Part 3

It is “dreadful,” as well as unnecessary that children should be left to grow up ignorant of any of those things, great or small, which will make it possible for them to enter the schoolroom, the church, the hall, and move about in such a manner as not to be objects of unpleasant observation to those who make politeness a profession.

All that has been said about the opening and closing of doors, and the rules of precedence, are always in full force, and should become so automatic that they will never have to be _remembered_. Even at home, and in the small country schoolhouse place of worship they should be observed, if one hopes to always do the “nice way.”

In a small congregation where “everybody knows everybody,” there is a great temptation to fall into very lax manners, and so to cultivate habits that are hard to overcome, and which will cause chagrin by and by to the young man or woman who wants to appear well among strangers. Therefore it is wise to train the children to such deportment in the small church, or cottage meeting that they shall never be in danger of bringing reproach on the home which they have left behind them, by uncouth or disorderly behavior in any public assembly.

Any place of worship should be entered quietly, children and parents together, single file, in such order that there will be no jostling, crowding, or changing of places. There are two ways of seating a family, either of which is good form. In one case the father enters first, followed in order by the mother, the youngest child, and then the others according to age, so that the eldest comes last. At the opening to the pew, or row of chairs, the father turns, standing to face the others, and waits until all have passed in and are seated, when he takes his place at the entrance. This arrangement gives the mother the seat in the farther corner, with the “baby” beside her, while the eldest child is next to the father.

In the other case the eldest child leads, and passes into the farther end of the seat, followed by the other children in such order as to leave the “baby” next to the mother, who sits in the second place from the end, beside her husband.

Sometimes when there is a large family, it is necessary to separate the children by placing the mother in the midst of them between two restless ones. But whatever order is necessary, let it be so matter-of-course that the coming in and seating shall be in that decorous manner which will impress the children with the sacredness of the service for which they have come.

Teach the child that in entering a seat or row of chairs, good form requires that he shall pass clear in to the farthest vacant place, or that if he has dropped down in the end or middle of the row, and others come to claim seats beyond him, he should always either arise, come out and stand to allow them to pass in, or himself go on to the farthest place. Teach him, never, under any circumstances, to make it necessary for any one to climb over his feet and legs to reach a vacant place. This is one of the most common and worst forms in which bad training in deportment manifests itself.

Also teach your child to refuse to climb over anybody’s feet. Instruct him either to wait for a decent chance to enter that seat or to find another. The ludicrous, not to say unbecoming appearance of a woman who tries to drag herself over the knees of some man who remains immovable in the end of the seat, or who attempts to draw himself up to “make room” for her to pass, is entirely out of harmony with the spirit which should prevail in a place of worship; and the young man coming from home with this habit, which has been formed by climbing over his brothers and sisters, as well as parents and guests, and letting them climb over him, will be left some sad day to wonder why people stop at the entrance to the pew where he sits, wait an instant, look at him so queerly, and then pass on, as if they were not willing to occupy the same seat with him. He may think it is because he is from the country, because he is not stylishly dressed, because they are very “stuck up,” when it is simply because they do not choose to climb over his legs to find a seat.

But your daughter should be so taught that if she must stand in the aisle and wait for some man to get it into his head that he had better move on, or come out so as to allow her to pass, she shall do it kindly and without contempt; for, of course, the poor fellow would do better if he only knew how.

Teach by precept and example that wraps and rubbers should not be put on until after the benediction. If your boy should grow up to the dignity of door-keeper in the house of the Lord, he should know that extra seats should never be removed from the aisles, nor doors be opened, until the last “amen” has been reverently uttered.

I believe that reverence and a proper understanding of the meaning of the sacred hours of worship would be wholesomely inculcated by the practise of sitting down in silence for two or three minutes after the benediction, or long enough for any necessary things to be done, such as the orderly passing out of the congregation might require.

Good form requires that there be no loud talking, visiting, laughing, bustling, or confusion of any sort in the breaking up of a congregation. In fact, instead of a breaking up, it should be a melting away, each for himself seeking to hold in thought, and carry with him all that is possible of the subject which has been considered, avoiding everything which tends to dissipate or to divert the mind from its contemplation.

This is the good form which _nominal_ Christians require and teach. It is only the _form_, if you please, at the best dead, by which the worldly professor seems to be trying to make up what may be lacking in real spiritual worship; but that very fact proves it to be more than ordinarily worthy of consideration and adoption by the most spiritual. Upon the same principle that our righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees should our courtesy and good breeding exceed that of the most cultivated people of the world.

