The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons | Page 5

men's views of the question.
The matter that I lay before you, therefore, has been thoroughly and repeatedly threshed out at such conferences, as well as in long, earnest, private talks with the wisest and most experienced mothers and teachers of our day; and it is in their name, far more than in my own, that I ask you to ponder what I say.
Do not, however, be under any fear that I intend in these pages to make myself the medium of all sorts of horrors. I intend to do no such thing. It is but very little evil that you will need to know, and that not in detail, in order to guard your own boys. We women, thank God, have to do with the fountain of sweet waters, clear as crystal, that flow from the throne of God; not with the sewer that flows from the foul imaginations and actions of men. Our part is the inculcation of positive purity, not the part of negative warning against vice. Nor need you fear that the evil you must know, in order to fulfil your most sacred trust, will sully you. This I say emphatically, that the evil which we have grappled with to save one of our own dear ones does not sully. It is the evil that we read about in novels and newspapers, for our own amusement; it is the evil that we weakly 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, the dangers so great and manifold, the temptations so strong and subtle, that your influence must be united to that of the boy's father if you want to safeguard him. Every influence you can lay hold of is needed here, and will not prove more than enough. The influence of one parent alone is not sufficient, more especially as there are potent lines of influence open to you as a woman from which a man, from the very fact that he is a man, is necessarily debarred.
You must bring the whole of that influence to bear for the following considerations.
Let me take the lowest and simplest first. Even if you