hing out hands of vain appeal to them; but my girls, my
dear girls, never once failed me. Not only could I see by the expression
of their faces how deeply they responded to my appeal to work out the
latent possibilities of their womanhood, and be the uplifting influence
to their brothers, and other young men with whom they were thrown, that
a true woman can be; but they came forward in troops to take up the
position I assigned to them in our woman's movement towards a higher and
purer life. Nobly did those young girls respond, joining a movement for
opening club-rooms and classes for working girls, a movement initiated
not by me, but by educated girls like themselves, and which has since
spread all over England and Scotland.

And if this is true of our English girls, still more would it be true
of the American girl, who has a unique position and influence of her
own, and is dowered with that peculiar capacity and graciousness which
seem to belong by divine right to the American woman.

I cannot but think that if we were to teach our girls less in religious
phraseology and more from the great realities of life; if they were
taught that Christianity is only human life rightly seen and divinely
ordered, that the Cross is only the uncovering of what is going on all
round us, though hidden to a careless gaze,--the sin, the pain, the
misery, which are forever crucifying and forever calling forth that
great passion of redeeming Love to which, through the motherhood that is
in us, "one touch of nature makes us kin"; and that the central truth of
Christianity is not, as we have too often taught, saving our own souls,
but a life poured out for the good of others, and personal salvation as
a means for having a life to pour forth--I cannot but think that much
fashionable girlish agnosticism would disappear, and the true woman
would reach forth to that divine humanity to which she belongs.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 31: Husband is derived from two words--"house" and the Saxon
word to "build," German _bauen_.]

[Footnote 32: See a little White Cross paper called _My Little Sister_,
which I wish mothers would get into the hands of their sons just
entering into manhood to read, mark, learn, digest. (Wells Gardner,
Darton and Co.)]

[Footnote 33: Coventry Patmore.]

CHAPTER IX

THE MODERN WOMAN AND HER FUTURE

Up to this point I have dealt only with the great shaping and moulding
principles of life, with indirect influenc