The Abominations of Modern SocietyTalmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Religion
The Abominations of Modern Society
Talmage, T. De Witt (Thomas De Witt)
Conduct of life
But I am now to tell you that industry is just as important for
a woman's safety and happiness. The most unhappy women in our
communities to-day are those who have no engagements to call them up
in the morning; who, once having risen and breakfasted, lounge through
the dull forenoon in slippers down at the heel and with dishevelled
hair, reading George Sand's last novel; and who, having dragged
through a wretched forenoon and taken their afternoon sleep, and
having spent an hour and a half at their toilet, pick up their
card-case and go out to make calls; and who pass their evenings
waiting for somebody to come in and break up the monotony. Arabella
Stuart never was imprisoned in so dark a dungeon as that.
There is no happiness in an idle woman. It may be with hand, it may
be with brain, it may be with foot; but work she must, or be wretched
forever. The little girls of our families must be started with that
idea. The curse of our American society is that our young women are
taught that the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh,
tenth, fiftieth, thousandth thing in their life is to get somebody to
take care of them. Instead of that, the first lesson should be, how,
under God, they may take care of themselves. The simple fact is that
a majority of them do have to take care of themselves, and that, too,
after having, through the false notions of their parents, wasted the
years in which they ought to have learned how successfully to maintain
themselves. We now and here declare the inhumanity, cruelty, and
outrage of that father and mother, who pass their daughters into
womanhood, having given them no facility for earning their livelihood.
Madame de Staël said: "It is not these writings that I am proud of,
but the fact that I have facility in ten occupations, in any one of
which I could make a livelihood."
You say you have a fortune to leave them. O man and woman! have you
not learned that, like vultures, like hawks, like eagles, riches
have wings and fly away? Though you should be successful in leaving
a competency behind you, the trickery of executors may swamp it in
a night; or some elders or deacons of our churches may get up an
oil company, or some sort of religious enterprise sanctioned by the
church, and induce your orphans to put their money into a hole in
Venango County; and if, by the most skilful derricks, the sunken money
cannot be pumped up again, prove to them that it was eternally decreed
that that was the way they were to lose it, and that it went in the
most orthodox and heavenly style.
O the damnable schemes that professed Christians will engage in--until
God puts his fingers into the collar of the hypocrite's robe and rips
it clear down to the bottom!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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