Part 8

Mrs. Jones--do you know her? She looks well to the ways of her household. She knows how every ounce of butter, and every spoonful of tea and coffee are disposed of. She is posted as to the sugar, and milk and potatoes, and calculates to a moment how long-lived must be a joint of meat, or what is the weight of a loaf of bread. She understands what should be the perpetuity of kindling wood, and knows when it is diverted from its original purpose as an _auxiliary_, by a dilatory cook, and used as a principal, to hurry up a late breakfast. You can't cheat Mrs. Jones. Every pot, pan, basin, knife, fork, spoon, in her establishment, serves its legitimate purpose, and no other; and never loses its edge or polish, or disappears "unbeknownst" into the ash-barrel. She scorns to buy preserves or pickles, how well soever made, and though she may encounter no pecuniary loss in doing so; she thinks it an excellent use of her time, although they are "well off," to prepare them with her own deft hands. She is at home when her husband leaves, and she is at home when her husband comes back. She does much of the sewing and fitting of family garments, and all the mending; and she often calls upon the minister to baptize a new baby. She is cheerful and content in her snuggery of a house, and every saucepan in it is surrounded with a halo. "Woman's Rights" simply sets her giggling, when mentioned. Her own family tub sets firm on its bottom--isn't that enough? Year after year passes. The freshness has left her face, and the features have sharpened, as she whirls round and round in this little maelstrom, with no desire to catch breath for one single moment. Occasionally she goes outside of her own door, but feels better inside, and hurries home as if she had committed a crime, in letting up her martinet superintendence for one moment.

As to books and newspapers, she never looks at either. "She says she has no time." I don't know whether she ever thinks that her children will some day grow up, and may ask questions which it were a pity their mother should be too ignorant to answer. I don't know whether she ever thinks her husband may weary at evening, of the history of the family potato. Since it is cooked invariably to his liking, it may be that is all he requires. But after he has eaten his dinner, and is satisfied--such is man--that I wouldn't like to dismiss Mrs. Jones to the nursery and put a bright woman in her place, unless "ma" lived round the corner.

Now Mrs. Smith lives opposite Mrs. Jones. The devil might fly away with _her_ saucepans, and she wouldn't care. Why does she hire servants, if she herself is to superintend saucepans? Is Mr. Smith always home to dinner, that _she_ need be? Has a woman no rights? Is it for her to be absorbed by the miserable family potato, when many women have no potato at all? Her answer is on the public platform. Smith indeed turns pale to think of it; but who or what is Smith? He's only a man,--a tyrannical, overbearing man, possibly of the worst type, who believes in "whipping females." Her "mission" is to reform such men--peaceably, if she can; belligerently, if she must; but it has got to "come off" somehow. Meantime the nurse rubs her children's noses _up_ instead of down; fills their eyes with soap-suds, and then boxes their ears for "whining about it;" eats _their_ lunch and tosses them _hers_. She tells the youngest child of the "black man who swallows little children whole" when she wants it to be still in bed, so that she may converse with her "cousin" in the area; and then wonders "what _can_ ail the little dear," when its progressive mother returns from her public speech-making, to find it in a stiff fit. As to Mr. Smith, he hates women's rights--he wants something to eat.

Now here are two female extremists. I don't see the necessity of either; but after saying this, I frankly declare that, had I to choose, Mrs. Jones has my preference. _Her_ children have a home at least. They have good wholesome food, and clothes suitable to the weather. If they are sick, they have watchful care. And no mother, unless she first secure all this to their helplessness, has any right, in my opinion, on the public platform. This much Mrs. Jones hath done. Possibly Jones, her husband, takes it, like sunshine, as a matter of course, and needing no special thanks. Men are more stupid, and ignorant, than ugly, on this and kindred points. _They_ don't dream, unless in very exceptionable cases, how a wife longs sometimes to have a husband testify his pleasure at her invariable good cheer in some other way than by gobbling it up, till he is as torpid as an anaconda, until next feeding time. _He_ never feels the need of such recognition; and so, if his attention is called to it by a half-smothered, weary sigh from some little wife who can't do without it, why, he thinks it "babyish." _Such a man ought to marry a man_--that's my verdict. Where's the sense of plucking a flower to put your foot on it? Better take a stone post for better, or worse, and have done with it. You can't dam--n up a woman's feelings as you would a village stream. You can't choose her for her tender, womanly ways, and then expect when you get her home that she will "heads up" with an unwinking stare at you for further orders the rest of her life. If that's the wife you wanted, why not take one of those figures outside the store-doors in Broadway, with a dress pinned on, which, when twirled round, stand stock still till they get another twirl? _They_ are _headless_, to be sure, but they are _so_ docile!

