A WOMAN'S HEART A Woman's Heart Manuscripts Found in the Papers of Katherine Peshconet and Edited by her Executor OLIVE RANSOM "Rede me and be notl wrothe For I saye no thynge but fro the. New York Doubleday, Page & Company 1906 Copyright, 1906, by Doubleday, Page & Company Published, April, 1906 All rights reserved, Including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian (L|)ic fcoofc is t To the Memory of KATHERINE PESHCONET And to the Memory of All Women of like Histories A WOMAN'S HEART A WOMAN'S HEART I. But I must utter what the voice within Dictates, for acquiescence dumb were sin. JAMES RUSSELL, LOWELL. WELL, I love you. I am not ashamed to say it. And you shall lead a better and broader life with me. If you had not been hemmed in by the metaphysics of the schoolmen, by fastings, prayers and offices, would you have just that naivete and abounding faith that whatever is is right? How different my worship! As the years passed to my majority ever think- ing with a glow in heart, " So much larger in knowledge! So much nearer work!'* Always prostrate before knowing; tor- [1] A WOMAN'S HEART luring my soul because of slow gains in learning; palpitating and quivering with- in the penetralia of my ideals. I, too, had fasts and vigils. And now you say this missal and breviary hold all I have nothing more to seek only to be lowly of soul and ob- servant of what priests teach oh, yes, the phrase is "what the church the holy church teaches," I had for the moment forgotten. You advise me to pour the eleventh century wine of these books into the twentieth century bottle of my brain. You are not good and you have not faith enough? Ah, if you were not and had not you would drop your belief in self-assumed authority. You will not? What hold it has on you! How can you subject yourself to the dictum of those desiccated monks and bishops? Such abnegation of desires and personality is servile. To walk without a cane or crutch that is to be strong. But suppose I admit your doctrines and cry "Credo." What then? You [2] A WOMAN'S HEART are the farther away. I of your faith? Then you are more than ever remote from me, no longer the one of all the world it is a delight to be near, but a con- secrated priest of a sacerdotal caste. It would be a sin, instead of the wine of life, to love you. The council of Trent more than three hundred years before you were born for- bade you to marry. Because you could perform your parochial duties better if I were to help you ? Every good man has more than double strength when rightly aided by a good woman every good woman more than double strength when rightly aided by a good man. We should be strong together. God was before the council of Trent, dear heart. When he bade you love me, he bade you marry me. You yourself acknowledge there are abuses in your church. You will not sacrifice your life to one of the greatest that would be cowardly. [3] A WOMAN'S HEART But given things as they are, might I not buy you off? My having you, you see, is all a matter of gold. For payment of money other popes have released from vows other priests and even bishops. Talleyrand of Autun, you know, mar- ried after years of a life that had never been blessed by the clergy. Why not a similar concession nowadays ? even if you have not entered Talleyrand's ves- tibulum to the married state. His price upon you would be high, if the pope knew half your worth. I shall lead you away. What if the archbishop does thunder? and the pope? What then? They will not let you do as God directs. We will issue our own writ of independence. We are Amer- icans you at least in birth if not in spirit and tradition. We will make our own church, which self-cleans itself from abuses, and in which God alone reigns. How serene our days after this nervous strain! I shall convert you. Soon you will not believe in their conjuring power, [4] A WOMAN'S HEART and you will smile at their anathemata, as the great world smiles and still whirls on. With Shelley you will say : "How ludicrous the priest's dogmatic roar! The weight of his exterminating curse How light ! and his affected charity, To suit the pressure of the changing times, What palpable deceit!" But you do believe in them ? No, not believe you mean. You cannot say you believe believe, for instance, as you be- lieve the sun is shining over there on the lawn. You cannot say that, dearest. You mean you can not believe in their self-constituted authority and power. Take the myth of the apostolic succes- sion. It is easy to show that bishops or presbyters of the early church were in many cases installed by the laity, and that their later confreres accepted ordination in like manner. That ends the whole papal pretence. You can prove the op- posite, also ? Even if you can, the claim of the bishop of Rome is beset with doubts. [51 A WOMAN'S HEART I know nothing of the church's doc- trines and its theology ? Teach me, then. You have said the doctrines are in the creed. And what is theology Christian theology? No more than men's specula- tion built upon the simple sayings of Je- sus. In it are submerging depths of hu- man narrowness and human unsympathy. I, too, can speculate, for have I not also the sayings of Jesus ? What do I want, except as the expression of a pious soul long ago foredone, or for their evolution- ary values, of Augustine's opinions ? Over him I have the advantage of fifteen centuries of our human race's growth in knowledge and wisdom. Jerome, Bona- ventura they were doubtless good men and lived up to the best of their times. Let us live up to the best of ours. "Truth is truth at all times," you say. That is just what I claim absolute truth is. But there is theological truth rela- tive truth, and truth only so far as their human sympathy and science lighted the theologues who pronounced it. Go into a [6] A WOMAN'S HEART second-hand bookstore; take down any old theological tome. How antiquated its teachings. How absurd its pronuncia- mentoes! As antediluvian as Noah's boat. But still further regarding the divinity of Jesus is not his loftiness and beauty of soul the greater if we look upon him as a man? He is divine, the "son of God" in the simple, old, poetic language. All men are. He sanctified humanity, most human of humans, by showing to what heights men could rise. He is one of many men imbued with a profound god- consciousness, who after death have been apotheosised. Our poetising faculty, es- pecially as it exists in simple minds, builds legends and marvels about the birth and death of such men. These stories, cast in form by succeeding gene- rations, perhaps by disciples who have mirrored their inspiration and are pos- sessed of a calmness and poise which the prophets along with their furor could not have, become popular history. Is there A WOMAN'S HEART not, oh faithful heart, a geographical distribution of the avatars of mankind just as there is a palm belt and a fir-tree belt about our dancing globe ? Prophets of distinct religious enthusiasm, so far in our race's history, have been born only within certain latitudes. [8] II. Forgive me that I hear thy creeds Unawed and