That behavior which everybody recognizes as becoming the house of the Lord, is that which would most certainly distinguish Jesus if he should come in among us; and the true worshiper who will clothe himself with these gentle, Christlike graces of conduct will be no less truly a Christian, while he will certainly be more quickly recognized as such.

VIII.

One of the evils which the good-form code is intended to control is that of the money and gift obligations, and the part they play in the association of young people; and in this the burden of preserving the just balance falls upon the young woman, although it is equally necessary that both boys and girls shall be so instructed that they shall each contribute an equal share of that mutual protection which good form is intended to assure.

A sentiment still lingers in the social world—a relic of medieval gallantry—to the effect that a young man must grant anything that a lady asks, even if, to secure it, he must risk his life, or character, or the last “quarter” with which he was to buy his dinner. This asking on her part need not be really _asking_: it may be only suggesting, or consenting to accept. She may only exclaim, “Oh, wouldn’t a sleigh-ride be just too lovely for anything!” She may have become naughty enough, without intending any harm, to say this on purpose to make the boy whom she delights to tease begin mentally to count over his small supply of change to see if he can possibly afford the rig. Girls have been known to take a queer sort of delight in leading a young fellow on to spend his last penny, to contract a debt, and go hungry, because he did not bravely refuse to take the hints that were intended to lead him into expenditure such as he could not afford.

No girl who has been properly trained, or who has truth and the elements of womanliness within, will ever resort to any such expedient for her pleasure, but will keep herself from all or any such social entanglements as would lead to anything so base. She will not allow a young man to place her under obligation, even to the extent of car-fare.

Teach your growing daughter that to receive a gift of any sort from any boy or man outside of the immediate circle of intimate, well-known family friends, is dangerous, if not disgraceful. Gift-giving and gift-receiving has come to be a vice. It is often intended as a sly, covert method of _buying_ you. Gifts are employed for “padlocking the mouth” of those who know something which, if told, might spoil some selfish or criminal plot; and this is by no means confined to Tammany Hall.

Many a girl has kept some dangerous bit of knowledge hidden in her secret thought, and has been compromised by it, simply because she had thoughtlessly accepted some bauble from some man whom she supposed to be a friend until, the ulterior motive being revealed, she discovered that the gift was a bribe, and its possession a confession of dishonor; and then she has found herself in a great strait between her desire to be free and yet to keep the trinket.

I had given a plain talk to a company of schoolgirls; and many questions had been passed up to me, in answering which I had touched some of these points. At the close of the meeting, a few girls lingered to speak to me, each waiting to ask some questions “all for herself alone.” So while the others waited at a safe distance, they came, one by one, to whisper their perplexities in my ear. How my heart was taken captive by those girls, as with shamefacedness, with trembling lips and burning cheeks, they asked me questions which were revelations both of the lack of early home teaching and of the methods by which an evil world had tried to make them wise!

“I have got afraid of a lovely necklace that _my friend_ gave me,” said one of them. “I’ve wished a hundred times he hadn’t given it; but what in the world can I do with it?”

“Send it back to him,” I said; “tell him you know more now than you did when you accepted it, and that you can not keep it.”

“But that would make him furious. I—I—dare not make him angry.”

“Then if he is so dangerous, you certainly dare not have him for a friend. If he is worthy of your friendship, he will understand and respect you all the more for this course. If he is not worthy of your friendship, the sooner you find it out, the better.”

“O—but—,” and the poor girl burst into bitter weeping. Then after a few moments, with a sudden firm resolution expressed in her face, she dried her eyes, looked up at me, clasped my hands as if to hold herself by them, and said, “I’ll do it,—I’ll do it right off,—and if he wants to make it hard for me, he may. _I’ve kept honest_,—God knows I have,—and he knows it, though _he_ hasn’t helped me, as he said he would.”

“He promised to help you?” I asked.

“Yes, he did; he said I could trust _him_; that he’d never let a girl be compromised in his company in the world; but if I had done, and gone, as he insisted, lest if I didn’t he would have been provoked, I should have been talked about long ago. I thank you so much. I’ll get rid of it. He may have his old necklace, and keep it to give to his wife.”

“That is right,” I said. “She is the only one who can wear or own it with safety.”

The young man with a good heart, who is well taught in that which is best in good form, will never offer to any lady outside his own immediate family circle any gift but flowers; and those in the most delicate unobtrusive manner, such as will leave her, in receiving them, absolutely free to pass them on to some hospital patient if she chooses. To make her feel, by even a look, that she is under any obligation to wear a flower because he sends it, is to rob it of its fragrance and beauty, and make it fit only for the dust heap.