_SUNDAY MORNING._

How many pleasant breakfast-tables it looks down upon! No need to hurry away to office, or store, or counting-room. Fathers come leisurely down in dressing-gown and slippers, and sip their coffee without danger of choking. They have time to look round and see how tall the children are growing, and that nothing in this world is so beautiful as a rosy baby fresh from slumber. Mother, too, has the old girlish smile, that comes not often on a week-day, or if it does, father has not time to notice it, and that, perhaps, after all, is the reason it comes so seldom. It is pleasant, after eggs and coffee, to sit comfortably down, the centre of a ring of happy faces, and hear the church-bells chime. Time enough yet to go, for this is the first bell.

Church-bells are not, to my ear, an "impertinence." One is a free agent. I am free to go, which I like to do; you are free to stay, if you prefer; though I may think you make a mistake. I don't say that I should go every Sunday to hear a man who was always binding doctrines together like bundles of dry sticks, and thrusting them at his yawning hearers. I want to hear a sermon that any poor soul who straggles into church, from any by-lane or alley, can understand, and carry home with him to his cellar or garret; not a sermon that comes on chariot wheels, but afoot, and with a warm, life-like grasp for every honest, aye, and _dis_honest, hand in the assembly, defaulter or Magdalen; for who bade you slam heaven's gate in their faces?

I want a _human_ sermon. I don't care what Melchisedek, or Zerubbabel, or Kerenhappuk did, ages ago; I want to know what _I_ am to do, and I want somebody besides a theological bookworm to tell me; somebody who is sometimes tempted and tried, and is not too dignified to own it; somebody like me, who is always sinning and repenting; somebody who is glad and sorry, and cries and laughs, and eats and drinks, and _wants_ to fight when they are trodden on, and _don't_! That's the minister for me. I don't want a spiritual abstraction, with stony eyes and petrified fingers, and no blood to battle with. What credit is it to _him_ to be proper? How can he understand _me_? Were there only such ministers in the pulpit, I wouldn't go to church either, because my impatient feet would only beat a tattoo on the pew floor till service was over: but, thank God! there are! and while they preach I shall go to hear them, and come home better and happier for having done it.

So I pray you don't abolish _my_ Sunday, whatever you may do with yours. Don't take away my blessed Sunday breakfast, when we all have time to love one another. Don't take away the Sabbath bells, which I so love to hear. Don't take away my human minister, whose God is no tyrant, and is better pleased to see us go smiling home from church, than bowing our heads like a bulrush, and groaning back to our dinners, till all you anti-Sabbatarians are mad to abolish Sunday,--and no wonder.

Our Catholic brethren have set us, at least one good example; their churches are not silent as the tomb on week-days. Their worshippers do not do up all their religion on Sunday. It may be only for a few moments they step in through that open church-door, on a week-day, to kneel and lay down burdens too heavy else to be borne. I like the custom. I should rather say, I like the reminder, and the opportunity thus afforded them; and I heartily wish that all our Protestant churches could be thus opened. If rich Christians object to the promiscuous use of their velvet cushions and gilded prayer-books, at least let the aisles and altar be free for those who need God on the week-days; for the poor, the tried, the tempted; for those who shrink, in their shabby habiliments, from the Sunday exhibition of fine toilettes and superfine Christianity. Were I a minister, and obliged to preach to paniers and diamonds and satins, on Sunday, I think I should _have_ to ease my heart in some such way as this, to make my pastoral life endurable, else my office would seem to me the most hollow of all mockeries. "The rich and the poor meet together, and the Lord is the Maker of them all," should be inscribed outside my church door, had I one. I could not preach to those paniers and their owners. My tongue would be paralyzed at those kneeling distortions of womanhood, bearing such a resemblance to organ-grinders' monkeys. I am not sure that I should not grow hysterical over it, and laugh and cry in the same breath, instead of preaching. I can never tell what vent my disgust would take; but I am sure it must have some escape-valve. You may say that such worshippers (Heaven save the mark!) _need_ preaching to. I tell you that women, so given over to "the devil and all his works," are past praying for; "having eyes, they see not; having ears, they hear not." They are ossified, impervious; they are Dead-Sea apples, full of ashes. There! now I feel better.

Having alluded to our Roman Catholic friends, allow me to ask leave of them to have the cross surmount all our _Protestant_ churches, unless they have taken out a patent for the same. It is lovely to me, this symbol, as I pass along our streets. It rests my heart to look at it, amid the turmoil, and din, and hurry, and anxious faces, and sorrowful faces, and, worse than all, empty faces, that I meet. I say to myself, there is truth _there_; there is hope and comfort there, and this tangle of life is _not_ the end. When I am a Protestant minister, the dear cross shall be on my church, and nobody shall stay away from it because they are ragged or poor, or because the cushions are too nice. Oh, I like Catholicism for _that_. They are nearer heaven than Protestants on this point.