unafraid; They are too small for one whose ears Have heard God's organ played; Who in vast, noble solitudes In simple faith has prayed. ELLA HIGGINSON. WHAT did they say to you in the "re- treat" that set your soul a-quivering ? Of the duty of a priest? Of his peculiar sanctification ? What frightened you? Not their "logic" certainly. What can it be? Last night I sat till ten watching the light of your study windows, wondering what kept you, fearing that your Phari- saical superiors were blaming you for some act they turned into a peccadillo. You wanted to come, did you not? To [9] A WOMAN'S HEART gain a grain of comfort I was saying all the while to myself, "He certainly loves me. He is not trying me willingly. But he little realizes that this waiting for him to leave the church and learn to stand alone is eating my life and breaking my heart." You do not know that constantly with me is the fear that in the end our love may not be the strongest bond. It is the best bond, yes. But mere habit has over- ruled men at times and you have been taught such absurd estimate of custom and convention. Custom and conven- tion have crippled your church in her past; they have appealed to her rever- ence and consideration and dictated her course in critical junctures. They may direct you. Do not choose the meaner life. Do not let lower estimates affect you now. I cannot have been mistaken. Do you want to be separated from me? Do you never wish to hear me say again, "Dear heart, I love you" ? I yearn over you as a mother yearns 1 10] A WOMAN'S HEART over her child. Women in their latent motherhood often have this emotion tow- ards lover and husband more often, I think, than men have the sense of fath- erhood towards the wife. No, not all the priests who have left the church have been evil men. A tale, dear heart. Look at the other side. See the letters, and " Table Talk," and for- mal writings of Luther. They evidence that he was not the licentious, drunken pretender your church holds him to have been. And Knox was he not for many a year a reputable priest ? If he had not followed some other dictate than his ease and advantage, he would not have had the stormy after-life which he suffered partly in exile and always in onerous work. And others of those reforming priests for instance, Zwingli ; and men not priests but leaders, such as Calvin, Ulrich von Hutten, Giordano Bruno ; and other men hosts of them were they not represented as monsters of iniquity [11] A WOMAN'S HEART to those unable to come within reach of the broadening spiritual impulses of their time? But upon such radicals what has been the verdict of Prince Posterity? Their very persecutors have profited by their great works. The narrower and more orthodox mem- bers of every sect abuse those who broaden beyond church and creed limi- tations. And when a man openly and boldly leaves the old faith, their contempt and revilings and innuendoes upon his convictions and morality sometimes out- last their lives. Men to-day who have left orthodoxy and dropped the doctrines of their ecclesiastical fathers have they not been spurned by the more conserva- tive, even if their lives are blameless? Think of those you know about. Over in Belgium there was till lately Alphonse Renard, at one time a Jesuit priest, an authority in his science of oceanography, whom his ecclesiastical limits could not restrain. You must get absolution from my [12] A WOMAN'S HEART touch? You fear to lose your soul by leaving the church and marrying me? To lose your soul! That seems to be your ever-present fear. Since your very infancy you have been hypnotised to that frame of mind. But by your teachings, one to whom Catholicism is offered and who rejects it will suffer eternally the torments of hell. You do not love me in spite of your pro- tests, for, holding me in your heart, you would choose an eternity of hell with me rather than an everlasting heaven apart from me. And if, by-the-by, you have not done your duty to the church and shown me her way and have you, caris- sime? then are you responsible for my soul and its sufferings and you cannot have a heaven, or at best it will be a meanly selfish one. Shall I ever learn that it is best for us to lead separate lives ? No, because it is not. But what would have been our happiness if our interests had been united ? [131 A WOMAN'S HEART if what you cared for I could have shared in, and to what I undertook you could have lent your sympathetic inter- est. How fair your gentleness always at hand, your discreet counsel ever ready, your strong arm, your shoulder beloved, such separation cannot be wise. Temperate conventionalities and sec- ondary moral laws melt before the fire of my love and longing for you. If your church were a person who knew me it would say I was right. Its rules must have been made against the character of women according to the distorted, eccle- siastical, misogynous judgment of olden time very much alive even to this day. But we American women are not that. If I were such as your ecclesiasts paint women I should never have loved you never have met you. Is there no power to which you can show the difference and, showing, gain our union ? A thor- oughly equipped corporation like your church should have such a referendum, some mediation between individual will [14] A WOMAN'S HEART and the will of the Roman congrega- tion. You say the Catholic reference of all authority on conduct to church teachings and council decrees is better than the appeal of the non-Catholics to public opinion, to what the world would think. But the appeal of non-Catholics is not to the world, or to what it thinks. Its test is, is it right? is it true? is it in accord with universal moral law? is it right to do this thing? Is it True?' 9 [15] III. My true-love hath my heart, and I have his, By just exchange one for another given : I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss, There never was a better bargain driven : My true-love hath my heart, and I have his. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. BELOVED, desire to put my arms about you is so great that I cannot forbear writing a word and on paper giving you an embrace. I have thought of the news you brought on Friday. Over and over again it has turned in my mind by night and day. But we must not lose hope, my life. That I say every moment. I said it yesterday in the first waking moments, not yet wholly conscious of the weight of sorrow. All this morning I was thinking what I should say. Do not misunder- stand. I dread the talk and want you by. [16] A WOMAN'S HEART " Prophete rechts, Prophete links, Das Weltkind in der Mitten." Only the doctrines of absolutism and pas- sive obedience I dread to meet, and I know they will form and direct all their sentences. You see it is difficult to cope with such antagonists upon the ordinary grounds of reason, love and nature and these are the three principles upon which I stand in my relation to you. This suspense waiting to see what Rome will do. I feel like taking you in my arms, and covering you with my gar- ments, and saving you, keeping you, loving and adoring