Because of the possibilities which I have suggested, and many others to which they lead, good form requires that a young lady shall make it practically impossible for any man not intimately related to her to spend any money, or force any gifts, upon her.

IX.

I should not do my whole duty if I did not make some reference to the “holy kiss,” nor yet contribute what I can to enlighten the mothers who honor me by reading my book concerning the universal but almost unspeakable questions that are always coming into the minds of young people about this sacred form of salute. _You_ may know as much about these questions as I do, perhaps more; but there is many a mother who never dreamed that they could infest any brain but her own, and she never dared speak of such a thing.

One girl came to me, her face suffused with blushes, but with a determined expression about her mouth, and said:—

“I am going to ask you something right out plain, because I think you will not laugh. I’ve never dared ask anybody yet, because everybody always laughs in such a mean way if you try to find out anything about such things; and I’d like to know how girls are going to know just what to do. Now it’s just this way: I am going with Charley, and he is a nice boy; he wants to do what is right, I know he does, but all the boys have such queer ideas about their ‘rights.’ When he takes me home from church or any place—and I’ve just got so I dread to have him; and sometimes I think I won’t go with another boy as long as I live, because, you see, when I go to say ‘Good night,’ he—he thinks I am so queer because I won’t let him kiss me. But I won’t; I never let anybody but my own folks. I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s nice to do that way unless it’s somebody you’re sure of, and love very much. He says I’m queer; and he gets provoked, and says it’s his right, if he goes with me. Now I want to know—is it?”

“No; it is not,” I said, positively, and perhaps with a little flavor of indignation. “And no properly instructed young man would make such a claim. He is not to blame, of course,” I added more mildly, “for he is young, too; but your instincts are all right; they are true; they are of God who made the kiss, and gave it its own place in common human language. It belongs to the home, and to the purest Christian fellowship between man and man, woman and woman; _to society, never_.”

“Oh, I am so glad I asked you!” she said; “for I was sure my feeling about it was right. But you know one doesn’t like to offend one’s friend, and one doesn’t like to be called queer. But what does make boys act so,—good boys, too, for Charley _is_ a good boy?”

I can not bring into the compass of these pages all that followed in our talk, but I would like to give the points of truth to the young mothers for whom I write.

The answer to my young questioner is found in the fact that boys, as well as girls, have been left in ignorance of the principle, as it is in God, of which the kiss is one form of expression, and have been left to catch up its perversion as Satan has undertaken to work it into custom and habit, in the world. Anything which Satan can not wholly spoil, he will counterfeit; or, better yet for his purpose, make so common, if possible, that it shall become worthless, as was the case with silver in the days of Solomon, when it became as the stones of the street, and “was nothing accounted of.”

The kiss, made common, is ridiculous. To be worth anything, it must speak exclusively the language of a pure, changeless affection, such as is represented in the love of God for his children. It belongs more to the parent and child, brother and sister, than to friend and companion. It is, as before intimated, fraternal, not social. As soon as any attempt is made to drag it into society, it becomes disgusting, and is always soon driven out by storms of ridicule. Therefore good form has taken it in hand, and has determined its sphere and office with the most arbitrary insistence. And again the voice of society is but an echo of the voice of truth and purity. Good form has decreed that the kiss, public and indiscriminate, is either an indication of unmitigated rusticity, of shameless immorality, or is to be understood as a joke,—very funny on its first spontaneous utterance, but very flat if repeated. Indulged in private, outside the sacred boundaries of the family, between men and women, it is unpardonable,—unatonable, at least as far as the woman is concerned. Good form requires that every young lady shall be so well trained that she will keep her lips absolutely untouched for her husband, _after_ the words have been spoken that make him her husband.

The “betrothal kiss” of the romancer has been brought under suspicion in real life by the fact that betrothal is, in our day, not by any means equivalent to marriage; and the young man who knows the world, and yet sufficiently regards truth and purity to seek them in a wife, would vastly prefer to find his lady friend rigidly determined to keep her lips to herself as long as they two are yet twain, rather than to find them always at even his command.

In the correspondence that has come to me as a result of “Studies in Home and Child Life,” is to be found pitiful evidence of the ignorance in which young people are allowed to grow up, even in a matter which may seem, like this one, trivial and bordering on the ridiculous.

The habit among children of kissing everybody is little short of vicious. Kissing games of every description are considered vulgar, anywhere outside the immediate family circle, and even then, because of the trend of habit, they are not good form.

