Women -- England -- History; Women -- Great Britain -- History
such a situation of time and place, and in her prime of life, being
about forty-four."
Such were the circumstances attending the last appearance of Margaret
Woffington, who, notwithstanding she died in the prime of life at the
age of forty-seven, had been for twenty-seven years the delight of the
play-going public. The three years she lingered as a mere skeleton of
her former self were spent in trying to awaken the consciences of her
late theatrical associates. Some of these scouted her new spirit as
hypocrisy, and insinuated that religion was her recourse only when
beauty and spirits had been lost. But the One who judgeth the
secrets of men's hearts is not so uncharitable in His judgment of His
creatures. It may be believed that the influence which she received
from the chapel meetings of John Wesley was the beginning of a genuine
religious life and character, and that it brought from her Maker that
commendation which was ungenerously denied her by her associates.
These brief sketches of the lives of some of the daughters of Scotland
and of Ireland illustrate the principal characteristics of the women
of the Scotch-Irish race. Among all the nations of the world no
women hold as high a place for pure morals and high courage. The
spiritualizing effect of the profound religious feeling of these
people--although in the form of their religious faith the Scotch and
the Irish are for the most part so diametrically different--accounts
in a large measure for their conservation of the facts and forces of
the religious life. The soil of both Ireland and Scotland was bedewed
for centuries with the tears of affliction and of persecution; the
blood of martyrs who cheerfully laid down their lives at the dictates
of religion and that highest social expression of the religious
instinct, the noblest piety of the human race--patriotism. Out of
all the oppression, rapacity, confiscation, which the two peoples
experienced in different forms and different degrees, arose an
unworldly ideal, a sense of the invisible realm. The sturdy Calvinist
matron of the Scottish Highlands is no more religious, no more the
product of the travails of her country, no more under the inspiration
and exaltation of high principle, than her less fortunately placed
sister of the Green Isle, whose religion is at the opposite extreme of
the forms of Christian faith. The women of both peoples can point
with tearful joy to the history of their sex as a scroll of fame and a
record of noble achievement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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