you forever. But instead here I am suffering. To see how one would aid one's heart's desire and to remain motion- less ! The torture of it ! Oh, to see you for a moment only a moment quite alone. I dreamed last night that you came to my bedside and said, "The archbishop has consented. We shall be married and I shall have a parish of my own!" 2 [17] A WOMAN'S HEART The impossibilities made me speech- less until, "At last it has come!" I cried. " Our life shall be a foretaste of heaven." And you clasped me close with tears in your dear eyes. You had made a full presentation of facts to the archbishop and powers abroad, I dreamed, but since you feared the case would be decided against you, had said nothing. Oh, to be in your restful presence morning, noon, and night. God made us for each other. The native harmony and understanding that is between us cannot be chance concord. Only last night I was thinking, "Does he ever recall nowadays the parsonage we talked of in the country the hauschen where we were to be unspeakably happy fair nature about us and God over all ? " a little, low house painted soft grey by rain and wind and sunshine. Moss is just starting in crevices of the roof. It faces the sea and behind stands a copse of pine. Lilac bushes open their aro- [18] A WOMAN'S HEART matic blossoms in one corner of the yard, and just beyond a brook pours its sweet waters into the salt. To our friends when they come we offer rush-bottomed chairs, and blue china on the table from which to eat our hom- iny and honey and eggs. Brown-speckled hens lay the eggs I gather in a melon basket. You wear a linsey-woolsey coat which I make for you, and I a homespun dress. Weed the garden? Yes, and water the flowers morning and evening. Do you laugh ? Oh, you will with delight when that home is reached. Sometime after we are married some- time when you are heavy with sleep I shall pull the covering aside and kiss you right there where the heart beats. And you will say, half-waking and putting out your hand, "What is it, love?" And I shall answer, kissing you again upon the forehead and nestling close to catch your sleepy mood, "I was only kissing the place where our dear heart beats." [19] A WOMAN'S HEART Don't tell me that instead you shall abide within the walls of a monastery with silence as your portion. No. No, you shall not. Promise me you will not go. It is wrong a sin, as you say. The body is beautiful. It is not wicked, as monastics preach. God gave it, building it during millions of years through the upward lift of matter. And God gave its promptings to be carefully and reason- ably guarded. Oh, promise you will not enter so terrible a life and kill yourself by fancied discipline. It is awful, an incred- ible rage in humanity, a distorted East- Indian craze legitimised in your church that gross lie against our best impulses, that insult to God. My arms tell me to say they are aching to clasp you once more, and my lips are hungry for your lips, too. Let me see your ringer under a microscope and try if I may find that elusive quality which makes your touch so melting. Oh, the joy I had this morning wken I [20] A WOMAN'S HEART rose in bed, pulled my curtain, and after lying in watch a moment saw your black- robed figure against the white stretch of snow beyond. It was like a return of salient youth to the aged. My heart quickened and tears wet my eyes for sheer delight. So it was last night when I saw the gleam of light from your win- dow. To see it I had left the Beethoven symphony. But what are all symphonies compared with nearness to you even though you are behind the stone walls of yonder house ? I watched your light till it went out, and purposely kept myself awake until I was confident that you were calmly sleeping. I have all various loves for you. In our joys I am your wife. In your distresses I feel your mother to take you in my arms and coddle you. I wish you were not more than three spans long that I might enfold you, kiss you, press you against my heart and unblushing tell you all that warms my lips and now embold- ens my pen. [21] A WOMAN'S HEART The intense unswerving love and dog- like fidelity of woman ! I know from my- self what it is. Fancy you and me caught in a March blizzard upon a Dakota prairie. I know what I should then feel happiest in doing in wrapping my clothing about you and covering you with my body from sleet and cold and death. I can fancy myself with my arms about you saying, "Are you warm, dear heart?'* But it is now Sunday morning, and through the soft wet air and sunshine I hear your voice intoning the first service. There is ever the same ineffable sweet- ness and charm in its sound. "I think, O my Love, 'tis thy voice, from the Kingdom of Souls Faintly answering." Now if I should save your soul not in the mediaeval but modern way would your life be happy? If you had moral conviction. Don't you see, dear, that your faith is but an attitude of mind, for [22] A WOMAN'S HEART the most part an obsolete phase of civil- isation? In the midst of our twentieth century science it is an electrified corpse. You believe in it, you say. But you do not know anything else. Your church authorities forbid you to hear or read any other teachings, or to see other religious expression. You follow Paul in much of his fiery narrowness. Why can you not also broaden to his advice of trying all things and holding fast to that which is good ? Your religion has beauties, its long historic growth and background, its many wise and good prophets, apostles and messiahs of the oneness of man with the divine. They have clung to the truth and sometimes tried to right the lies. Why give them up? Theresa might be the zealous ascetic and egotistical prac- tician still. In the real, human good she did she is Saint Theresa to all human souls. When I hear your music and petition to the Mother, I am with you full of [23] A WOMAN'S HEART yearnings for womanly guidance and sympathy and the sweet, hovering quality of the eternal-feminine. This longing is in every soul men's and women's. It was there back of our Christian times when men called upon the chaste Arte- mis, and maids of Periclean Athens marched through the limpid air &<* Xafj.xpoTa.Too aioipos over the marble steps of the Propylsea to the shrine of Athena and the precious Phidian glories shining in the cella's dim light. Our reforma- tory ecclesiasts lost a line by which to hold subject their fellow-men when they put womanly force from their churches. All women long for womanhood as well as manhood in uplifting tradition. Again men blundered when they called God "He." God is neither he nor she. Then why forever say " He ? " The art of your old cathedrals their beautiful outlines, their tender pictures, their enchanting carvings is potent. They may lead one momentarily to for- get your grossly material and revolting [24] A WOMAN'S HEART conception that the body of Jesus is lying within the shrine. And your liturgical proceedings, your incantations, the mil- linery your priests put on, the dramatic effect and scenic display they aim at to carry to the imagination of believers the