I am very glad for the Protestant noonday prayer-meetings, wheresoever held. One may have a great spiritual need on other days than Sunday. One may happen in here--if such things ever _happen_, which I doubt--and _there_ learn that need, and the way to satisfy it. The devil is cunningly and wisely busy _every day_ and every night in the week. Why should good Christians think to circumvent this skilful diplomatist in one?--on _Sunday_ only? The devil makes _easy_ all the paths leading to perdition. Christians make hard and difficult the road to heaven, with their fine churches, and fine worshippers, and empty preaching once a week. And all around us pitiful hands are outstretched, and hungry hearts are waiting for the loving Christian word of help, temporal and spiritual; and men and women go down into the maelstrom of despair, folly, and sin; and we open our churches and let _well-dressed_ Christians in to pray for them on Sunday. Sunday! the word has no meaning. Call it Monday or Tuesday, or Fourth of July, or anything you will, but not "Sunday." _That_ once meant something.

Let me give you a postscript to a sermon I once heard. "Middle age is inevitable routine, but keep your _souls_ above it," I heard a clergyman remark the other night. He "knew that it was difficult," he said, "not to merge one's self at that crisis in the shop, in the store, in the office; difficult _not_ to become a mere drudge and a machine; but still, avoiding it was the only hope for this life." Oh, how my heart echoed these words--not for men, but for my own sex, of whose routine life the clergyman said nothing. I wanted to get up and say to him, "My dear sir, your address is eloquent, and true, scholarly, and sound, so far as it goes. It _is_ the only hope for this life that these men of business should not become mere tools." But I wanted to ask him if men, with their freedom of action--men who, out in the world, inevitably come into collision with _stirring_, not _stagnant_ life--find this difficult, what of their wives? With twenty nerves where men have one to be jarred and agonized, with the pin and needle fret, of every minute, which they may never hope to escape or get away from; tied hand and foot, day and night, week after week, with the ten thousand cords, invisible often to the dull eye of husband and father, who accepts at evening the neat and pleasant result, without a thought of how it was accomplished--without a thought of the weariness of that inexorable grind of detail necessary to it--without a thought that a change of scene is either necessary or desirable for the wife and mother who is surely under its benumbing influence, merging _her_ "soul" till she is a mere machine.

I wanted to hear this clergyman say something about that. I wanted to know of him whether these women were doing God and their husbands service, by so sinking the spiritual part of them that one could hardly tell that it had existence. I wanted to ask him whether, if their husbands, through indifference or selfishness, or both, gave no thought to this matter, if he--set in a high place to teach the people--had no word of advice to such men, that they look as well to the spiritual deterioration of the _mothers_ of their children as to their own--the fathers. Nay, I insist that for the mother it is of _more_ consequence, as having infinitely more to do with the forming years of these children. And what time, pray, have many of these "routine" mothers for "thought," properly so called? What time for reading even the daily papers, to keep up intelligently with the great issues of the day, of which it is a shame and disgrace for any American wife and mother to be ignorant? How can they in this way be fit companions for their children's future? How can they answer their questions, on this subject and on that, while their vision is for ever bounded by the horizon of the physical wants of the household? You may preach "woman's duty" to me till you are hoarse; and I will preach to you the lust and the selfishness, which is ever repeating the dilemma of "the old woman in the shoe," till she has not an interval to think whether she or her brood _have_ souls. "Routine life" of _men_! Men can and do get out of it--"business takes them away from home on journeys." "Business" takes him out pleasant evenings; on rainy ones, he never has "business;" then he goes early to bed, to prepare for a long evening of "business" when the sky clears.

His wife--well, "she don't seem to need it; or if she does, she don't say so;" and I might add, in the language of Dickens's nurse, Sary Gamp, "it is little she needs, and that little she don't get," at least from him.

Routine men! Oh, bah! "Routine men" have a result to show for their "routine." They have clerks--not from Intelligence-offices either--who have to do as they bid them. They also lock up shop at dark. They also walk or ride home in the fresh air, and talk with their male friends while doing it. They also are not dependent on the whim or caprice of any man to take them out for a breath of fresh air at night, after an exhaustive day of indoor stifling detail. And so, though the sermon to which I listened was excellent _from a man to men_, I made up my mind to add this little Appendix to women, from a woman, on the routine-woman's side of the question. You may talk of the selfishness of women till your head is white; there never lived that selfish woman so execrably selfish as a selfish man can be. I don't say _you_ are so, sir: though at this distance, I venture to inquire whether, were you in your wife's place, you wouldn't occasionally like to climb up on the edge of the peck-measure in which she daily revolves, and look about outside, even if it should tip over on the whole brood of young ones in the process?

