the first words were spoken of His risen life. It was a woman He made
His first messenger of the risen life to the world. Nothing in the life
of the true Man on earth stands out in more marked features than, if I
may venture to use the words, His faith in women, as if to stamp it
forever as an attribute of all true manhood, that without which a man
cannot be a man.

Now, side by side with this attitude of the true Man, this perfect
loyalty to all womanhood as such, ay, even degraded womanhood, place the
present debased attitude of men, even of some Christian men, which we
are looking to you mothers of boys to change _in toto_. Is not a
powerful writer in the _Westminster Review_ right when he says, "There
is not found a chivalrous respect for womanhood as such. That a woman
has fallen is not the trumpet call to every noble and wise-hearted man
to raise her up again as speedily as may be; rather it is the signal to
deepen her degradation and to doom her to moral death." Is it not a
received code even among Americans as well as Englishmen that if a woman
knows how to respect and protect herself men are to respect her--it is
only a scoundrel that will dare to say an insulting word to her? But if
she is a bit fast and giddy, if she has little or no respect for
herself, if her foolish feet have slipped ever so little, then she is
fair game. "She gave him encouragement; what else could she expect? It
was her own fault." To expect that any man with an ounce of true manhood
in him would at once say, "That young girl does not in the least realize
the danger she is in, and I must get between her and the edge of the
precipice, and see that she comes to no harm."--this would be to expect
the wildly impossible. Have we not made up our mind that the beast and
not the Christ is our master here; and does not every beast spring at
once on a fallen prey? It i