faith that God, like humans, is hypnotised by genuflexions and denial of our self- respect all such things sicken a pure faith, weaken a sturdy intellect. [25] IV. Ich ungliicksel'ger Atlas! eine Welt, Die ganze Welt der Schmerzen, muss ich tragen, Ich trage Unertragliches, und brechen Will mir das Herz im Leibe. HEINE. THIS morning I know where you are, for the old women are going along the road- side with tlueir beads. If belief in your myths could cover me, I should buy a string and go along too. Then would be saved great pain. But the immaterial structure about you is not divine. It is not even good or right. It is unholy because it selfishly destroys many helpless human lives just as it de- stroys yours and mine, and turns to ashes the loves of men and women. Comfort to some weak souls it may bring in re- ward to their deference to its fables. [26] A WOMAN'S HEART But the comfort it might give, and the happiness! Its spiritual consolations might be greater if its merciless laws and dogmatism were wiped away for ever. You might be my husband and still carry hope to the sick, aid to the orphans, cheer to the discouraged, help to the stumbling and fallen, and be the sweet, charitable adviser beloved of God and men. I do not say this in play. Tears are in my eyes and emptiness is gnawing my heart. It is the ache of a love that de- spairs of fulfilment which endeavours to realise that it has no place in the future hopes and plans of the one it adores. It aches all the time steadily, by day and by night. Because of it I cannot sleep. If I cannot sleep I cannot work. So the idleness of gnawing away my own heart and mind pinioned like the poor aider of men of Promethean legend, and preyed upon by a hunger and watching for some glimpse of you through the un- friendly foliage. Think of such hours. Now and then a little hope will start. [27] A WOMAN'S HEART But some frosty dogmatism of your utter- ance nips it before it has fairly burst the soil. Now they are singing the "Agnus Dei," and I am sitting by the window to hear your voice and thinking what the ele- ments are that bind you. Form is the main. That is clear. (There is your voice again. I could hear one word "domine." Sound of the people's kneel- ing and rising comes clearly, the air is so still.) And shall we be sacrificed to form, I say? My soul cries " No." Your rules change. This rule that separates us cannot exist. It must change. Then shall we be sacrificed? No. No. No. We shall suffer, as we said, if we forestall public opinion. But we shall be right, and I would rather be right than be pope. We shall have each other. The power that makes for righteousness shall be on our side, and with God's aid and yours I can carry any burden. But your rules do change. It was for- merly an unheard-of thing for a woman to [28] A WOMAN'S HEART sing in your churches because ecclesi- asts taught nasty things about women. In some countries the prejudice is almost as strong as against the marriage of priests. But of late years in how many of your churches have women been singing? Can you not, with the idea of God and his judgment, superior to any creed or petty ruling, or lip-worship, and with the tenderest and most loving care my heart can give can you not do what is right? Dearest, I ask this a thousand times. To see those qualities I find in you loved and honoured ! I cannot give you up. I have tried and I cannot. I will go anywhere- only let me have you. Ah, if you were not a priest, dear, if you knew women, you would know that the delay of a word is all the difference between light-heartedness and gaiety, depression and gloom. When I expect a letter and none comes, I cannot be happy. This morning the sun is at his shining, and the birds in their first spring [29] A WOMAN'S HEART songs. But joy of life is through a veil. The letter which you promised came not. Yet when I see you after such a time, all the agony and sharp remembrance of the agony fade at sight of your face and the happiness your presence brings. When I look about on all this rising tide of spring and ask myself what is the clearest and most beautiful expression of God the budding leaves and tender green of new foliage, the blossoming trees, the sly jacks standing in their pulpits down yonder shady ravine, the violets purpling the earth, "the naid-like lily of the vale," the liquid call of the oriole, the even-song of robins none of these is God's most loving voice and sign of pres- ence, but my very heart of hearts, which you are, that is the clearest and most beautiful word God has spoken. Thou art God's best message. My life began again when I met you. Until then I had been one with eyes and saw not, and with feeling and felt not. The day I first spoke to you there seemed [30] A WOMAN'S HEART a dawning of a new life, a resurrection of things of another life, a renewal of vital force within me. I lived, but with a new spirit. Whenever I hear the music from your church I listen, and wonder if you are there, and hold my head towards it, and endeavour to discover from the sounds whether it is your voice save when you are away, and then I pass hastily saying: " It is the funeral mass of some poor soul ; or mayhap some saint's day." The music is sweeter at vespers when you are there, the rites seem actually holy and God is present in body if God can be anywhere in body. But the body I see is your body, and it is the God in you I adore. But why do you repeat the "Hail Mary" so many times? Jesus said, " Beware of vain repetition." If the spirit of the mother of Jesus is not hard-hearted, or deaf, or inattentive, she must have heard one heart-felt supplication, or two [31] A WOMAN'S HEART or three at most. What fortune, then, in repeating the same word thirty times ? Is it not "vain repetition" ? If not, what sort of repetition is it ? Such rhythmic repetition has its effects. It lulls the mind like a cradle song. It is a cradle song as perhaps the church knows. It hypnotises. It magnetises the poor, tired, untrained minds that make up the mass of your hearers. It produces curious mental phases. I have never yet seen a Catholic who did not impress me as suffering atrophy of certain of the mental faculties. The wide-awakeness, alertness, individual energy of the Acatho- lics is replaced by a sort of intellectual somnolence, which, I suppose, is induced by repetitions and hypnotising ceremo- nial, and reliance upon authority. As to the converts of which you yester- day spoke, they are, here in America, like those your church makes in Rome of Anglo-Saxon stock I speak few other than the intellectually maimed, halt, and [32] A WOMAN'S HEART blind. Do you think that with the Irish and Italians coming from Europe, and the French Canadians immigrating from the north, your church will gain a great part of our teeming country ? New Eng- land rocks and their scant attrition would be hardly a fat or fertile setting for your unctuous ceremonial, or the weak con- victions and characterless masses its prev- alence brings forth. What a replacing of the granitic character of the Puritans! and the simple truth of the early Dutch! But so in