There is great possibility of infection in the kiss. The remains of old teeth, the breath and lips of those who are in any wise diseased, make kissing dangerous. It is well-nigh impossible to find a clean, sweet mouth in these days of human degeneracy; and because of these facts the little children are exposed to every malignant disorder that is afloat, and many that are hidden deep in the foul cisterns of the broken-down body of grandparents, father, mother, and the strangers who straggle in and use their “rights” on the freely rendered lips of the little innocents.

The warnings of science, of which so many make light, are timely, and should be religiously regarded as the authority of God by every one who does not know within himself that he has so faithfully brought his whole being into conformity with every law of life and health that he is clean through and through, so that the sensitive lips of his babe can come to his with the same certainty of a blessing in the caress that the bee has when he goes to the white clover of the meadow.

He, and he only, who has brought himself fully into harmony with both the letter and the spirit of Isaiah fifty-eight may freely give his lips to his child, out of which to drink his fill of love. And the home that is brought into this beautiful accord with Christ may be as the garden of the Lord, from which all lips shall, with every caress, gather that word of life that is sweeter than honey.

X.

The time is at hand when the truth must be taken into every lane and walk of life—into king’s palaces, into halls of learning, into banquet rooms, and into homes of refinement and culture, as well as to the haunts of poverty and crime; for the whole earth must be filled with the knowledge of the Lord. No soul must be left to arise in the second resurrection and say, I did not know the way of life, or I would not have been here. There are being prepared in all Christian homes those who shall become the messengers of this gospel of the kingdom to every rank, grade, and condition among men.

This is a consideration for every Christian mother and father. As among the children of Israel every maiden held in her heart the secret hope that she might be the mother of the promised seed of David, so now, however humble and far away from every center of influence your home may be, however meager its furnishing, however much you may seem to lack incentive to noble effort, there should be inspiration in the thought that the little child playing about your feet, whose life and habits you are molding, may be one who shall be called to bear the vessel of the Lord, which is his Word, filled with the holy oil of his Spirit, before some council of earth’s great men, and to answer for the principles by which the world is to receive its final test.

By this I do not mean that he may be called to suffer martyrdom,—although that is possible—but I refer to the fact that he may have the yet grander ministry of standing up to be quizzed and catechized by those learned in the wisdom of the world concerning all that he has been taught of Christian principle, health, disease, and life in the Holy Ghost.

Unquestionably, this work is waiting for some select few of our young people in the not far distant future. Some great council of physicians will wish to know all about what the medical missionary physicians teach, and why; the chemists of the world will wish to know the philosophy of the system of dietetics which will keep the temple of God in repair; and, as is almost always the case among the people of the world, there will be eating and drinking on a large scale connected with all these investigations; and your boy or girl may have to accept the place as guest of honor at some such feast, and carry himself _elegantly_, for Christ’s sake and the truth’s; for the banquet, the dinner, the lunch, play an important part in all social affairs to-day, and will until the end of probation.

If a man of means and social standing becomes interested enough in what you know of Christ to hear you out on it, he will make you a dinner, invite a few friends, and give you a chance to talk and tell all you know. And if you know how to take advantage of the opportunity—how to avoid giving offense by your manner of speech and habits of conduct; if you know how to charm and win by your personality, you have placed at the command of truth an instrument that can be made effective where, otherwise, no entrance could be gained.

Nowhere is the observance of good form more necessary to one who has work to do in the social world than at the table; for here bad habits may be given such disgusting publicity as to render them a cause of reproach to any good cause; and the obligation is upon every Christian home to see that its children are so instructed that they shall be ready to quickly fill any place to which the work may call, and to stand with dignity for the truth in any place that can be opened to its consideration.

A home of wealth and elaborate appliances is not necessary for such training. A child who is instructed in the proper use of the few simple things that constitute the furnishing of the most humble home, and in those rules of good form that ought to be the natural order in any place, will not be left to carry with him into some important convocation careless table habits, which, under the pressure of a sense of responsibility, would certainly come to the front, in place of the few better ways that he might have picked up and stored away for occasional and special use.

In “acting out just what is in him,” he will not bring himself and that which he represents into ridicule; the opportunity of giving the truth a chance to shine will not be lost, while honest souls are left in the dark; the breath of personal contempt will not obscure the character of Christ, which he is supposed to represent. He will be accepted, first, because it is agreeable to look at him; he will be heard because no good reason appears why he should not be; and after that, everything will depend on what he really _is_ and _has_ down under the surface, in the place where he lives alone with God.

“But,” you say, “the Lord, who calls a man to stand in any place, will prevent any disaster to the cause, provided his servant is honest.”