LITMIR.BIZ

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a good deal of an imbroglio, and you see with it all how he comes to be glad that I have a turn for letter-writing and can keep you informed of how we of the interior go on. My business in it all is to keep a quiet, peaceable, restful home, where he shall always have the enjoyment of seeing beautiful things and find everything going on nicely without having to think why, or how, or wherefore; and, besides this, to do every little odd and end for him that he is too tired or too busy to do; in short, I suppose some of the ambitious lady leaders of our time would call it playing second fiddle. Yes, that is it; but there must be second fiddles in an orchestra, and it's fortunate that I have precisely the talent for playing one, and my doctrine is that the second fiddle well played is quite as good as the first. What would the first be without it?

      After all, in this great fuss about the men's sphere and the women's, isn't the women's ordinary work just as important and great in its way? For, you see, it's what the men with all their greatness can't do, for the life of them. I can go a good deal further in Harry's sphere than he can in mine. I can judge about the merits of a translation from the French, or criticise an article or story, a great deal better than he can settle the difference between the effect of tucking and inserting in a dress, or of cherry and solferino in curtains. Harry appreciates a room prettily got up as well as any man, but how to get it up – all the shades of color and niceties of arrangement, the thousand little differences and agreements that go to it – he can't comprehend. So this man and woman question is just like the quarrel between the mountain and the squirrel in Emerson's poem, where "Bun" talks to the mountain:

      "If I am not so big as you,

      You're not so small as I,

      And not half so spry.

      If I cannot carry forests on my back,

      Neither can you crack a nut."

      I am quite satisfied that, first and last, I shall crack a good many nuts for Harry. Not that I am satisfied with a mere culinary or housekeeping excellence, or even an artistic and poetic skill in making home lovely; I do want a sense of something noble and sacred in life – something to satisfy a certain feeling of the heroic that always made me unhappy and disgusted with my aimless fashionable girl career. I always sympathized with Ida, and admired her because she had force enough to do something that she thought was going to make the world better. It is better to try and fail with such a purpose as hers than never to try at all; and in that point of view I sympathize with the whole woman movement, though I see no place for myself in it. But my religion, poor as it is, has always given this excitement to me: I never could see how one could profess to be a Christian at all and not live a heroic life – though I know I never have. When I hear in church of the "glorious company of the apostles," the "goodly fellowship of the prophets," the "noble army of martyrs," I have often such an uplift – and the tears come to my eyes, and then my life seems so poor and petty, so frittered away in trifles. Then the communion service of our church always impresses me as something so serious, so profound, that I have wondered how I dared go through with it; and it always made me melancholy and dissatisfied with myself. To offer one's soul and body and spirit to God a living sacrifice surely ought to mean something that should make one's life noble and heroic, yet somehow it didn't do so with mine.

      It was one thing that drew me to Harry, that he seemed to me an earnest, religious man, and I told him when we were first engaged that he must be my guide; but he said no, we must go hand in hand, and guide each other, and together we would try to find the better way. Harry is very good to me in being willing to go with me to my church. I told him I was weak in religion at any rate, and all my associations with good and holy things were with my church, and I really felt afraid to trust myself without them. I have tried going to his sort of services with him, but these extemporaneous prayers don't often help me. I find myself weighing and considering in my own mind whether that is what I really do feel or ask; and if one is judging or deciding one can't be praying at the same time. Now and then I hear a good man who so wraps me up in his sympathies, and breathes such a spirit of prayer as carries me without effort, and that is lovely; but it is so rare a gift! In general I long for the dear old prayers of my church, where my poor little naughty heart has learned the way and can go on with full consent without stopping to think.

      So Harry and I have settled on attending an Episcopal mission church in our part of the city. Its worshipers are mostly among the poor, and Harry thinks we might do good by going there. Our rector is a young Mr. St. John, a man as devoted as any of the primitive Christians. I never saw anybody go into work for others with more entire self-sacrifice. He has some property, and he supports himself and pays about half the expenses of the mission besides. All this excites Harry's respect, and he is willing to do himself and have me do all we can to help him. Both Alice and I, and my younger sisters, Angelique and Marie, have taken classes in his mission school, and the girls help every week in a sewing-school, and, so far as practical work is concerned, everything moves beautifully. But then, Mr. St. John is very high church and very stringent in his notions, and Harry, who is ultra-liberal, says he is good, but narrow; and so when they are together I am quite nervous about them. I want Mr. St. John to appear well to Harry, and I want Harry to please Mr. St. John. Harry is æsthetic and likes the church services, and is ready to go as far as anybody could ask in the way of interesting and beautiful rites and ceremonies, and he likes antiquities and all that, and so to a certain extent they get on nicely; but come to the question of church authority, and Lloyd Garrison and all the radicals are not more untamable. He gets quite wild, and frightens me lest dear Mr. St. John should think him an infidel. And, in fact, Harry has such a sort of latitudinarian way of hearing what all sorts of people have to say, and admitting bits of truth here and there in it, as sometimes makes me rather uneasy. He talks with these Darwinians and scientific men who have an easy sort of matter-of-course way of assuming that the Bible is nothing but an old curiosity-shop of by-gone literature, and is so tolerant in hearing all they have to say, that I quite burn to testify and stand up for my faith – if I knew enough to do it; but I really feel afraid to ask Mr. St. John to help me, because he is so set and solemn, and confines himself to announcing that thus and so is the voice of the church; and you see that don't help me to keep up my end with people that don't care for the church.

      But, Mother dear, isn't there some end to toleration; ought we Christians to sit by and hear all that is dearest and most sacred to us spoken of as a by-gone superstition, and smile assent on the ground that everybody must be free to express his opinions in good society? Now, for instance, there is this young Dr. Campbell, whom Harry is in treaty with for articles on the brain and nervous system – a nice, charming, agreeable fellow, and a perfect enthusiast in science, and has got so far that love or hatred or inspiration or heroism or religion is nothing in his view but what he calls "cerebration" – he is so lost and absorbed in cerebration and molecules, and all that sort of thing, that you feel all the time he is observing you to get facts about some of his theories as they do the poor mice and butterflies they experiment with.

      The other day he was talking, in his taking-for-granted, rapid way, about the absurdity of believing in prayer, when I stopped him squarely, and told him that he ought not to talk in that way; that to destroy faith in prayer was taking away about all the comfort that poor, sorrowful, oppressed people had. I said it was just like going through a hospital and pulling all the pillows from under the sick people's heads because there might be a more perfect scientific invention by and by, and that I thought it was cruel and hard-hearted to do it. He looked really astonished, and asked me if I believed in prayer. I told him our Saviour had said, "Ask, and ye shall receive," and I believed it. He seemed quite astonished at my zeal, and said he didn't suppose any really cultivated people now-a-days believed those things. I told him I believed everything that Jesus Christ said, and thought he knew more than all the philosophers, and that he said we had a Father that loved us and cared for us, even to the hairs of our heads, and that I shouldn't have courage to live if I didn't believe that. Harry says I did right to speak up as I did. Dr. Campbell don't seem to be offended with me, for he comes here more than ever. He is an interesting fellow, full of life and enthusiasm in his profession, and I like to hear him talk.

      But here I am, right in the debatable land between faith and no faith. On the part of a great many of the intelligent, good men whom Harry, for one reason or other, invites to our house, and wants me to be agreeable to, are all shades of opinion, of half faith, and no faith, and

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