numbers it is impending. After moral elevation has builded, eccle- siasticism comes to reap the riches of plain living and high thinking foreign priests and French nuns and, under the azure depths of Kentucky, that absurd old fan- tasy, a silent monastery. We have be- come a rich country. Priestcraft thrives best where luxury gives ground to pride and superstition and ignorance and poverty. With luxury ecclesiastical graft becomes easy. Seeing this is a difficult thing to a real American. For it means 3 [33] A WOMAN^S HEART the disintegration of our dearest founda- tions. If we had not builded a great Puritan nation, and grown strong and rich and opulent, priests would not be flocking and multiplying here and putting in a drivelling claim about "first possession." First possession! Aside from a few French in the age of faith, they waited till ease and riches were at hand. Those jeers at the Puritans which your colleagues are so fond of making they are ungrateful. If it had not been for Puritan self-sacrifice, Puritan tenacity, Puritan moral elevation, you would not find a home in the country to-day. The Puritans strove for Liberty liberty to think accord- ing to their conscience, liberty to speak out their thoughts, liberty of self-expression, liberty to love liberty. They produced some of the greatest peoples, some of the greatest government, some of the great- est conduct in the private affairs of life, some of the greatest poetry, some of the greatest prose of the world, and the moral [34] A WOMAN'S HEART impulse they fought and died for has come to be one of the great possessions of mankind for all time and for all lands. If in times of peace they used force to keep out aliens whom they judged fatal to their community interests, it was the force that an unarmed husbandman takes at sight of some seemingly evil creature. The tools they used, remember, were the simplest inventions of the ecclesiastical ingenuity of your Inquisition. To me the Puritans and their works are one of the noblest expressions of our human race in its struggle with supersti- tion and the diabolism of priestcraft. No people but the Jews has shown a greater religious emotion, and none has surpassed them in a living sense of the moral law. Catholicism is the religion that will supervene in America after the dry rot has seized upon the energies of the people- never before. It is the religion of disap- pointed hopes and ambition for the laity. Its priesthood teaches content with narrow limitations by imposing them, and [35] A WOMAN'S HEART endeavours to make up for a lack of worldly goods among its supporting peo- ples by spectacular display and theatrical pomp the priests being the chief actors. Not long ago one of your archbishops crowned an image of "Our Lady of Mount Carmel" in a park in New York named after Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson, heaven save the mark! Two hundred priests, "monsignori " (supposedly thinking men) and acolytes followed the statue and led thousands of Italians. The crown was of pure gold and set with many gems, some of which were given by the pope. How nauseating! And within a stone's throw of the whole fanfare were housed people in need of the simplest elements of decent living. " Men die of many dis- eases," said Sir Leslie Stephen, "creeds of only one, that of being found out.'* What an incongruity in an American landscape is a priest in cassock and berretta! The idea that he cannot be a true American citizen is a right one. [36] A WOMAN'S HEART At its core, it is as true now as when Landor wrote, "The popish priesthood by its institutions, its interests and its vows must always be opposed to the civil magistrate." Any man with genuine in- dependence of spirit, loyalty to right and truth and belief in human dignity and hard-headedness which are unfailing sig- nets of the American spirit whether in 1776 or in these days any man with these great possessions could not pros- trate himself prone on his forehead, as your ecclesiasticism forces her priests to fall before her. His manhood would not permit the servile act. Its very hideous resignation of manly self, its abrogation of free acts, its subordination of all direc- tions and tendencies of thought and feel- ing to the powers over in Italian Rome- think of the spirit of 1776 thus denying its human rights. So it is I say that no genuine American, no man filled with the spirit that incited, founded and built up our commonwealth of these United States could ever become [37] A WOMAN'S HEART a Catholic priest. "The Roman Catho- lics have always claimed to be independ- ent of all governments, and to use all governments for their own purposes." The Catholic Church must grow to Americanism, dear heart, if it would here endure. Some day American priests will become too independent to refer to Rome. It is inevitable. There will be no St. Peter's chair. Shall our lives be marred ruined by passing tradition or strengthened by everlasting truth? which erat in prin- cipio, et nunc, et semper et in ssecula sseculorum. [38] V. And the poor Pope was sure it must be so, Else wherefore did the people kiss his toe ? The subtle Jesuit cardinal shook his head, And mildly looked and said, It mattered not a jot Whether the thing, indeed, were so or not; Religion must be kept up, and the Church preserved, And for the people this best served. And then he turned, and added most demurely, 'Whatever may befall, We Catholics need no evidence at all, The holy father is infallible, surely!' *****###:;: And dignitaries of the Church came by. It had been worth to some of them, they said, Some hundred thousand pounds a year a head. If it fetched so much in the market, truly, 'Twas not a thing to be given up unduly. ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH. Bur you will not be a slave to your past. It is wrong, dear heart, "an abuse," as [39] A WOMAN'S HEART Catholics say. You will not sacrifice your life and mine to an abuse. And we shall be married ? Some day, very soon ? I cannot live without you I do not want to live. You shall not fear to fall back in the old way. I shall be with you ; and if by-and-by I must die and be lost to you, there will be the memory of our brave struggle in your heart. If the dead live again I shall be near you in spirit always. Is it so? All the rest would weigh as thistle-down compared with your love for me? Dearest heart, is it only your faith, adherence to authority and to child- ish ideas and ideals, that hold you ? And you believe in and trust them so implic- itly? I have said about them what I could of faithlessness. I have laughed at customs and usages, made for other gen- erations and centuries, and you have been angry. Showing the sawdust in your doll was sad work to both of us. If you could accept ideas of growth! Now there is the church that is my fin- ger, yes, the finger for the wedding-ring [40] A WOMAN'S HEART see from what manners of a simple- minded peasantry on the shores of Gali- ilee the ponderous ceremonial and bar- barous pomp of the Vatican have grown! Think of the simplicity and beauty of life of those early Christian