Literary and General Lectures and EssaysKingsley, Charles
History
Literary and General Lectures and Essays
Kingsley, Charles
English literature -- History and criticism
politicians or the fixed ideas of the sage.
Such a course of history would quicken women's inborn _personal
interest_ in the actors of this life-drama, and be quickened by it in
return, as indeed it ought: for it is thus that God intended woman
to look instinctively at the world. Would to God that she would
teach us men to look at it thus likewise! Would to God that she
would in these days claim and fulfil to the uttermost her vocation as
the priestess of charity!--that woman's heart would help to deliver
man from bondage to his own tyrannous and all-too-exclusive brain--
from our idolatry of mere dead laws and printed books--from our daily
sin of looking at men, not as our struggling and suffering brothers,
but as mere symbols of certain formulae), incarnations of sets of
opinions, wheels in some iron liberty-grinding or Christianity-
spinning machine, which we miscall society, or civilisation, or,
worst misnomer of all, the Church!
This I take to be one of the highest aims of woman--to preach
charity, love, and brotherhood: but in this nineteenth century,
hunting everywhere for law and organisation, refusing loyalty to
anything which cannot range itself under its theories, she will never
get a hearing, till her knowledge of the past becomes more organised
and methodic. As it is now, for want of large many-sided views of
the past, her admiration is too apt to attach itself to some two or
three characters only in the hero-list of all the ages. Then comes
the temptation to thrust aside all which interferes with her
favourite idols, and so the very heart given her for universal
sympathy becomes the organ of an exclusive bigotry, and she who
should have taught man to love, too often only embitters his hate. I
claim, therefore, as necessary for the education of the future, that
woman should be initiated into the thoughts and feelings of her
countrymen in every age, from the wildest legends of the past to the
most palpable naturalism of the present; and that not merely in a
chronological order, sometimes not in chronological order at all; but
in a true spiritual sequence; that knowing the hearts of many, she
may in after life be able to comfort the hearts of all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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