ver find salvation
in being told to take care of herself, and least of all for the purpose
of keeping the man, for whom she was created to be a helpmate, at arm's
length. Gospels of self-culture may take seeming root here and there in
the exotic woman; but even in her, at some moment of swift passion or
strong emotion, they will crumple up and fall off from her like a
withered leaf. James Hinton knew a woman's nature but too well when he
said that she would respond to the appeal "Lay down your life" more
readily and more surely than to the appeal "Take up your rights." She
certainly has a most divine power of flinging herself away, whether
nobly or ignobly, which forms both her strength and her weakness. But I
have never yet known a woman who would not, at any rate to some degree,
respond to an appeal to save, not herself, but another: "Do not let him
do this wrong thing, for his sake. You can do anything you like with a
man who loves you. God has given him body and soul into your hands, and
you can lift him up into something of His image and make a true man of
him; or you can let his love for you sink him into a selfish beast of
prey. Do not let him do anything that will for ever lower his manhood,
but use your power over him to keep him true to all that is best and
highest in him." I have never yet known the woman who will not be moved
by such an appeal as this. In other words, the central motive force of a
woman's nature, the key of her whole being, is, and must ever be, the
mother in her, that divine motherhood which is at the heart of every
woman worthy of the name, married or unmarried. It is this divine
motherhood, which all evolution, the whole "process of the suns," has
gone to strengthen, and which Christianity has enshrined at her very
heart--it is this that makes her for ever the Christ factor in the
world, the supreme expression of the redeeming Love--that care of the
strong for the weak which even in Nature comes trembling into existence
beneath the tender wing of the nesting bird, or forces itself into
notice in the fierce lioness's care for her whelps, and which we
believe will work out the ultimate consummation of the "whole creation
that groaneth and travaileth in pain until now." And I contend that if
we are to have in the future such women as Lady Augusta Stanley, round
whose lifeless form were united in one common sorrow the Queen on her
throne and the poorest of the poor, such women as Browning's wif