communists. Under a mothering sky and upon a soil that shot forth harvests sometimes of a hundredfold, and blown upon by winds that nurtured the grape and olive with half the humanity that stirs the hardest hearts of our century, we should have girded up our garments and climbed over the rocky cliffs of Tiberius and bent in reverence before the teacher. How the native grace of Jesus, increased by years of thought and study, must have yearned for a companionship more alert and open than the peasants about him could bring ! Perhaps their very condition was the reason of his accenting their work for their own souls, and so little for the souls of others. It is all simple and calm and natural when you drop the unhealthiness of super- [41] A WOMAN'S HEART naturalism and look only to the direct teaching of a master. Then we have righteousness and the natural religious emotion that stirs in every heart. Nothing there absurdly contradictory to all facts and experiences of life. And we have no more a very human institution claiming divinity by reason of its long duration, protracted life and vitality and factitious vigour; and again life by reason of its divinity. How else should your church have sur- vived the irruption of the northern hordes in Italy ? the dark ages ? mediaeval- ism? Why should it not have survived? What power of half the material force opposed it ? Of its age ? there are older institutions which you do not believe to be divine. Of its divinity think of the effectless work of some of its deep- thoughted reformers. Remember Arius, Rienzi, Wycliife and many an English- man of Wycliffe's time, Savonarola, So- cinus. And then, "A divine institution ought to convince the minds of men by [421 A WOMAN'S HEART its inherent quality of truth, ought it not?" says Balzac. Morever, was there not at the very core the inspiring dicta of Jesus ? These were the principles of truth, of soul beauty, that worked its survival in its shock with the strong men of the north. They were the divine sparks of saving grace. Deep within, its soil was rational. Like all else founded in truth, it grew and increased in spite of devices and the deforming fig- ments superstition wrought. But the assertion regarding the devel- opment of the church and its hold upon civilization that surely does not deter- mine its divinity. -It does? Does, then, the development and influence of some other thing, or the generation of a new idea which you would not call divine ? Take any instance. The use of steam made over our material life and greatly advanced our development. Is it logical to conclude, therefore, that the birth of the idea of the use, whether in the brain of the French scientists or the English [43] A WOMAN'S HEART workmen, came about through the ex- traordinary acts of infinite and eternal power ? Does it not rather enhance your conception of mankind to know that by human reason, human patience, human ingenuity, skill, experiment and learning, the value and force of superheated water as a motor power were brought forth ? In the moral world are the men who better human conditions by the steadfast teaching of better things are they any more the children of God, any nearer God in nativity than you and I ? Were the authors, for instance, of "The Rights of Man" nearer? Are the advocates and leaders of a juster and completer social order more divine ? Of this question of the divinity of the church, her course in history is a suffi- cient negation. We need go back very little to learn. In France within the nine- teenth century, when the opportunity for alliance with civil liberty offered, when Lamennais, Lacordaire, Montalembert led the way, when progressive democracy [44] A WOMAN'S HEART was in the air, the church turned upon political liberty, and coquetting with Louis Napoleon became finally his not too reputable thrall. In writers of your faith I find these facts. Was such action precisely divine ? The church has had long life because of its precepts of love, sympathy and hu- man helpfulness hidden in its mummeries, because of its vast material riches and the superstition it nurses in its peoples. Buddhism has had a longer life for like reasons. Here in America the church perhaps because of its smaller power has done better than in France. So far it has made semblance of the idea of civil lib- erty. Democracy it now proclaims the church's own child "an earnest effort to realise in society the unity of the race, hu- man brotherhood, and the natural equal- ity of all men, asserted in the Incarnation and Redemption." This social condition the church condemned and anathematised until its strength and liberty afforded [45] A WOMAN'S HEART opportunity for the church's workings. Certain social tendencies which it now rejects, forbids, and calls bad names, after their ultimate adoption and a few gen- erations have passed, it will proclaim if the church still exists as at one with itself, taught and practised by the early Christians and "asserted in the Incarna- tion and Redemption." Time and again in the progress of the human race it has played this little com- edy. The fallibility of it is evaded by the formulae of ecclesia gubernans and eccle- sia docens. In this case it is a question of morals and the infallible ecclesia docens which errs. Real liberty, dear heart, the church knows not. Its clergy are still its bonded slaves. How? Not to mention more important instances, in the celibacy it entails, "the bulwark of the church," which arose from an imagination steeped in supernaturalism and monstrous con- ceptions of women. Moreover, it makes a priest in every way a slave, an involuntary servitor, to [46] - A WOMAN'S HEART his past, to his vows taken at an early age in ignorance and inexperience of himself and the world. What does the youthful seminarian know of what God shall dic- tate to him in the coming years, and his own being and growth demand ? And if he breaks away from the priesthood, what possibilities of life, or bread-win- ning, or avocation are his ? He is ostra- cised and stigmatised by all his former comrades and co-religionists, and their contempt breeds distrust in others. He must always be consistent with himself? To be true to his real self he must be in- consistent. Ah, yes, look at the root in- con-sto. It is moving with and accommo- dating one's self to forces and agencies, few of which can be foreseen. It is seizing upon and using all that can be turned to good. And the youthful seminarian is taught a regard for formals and externals mainly for externals. It is by exter- nals, by sensuous rituals and ceremonies that the credulity and reverence of the ignorant many are appealed to, and the [47] A WOMAN'S HEART aesthetic instincts of the few are tickled and made potential in the growth of their religious emotion. [48] VI. An amor dolor sit, An dolor amor sit, Utrumque nescio; Hoc unum sentio, Jucundus dolor est, Si dolor amor est. BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX. OH, it is well that we are surrounded, held in check by conventional trammels. Otherwise I know not what we might do. If restraints were not great about