By the Golden Gate eBook

Joseph M. Carey
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 189 pages of information about By the Golden Gate.

By the Golden Gate eBook

Joseph M. Carey
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 189 pages of information about By the Golden Gate.
of soul of a noble motherhood.  It has often been remarked that great men have had great mothers.  I think experience and observation will bear out this statement.  Glance over the pages of history, and eminent examples will rise up before the view.  Whence spring the Samuels and the Davids, whence a Leonidas and a Markos Bozzaris, whence the Scipios and the Gracchi, whence the Augustines and the Chrysostoms, whence the Alfreds and the Gladstones, whence the Washingtons and the Lincolns, whence the Seaburys and the Doanes, and many another?  Are they not all hewn from the quarries of a noble motherhood?  Are they not sprung from the fountain of a womanhood whose living streams are clear as crystal and sweet and refreshing?  The first Chavah, Eve, is rightly styled the mother of all living; and a generation or race of men to be living, active, noble in achievement, distinguished in virtues, must issue from a well-spring which vitalises and beautifies and magnifies the spirit and the intellect, as Engannim waters her gardens, and Engedi nourishes her acacias and lotus-plants, and Enshemesh reflects the sun’s golden beams the livelong day.  But what, you ask, are the exact teachings of the sage Confucius, who influences Chinese society even to this day, with regard to woman?  Hear him:  “Moreover, that you have not in this life been born a male is owing to your amount of wickedness, heaped up in a previous state of existence, having been both deep and weighty; you would not then desire to adorn virtue, to heap up good actions, and learn to do well!  So that you now have been hopelessly born a female!  And if you do not this second time specially amend your faults, this amount of wickedness of yours will be getting both deeper and weightier, so that it is to be feared in the next state of existence, even if you should wish for a male’s body, yet it will be very difficult to get it.”  Again another saying of Confucius is:  “You must know that for a woman to be without talent is a virtue on her part.”  With such teaching then ever before them, do you wonder that Chinese women do not excel in virtue, and that they are the mothers of a race of men who are practically like standing water instead of a flowing fountain to refresh the waste places of human life?  The teachings of Mormonism and Mohammedanism with regard to woman also degrade her and rob her of the beautiful crown which her Maker has put upon her head; and hence it is that such peoples are not virile and progressive like the nations where woman is looked upon as man’s helpmeet, where she stands upon his right hand as a queen.  The Mormons are better in many respects than their faith; and if the first generation was hardy and aggressive and brave in subduing the desert and changing Rocky Mountain wastes into a blooming garden, it was because they had been trained in the school of Christianity and had imbibed lessons of wisdom at the fountain of a pure faith and inherited from Christian fathers and mothers those qualities which are stamped on the
Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
By the Golden Gate from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.