akly give way to in our lives; above all, it is
the destroying evil that we have refused so much as to know of in our
absorbing care for our own alabaster skin--it is _that_ evil which
defiles the woman. But the evil that we have grappled with in a life and
death struggle to save a soul for whom Christ died does not sully: it
clothes from head to foot with the white robe, it crowns with the golden
crown. Though I have had to know what, thank God! no other woman may
ever again be called upon to know, I can yet speak of the great conflict
that involved this knowledge as being the one great purifying,
sanctifying influence of my life. But even if, as men would often
persuade us, the knowledge of the world's evil would sully us, I know I
utter the heart of every woman when I say that we choose the hand that
is sullied in saving our own dear ones from the deep mire that might
otherwise have swallowed them up, rather than the hand that has kept
itself white and pure because it has never been stretched out to save.
That hand may be white, but in God's sight it is white with the
whiteness of leprosy. Believe, rather, the words of James Hinton,
written to a woman friend: "You women have been living in a dreamland of
your own; but dare to live in this poor disordered world of God's, and
it will work out in you a better goodness than your own,"--even that
purified womanhood, strong to know, and strong to save, before whose
gracious loveliness the strongest man grows weak as a child, and, as a
little child, grows pure.

God grant that, in view of the tremendous responsibilities that devolve
upon us women in these latter days, we may cry from our hearts:

"Let not fine culture, poesy, art, sweet tones,
Build up about my soothed sense a world
That is not Thine, and wall me up in dreams.
So my sad heart may cease to beat with Thine,
The great World-Heart, whose blood, forever shed,
Is human life, whose ache is man's dull pain."

CHAPTER II

"WHY SHOULD I INTERFERE?"

I am, of course, aware that at the very outset I shall be met by the
question--far less frequently urged, however, by thoughtful mothers than
it used to be--"Why need I interfere at all in a subject like this? Why
may I not leave it all to the boy's father? Why should it be my duty to
face a question which is very distasteful to me, and which I feel I had
much better let alone?"

I would answer at once, Because the evil is so rife,