me I should give myself wholly to you to make or to mar. I should leave all, go to you, give myself to be merged in you body and soul. I should have no power of with- standing. Something greater than I bids me follow now. But there is your envi- ronment and I am "saved." Say rather maimed for life two of us, your life and 4 [49] A WOMAN'S HEART mine made desolate. Look at the loves, the ephemeral which are united and ours which is eternal made a cruel deso- lation. Does not your faith in things that are, cry to heaven ? God never meant it so. I said to a woman to-day that of those I had met, you, the most simple, direct, and ingenuous of all, modest to a fault, you had influenced my life the most, that you had given its current calm- ness and clarity. She is a worldly woman and was once a Catholic. She raised her eyebrows. I added that I could look back and see the change, and that I could kiss the hem of your garment for all you had brought me. Men say you are unaffected and in- genuous. They never say you are wise. And yet you have taught me more than all the poets and philosophers and his- torians, for you have taught me what love is, how it can make life glorious and clothe the commonest and meanest thing in sanctified light. For is not the very [50] A WOMAN'S HEART wafer you bless precious to my eyes ? And of all the throng in yonder city there is but one whose look, whose thought, whose wish, whose admiration, whose touch I value. All others are automata. Their motion, talk, and concourse are phantasmagoria. I am all the time look- ing beyond them and stretching my neck for a glimpse of You the Everlasting. There is about our love such a tender- ness, devotion, holiness such absence of querulous complainings, puny esti- mates, and deference to conventional nar- rowness that I am sure it must live out of pure largeness and cleanness of spirit. But love loves to be with what it loves. This law at times leads my great love for you to try to leap the fence ecclesiasticism has built about you and gain the com- panionship it hungers for. Sometimes it forgets for a moment the last repulse your last exposition of your dogmas and the answers I write you. Again I say love is a strange creature [51] A WOMAN'S HEART that must be constantly assured of the existence of its other half. It swoons if not fed on repetitious sweet. A week passes and you do not come to say "I love you." Then I am utterly miserable. My heart is heavy and I walk the floor. But you come, and look into my eyes, and take my hand, and I ask with gath- ering tears, "Do you care for me?" "Love, yes," you answer, drawing me towards you. That moment I think I shall never doubt again. But again in a long separation the same empty ache be- gins. I must have you near or be miser- able. Three times this morning I saw you as you hurriedly walked to the church in cassock, cloak, and berretta at nine o'clock; when you went to intone the half -past ten o'clock mass ; and last when you came in through the December rain to your twelve o'clock breakfast. "Poor faint priestling," I said to myself, "how he abuses his poor body, all for a lit- tle superstitious observance!" At times [521 A WOMAN'S HEART when I see you with long cloak floating behind as you walk under the elms to the church, comes a great wish to be one of those to whom your doctrines bring com- fort although your creed would to my mind be intellectual opium rather than courageous, clear-eyed faith and practice. If I were a Catholic what work would the church find for me to do ? Would it give hearty support and co-operation to founding and equipping a woman's col- lege, Catholic inasmuch as its religious observances should be Catholic ? I do not mean a high school, whose most excellent virtue is mediocrity, but a college with aims and ideals in the training and edu- cation of women, and in opportunities for carrying study beyond any women's col- lege now established. Singular it is that the Catholics have not caught up the spirit of the education of women which has become so supreme among us Ameri- cans. You plead that the church is now too poor for such accomplishment. That [53] A WOMAN'S HEART cannot be the real reason. The church has money to found colleges for men; and to build vast cathedrals. Why they do not for women is found in the church's and priests' estimate of women. But the woman's cause is man's. What a force in disintegrating so-called preju- dices, and what power of attraction such a college generously conducted would be! There is a conviction abroad in the land that the priests will not educate Catholic women because they know their power is co-extensive with the women's igno- rance and subordination. This idea of a college for women, and of superior grade, is not fanfare. About it I have of late thought much. Looking at it considerately helps one to see the enormous difficulties one would have to overcome, and the almost martyrdom one would suffer who had the movement in hand. It would mean the conversion of a majority of the Catholics to estimates of women's dignity. When I say, "If I were a Catholic," do [54] A WOMAN'S HEART not think that the pleasure of upbuilding a women's college could change my faith contrary to my convictions. But at times the question seems to be only into what terms we shall translate life its sen- sations, experiences, and conceptions; whether the scientific and truth-seeking, or the discursively imaginative and ficti- tious. Even with your submergence, do you not ever hesitate and question if the socialists may not be right in their prop- agandism? the goodness of human na- ture and the beneficence to society and the individual of his total expression, rather than the old theological doctrine of the inherent evil of ourselves and the need of its suppression and extirpation through asceticism ? But in all this ques- tion of college foundation of one thing I am convinced not far away is an hour when the Catholic Church will be forced to supply, in order to hold its own, some poor substitute at least of what I have hinted at. [55] VIL Quhilk was not words and babling vaine, Bot words with knawledge joynd certaine: Quhilk in her life she did expresse, By doing as shee did professe. JOHN DAVIDSON. IN his "Apologia pro Vita Sua" Newman shows the poorness of his spirit in telling how he dwelt upon dogmatic differences, and hinged the salvation of his soul upon such divergence. Why, instead, did he not brood over the hungry, wretched hovel-dwellers in his country, and base his salvation on saving their souls and bodies ? Men are ever more and more uniting the conceptions of God and of Law in this they are approaching with upward motion the stand of the dramas of Soph- ocles. Those ancient poetic expressions of the modern scientific idea are the sub- [56] A WOMAN'S HEART limest word of God-ruling or Law-ruling whichever you will the sublimest word of the modern scientific idea that Law is "the order of the whole re- garded as a process of unerringly un- folded energy," as Symonds says, and God as "that same order contemplated by human thought as its essence mind- determined." When