hem in the dark--to make up your mind
that you will come to the woman you love in the glory of your unfallen
manhood, as you expect her to come to you in the beauty of her spotless
maidenhood."

I did not know for one moment whether they would not break out into
cooing like doves; but, on the contrary, they listened to me with
profound attention, and I could see that none of my words went so home
to them as those. When I had finished my address a member of the
committee said to one of the professors, "I think if she had asked them
to go off and storm Edinburgh Castle they would have marched off in a
body and done it." So great is the power of a woman pleading for women.

If I could use this sacred plea with effect under circumstances of--I
think you will allow--such unspeakable difficulty, must it not be
possible to you, the mother from whom such an appeal would come so
naturally, to use this same influence, and in the quiet Sunday walk
through the fields and woods where Nature herself seems to breathe of
the sanctity of life in every leaf and flower, or in the quiet talk over
the winter fireside before he leaves home, to plead with your son to
keep himself faithful to his future wife, so that when he meets the
woman he can love and make his wife, he may have no shameful secrets to
confess, or, worse still, to conceal from her, no base tendencies to
hand down to his unborn children after him? Thank God! how many an
American and English wife and mother can speak here from personal
experience of the perfect love and perfect trust which have been bred of
a pure life before marriage, and a knowledge that the sacraments of love
and life had never been desecrated or defiled, so that no shadow of
distrust or suspicion can ever darken the path of her married happiness.
How powerful the pleading of such a mother may become with her son, to
give his future wife the same perfect trust and unclouded happiness in
her husband's love!

I remember in a series of allegorical pictures by an old master in the
Baptistery at Florence, how, with the divine instinct of poets and
artists, in the beautiful symbolic figure of Hope, the painter has
placed a lily in her hands. Cannot we teach our sons that if they are to
realize their dearest hope in life, that divine hope must ever bear a
lily in her hand as the only wand that can open to them the paradise of
the ideal, the divine vision which is "the master light of all our
seeing," the deepe