_JUSTICE FOR CLERGYMEN._

Can anybody tell why clergymen should not receive fees for attending funerals? They receive fees, and generous ones often, for performing the marriage-ceremony, which is very unnecessary in comparison; a wedding being a joyful, happy, inspiriting occasion, with its bright faces, sweet flowers, and happy congratulations of friends; the exceptions to which are so few as not to need enumerating; and it must needs rest a man instead of wearying him, cobwebbed all over with theological tangles as he is, to witness all this; for no matter what vicissitudes fate and the future have in store for the two he has made one, at least for _that_ hour they are supremely blessed, and he has made them so. But a _funeral_! with all its present unnecessary and dreadful accumulation of horrors; with its closed blinds, its piling up of sable garments, its pale dead face, which needs no such auxiliaries of gloom. Imagine a clergyman, already worn out, mentally and physically, entering such a room, filled with mourning friends, to whom even the Saviour's own sweet words would seem cold, who must each for himself tread the wine-press _alone_, till such time as they can find _Him_. Imagine this minister trying, by prayer and exhortation, to lift that heavy load of sorrow which all who have grieved know, that time and faith alone can lighten. Then he goes and looks into the face of the dead--oh! how many dead faces has he looked at, through the eyes of others, in the same way!--then he offers a friendly hand to the widow, or the orphan, as the case may be, and then with this immense draft on his sympathies, with those heart-rending sobs still sounding in his ears, perhaps within that very hour, he is called to a repetition of the sad scene. I am very sure that any clergymen of experience and sensibility will say, that I have not overstated this wear and tear of feeling in the delicate endeavor to say just the right thing, to the differing faiths of the craving, sorrowing hearts present.

Now why, I ask, should clergymen, in addition to their other exhaustive duties, be expected to go through this most exhaustive service of all, without remuneration? More especially, when one considers the often danger of contagious atmospheric influences, at such times and places, upon his tired frame.

I have often pondered, without yet being able to find a shadow of a reason for this unjust demand upon clerical strength. If you say it is the custom, I only say it is time that, with other bad customs, it were reformed; and more--since clergymen themselves have their lips delicately closed on this especial subject, while on others they might be considered at liberty to speak. That's why _I_ have spoken for them.

I like ministers. I was brought up with them. My father's house was a minister's tavern, lacking the sign swinging before the door. I was a wild slip in those days; that's why they always "wanted a little conversation with Sarah." It was philanthropic, but thrown away. I had been told so often that I was "a child of wrath," that I had it at my fingers' ends--I might have said, at my toes' ends, for it was they who helped me out the nearest door after meals, lest I should hear the stale announcement again. I persisted I "loved God," when I was asked. Why shouldn't I? for no bugaboo of anybody's raising could have made me believe I was born by him to be tormented. The flowers, the clouds, the ocean, the sun, moon, and stars--what priceless gifts were they! No "doctrine" or "creed" could rob me of them; and didn't _he_ make them, and give me a soul to enjoy them? It was of no use telling me I was a "child of wrath" under circumstances like these! One soft sweet breath from my flower-garden knocked that idea "all to smithereens."

Now I didn't hate those ministers for trying to darken what should have been, and what _was_, in spite of them, youth's festival hour. I knew they _thought_ they were right, and I believe them to be truly good, though mistaken, men. They didn't know that, child as I was, if _I_ ever went to Heaven, it would be taking hold of my Heavenly Father's hand, not cowering before him through fear of "hell." So they fired over my curls, when they got me in a corner, and talked to me that way. They didn't make me hate "meetin'" either; though I was driven there to hear so many "seventeenth-lies" at the point of the bayonet; and when skewered up on the seat between rows of big folks, I felt as if little ants were creeping out from under my finger-nails, so fidgety did I get for the blessed outdoors.

But I have not outgrown "meetin'" yet, and I count no Sunday a Sunday when I don't go there some part of the day. Oh, had they only known _how_ to talk to me, instead of driving me within myself, and making me put my worst religious foot foremost. But clergymen have found a better way since, thank God! Still I often smile at the bits of the old leaven in the ministerial make up. How they will wonder at it all, when eternity's light shines down on their life-path, and shows them these mistakes. For I make no apology here for boldly asserting that a minister can, and does, and always will, make an occasional mistake; although I was once pounced down upon by an evangelical critic, who talked to me about "wounding the Lord in the house of his friends," when I said so. It is just such stuff as that, that drives everybody _from_ the "Lord." Better face the music, and own up, that even ministers are _human_. For my part, were I a minister, and fenced in, and badgered about, and cross-questioned and interfered with, and expected to be a sound, rounded, well-disposed human being, morally, mentally, and physically, all the same as if a coroner's inquest wasn't squatting on my free-agency every hour in the day, I'll warrant you I should make a great many more mistakes than they do. Old Adam in me, would soon see that they didn't want material for a verdict to suit their narrowness.