I see the Catholic Church ruling millions, I cannot help crying, "Alas, what is man!" I sit and gaze at your church, your school, and I am filled with wonder that enough of our kind can be found to build and maintain them. Over our broad country the houses they are putting up to what use will they be put when the descendants of the builders become thoroughly Americanised? Will the church meet them half way, accom- modate itself to them, and teach religion in a purer form? Or will it dogmatise, Romanise, papalise, ultramontagnise un- til its adherents who have mental inde- pendence fall away ? [57] A WOMAN'S HEART To explain this madness of the build- ers would be easier if yours were the only like institution in the world. You might with solitary example claim special and divine sanction and protection. But there are other religions just as rich richer; just as old older; just as blessed with stupefying ceremonial, dogmatic theolo- gies, sacerdotal exclusiveness, self-vaunt- ing tradition, and deadness to scientific cleanliness monasteries, holy orders, miracles, saints, and shrines. You find them in India, in Thibet, in China. Con- sider this. But you will take refuge in the assertion that God sent the false forms to make way for your true. A most infamous God! so to mislead bil- lions of human finite creatures, if that were his game. I How can they call themselves "Catho- lic," that word meaning universal, and yet nurse so narrow a church prejudice that they avoid as far as possible social intercourse with those who do not believe [58] A WOMAN'S HEART their dogmata? The Catholic laity even attack priests if, forsooth, they associate with non-Catholics. Among Christians, Protestantism is the religion of action to do to achieve to accomplish; Ca- tholicism the religion of contemplation, inaction, unachieving, dreaming life away and submitting, ever submitting. George Moore has said this in stronger fashion. "Protestantism is strong, clean, and west- ernly, Catholicism is eunuch-like, dirty, and Oriental. . . . Yes, Oriental; there is something even Chinese about it. What made England great was Protest- antism, and when she ceases to be Prot- estant she will fall. . . . Look at the nations that have clung to Catholicism, starving moonlighters and starving brig- ands. The Protestant flag floats on every ocean breeze, the Catholic banner hangs limp in the incense silence of the Vatican. Let us be Protestant and revere Crom- well." But God is preparing a mighty ven- geance. "Here," say your powers, "to [59] A WOMAN ; S HEART this great, teeming, generous, receptive America we shall flee for refuge, and there shall we build better than in our seventy years of Babylonian Avignon." Time and occasion answer with Mc- Glynns and other recalcitrants in the first quarter century. "I defy the malig- nity of Rome," said Dr. McGlynn in 1888. "I give them warning now that if they attempt to hound me with the arts of which they are such masters, I will expose them. I have only told things which politicians and well-informed peo- ple have known in the past, but I give them warning that I am full of knowl- edge of events, the tale of which will make the country too hot to hold them. They had better let me alone." Such men are amalgams of America and Rome. How does it work? Is it a success ? Sweetheart, your dear letter of "one and a half lines" here as I got home just now. All the way I was dreaming and [60] A WOMAN'S HEART saying, "How can I make him know he is the world to me?" Oh, my very life, if you could only see me as I am your- self as you are our love as it is and should be in the future. To-night has much to be said. Shall we ever, even in an eternity, tell what we would ? Shall we ever come to an end by "the golden bar of Heaven" ? It is long since the sentence from your lips, "Yes, I must see you again this week." My heart echoed the words, and Thursday morning I loitered, hoping to take the same train with you. Friday afternoon I watched for you an hour, and Saturday morning and afternoon an hour each in waiting. Sunday night I said to my heart, " Certainly he will come." This is a bit of the external history of my thought for you since you were here. This terrible strain with week after week of mind revolving on the same momen- tous question, of devising ways and means only to have them torn from me [61] A WOMAN'S HEART is it all to be for naught? Shall I lose you at last ? Why do I persist ? I do not know except because you are my life. I know it and I feel it every moment. There is no escape. This love means my destruction unless you see broadly and love deeply. I cannot leave you. I fly to you from whatever quarter, as the moth flies to the candle. It is the old likeness but the true one, and I am singed and burned and bruised and lie worn and exhausted where I have fallen near you. You say you do wrong to care for me, or say you love me that you are already married, and to the church, and made your vows to her long ago. If you love me it is right to say so. God would not have given you this single love if it had not been right. You confess it broadens and clarifies your thought and feelings your estimate of life. Then it cannot be bad. Give a writ of divorce to your present spouse. Your ecclesiastical court will not [62] A WOMAN'S HEART do it for you. Then take it into your own hands for yourself. Follow the cus- tom of Rome, of a Rome more ancient but of a paganism similar to your twen- tieth century, renovated city's. Go back to the habit that pertained in ancient time of putting away your wife and tak- ing another. Leave the church, my very soul, and marry me. It is a horrible oc- topus gigans you are serving, which every year catches hundreds of men in its ter- rible suckers and you above all. I hate it. I hate a monstrosity that forces men to lead unnatural lives, and hence im- moral lives. And it keeps you from me. It is now half-past three this Friday morning, and with hour after hour of sleeplessness upon eyelids I sit here in the cool air to say once more that I think ever of you with the same strong love. This night I have turned in mind again and again the whole tragedy of our meet- ing. I have thought what you have done and said through these shuffling months [63] A WOMAN'S HEART and years. How can I make you see that our love, if rightly followed, is the best of your life and mine? that it is your and my right life. If you had been here these last two hours I know I could have made you see it I have felt so strongly the desire to show it to you. But now I am too exhausted to write out the thinking. And this coming day will pass as hun- dreds of days have sped. And you will be driven by an infinitude of little masters; and I shall be drowned in care and anx- ieties which press grievously. And all that has been throbbing in my poor head will be as the works of the Pharaohs are. I looked at my watch at half -past twelve and said, "Is he talking with his friends now?" I have been to the dining-room for bread, and I am going to ask your aid to sleep. Come, be near me. Press my hand and kiss my forehead. tQ