But perhaps some pessimistic mother will exclaim, “What is the use of making these old-fashioned appeals to our modern girls?  They are so taken up with the delights of their freedom, so absorbed in the pleasure of cycling and athletic games, so full of manly ambitions, so persuaded that the proper cultivated attitude is to be an agnostic, and to look at God and the universe through a sceptical and somewhat supercilious eyeglass, that if we did make an appeal to them such as you suggest they would only laugh at such old-fashioned notions.”  I can only say that I have not found it so.  I can bear the highest testimony at least to our English girls, of whom I have addressed thousands, all over the three kingdoms.  Occasionally it has happened that maturer women have left me stranded, stretching 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.)]