A Home Art; or, Mothers and Daughters.

Know your own work, and do it.

This is a simple sounding rule, but we all find practical difficulties in following it. You have most of you lately left school, and I think the difficulty of the first part of this saying must have struck some of you. At school you knew your own work,—you had a certain time-table, you walked with the crutches of routine; and when you left school and found your day mostly at your own disposal, you learnt that a free life is far more difficult, and therefore far nobler, than a life under direction.

It was pleasant at first to be able to carry out your own fancies, but you awoke after a while to the fact that you were not spending holidays but living your real life; and then the thought must have come, if you had any stuff in you, "I must anyhow live my life; am I living it nobly?"

How can you live a noble life? Bacon gives us, perhaps, the best answer when he says that "the end of all learning should be the Glory of God and the Relief of Man\'s Estate." Shall this be the result of your school learning? Others can speak to you from experience, as I cannot, of the glory and happiness of a life spent in the Relief of Man\'s Estate: I would speak to you of a preliminary stage of work for that relief, of some of the difficulties which beset girls on first leaving school, and owing to which so much noble aspiration and unselfish enthusiasm run to waste.

I believe one of the main difficulties is friction at home; a difficulty on which I the rather dwell because it is harder, for those who know you personally, to speak of it without irritating you, or else criticizing your home. How is this home difficulty met? Some meet it by leaving home,—which reminds me of the minister who said in his sermon, "This is a serious difficulty in our belief, my brethren; let us look it boldly in the face,—and pass it by." Some lay themselves open to Punch\'s attack, when he depicts a girl saying, "Mamma has become quite blind now, and papa is paralytic, and it makes the house so dull that I\'m going to be a hospital nurse."

Many who are too clear-sighted to neglect home duties, yet leave this difficulty unfaced, in that they look for all the pleasure of their life outside home, and within that home allow themselves to live in an atmosphere of friction and peevishness. The girl who does that has left the riddle of home life unsolved: she was meant to wrestle with that difficulty till she wrung from it the blessing, the peace which comes only from self-conquest and acceptance of all the circumstances of her life.

Have any of you the lurking thought, "I was born by no choice of my own: those who brought me into the world owe duty to me, not I to them?" I have known some say this, and I have known many act as if they thought it, and I have known some who felt as if God had better work for them to do outside home, and have either gone off to do it, or have chafed against life because they could not go. It does seem to me that the present very general eclipse of the old Roman virtue of filial piety lies at the root of much of the unsound work, and of the undone work, of the present day.

Know your own work, and do it. What is your work on leaving school? Is it not to learn to fit into your home? At school, when you got your remove, your duty was to get into the work of the new form, and to do it. You have now been moved to higher and far more difficult work than any sixth form, you are in the school of home. Are you learning its lessons, or are you fretting for a remove? It may be you find life so easy and pleasant at home that you feel any talk of its difficulties does not apply to you; it is all play so far. But I know so many who feel this friction on leaving school, that I am sure it must be the case with some of you.

If any here fail to feel the debt they owe at home—the debt which God enforced as next to the debt owed to Himself—let me remind them that the whole instinct of mankind has responded to the appeal of parents; filial piety has always been reverenced and held beautiful, and the hereditary sense of mankind must be taken into account in deciding what is, or is not, a virtue. But supposing I granted, for the sake of argument, that the original debt was on your parents\' side and not on yours, what then? You remain as bound as ever to show them submission and devotion; all, in short, that the old-fashioned believers in the Fifth Commandment thought to be due from a daughter. If you are striving after a noble life you must give all this,—if you owe allegiance to either the Christian ideal of love or to the Pagan one of strength. "If a man love not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God Whom he hath not seen?" and, equally, if he love not his brother close at hand, how can he love brethren afar off? It is a poor sort of love which lavishes itself on self-chosen and, therefore, less irritating objects of charity, and is powerless to influence the home atmosphere. It is a poor sort of strength which shrinks from the hardest fight, from the conquest of self at home.

Is not every right and wise piece of good work for others an attempt to help them to train themselves to live a higher life? And can we dare to put our hand to this plough while neglecting our own training?

I was asked to speak to you about WORK, and you may think I am forgetting this in dwelling on home life. Not at all; I am looking on home life not as an end in itself, but as God\'s great training-school for His best workers; as the special place for the development of those qualities which are essential to all true and lasting work for "the Relief of Man\'s Estate."

I do not think I underrate the difficulties girls find; quite apart from her own faults and weaknesses, a girl who leaves school and goes home has probably three difficulties to contend with.

First, the change from restraint to liberty, which is a difficult phase in every life. Will you make it a change from "the rich bounties of constraint" to self-restraint, which is better still; or will you let it be a change to the weak lawlessness of a drifting life? If you would respect yourselves, and be worthy to take part in the great battle between good and evil, make and keep some rules for yourselves. Have a rule about getting up in the morning and (almost equally important) about going to bed at night; a rule against novels in the morning; a rule to read something sensible every day. Make what rule you please, only keep it, or you will never be more than a cumberer of the ground. Reading is the best thing to save your life from being eaten away by trifles. The best advisers say to a man taking a country living, "Read, read, read;" I say to you, read doggedly; the snare of a free life is desultory reading. Make any plan of stiff reading you like, and stick to it for one year, writing out notes of what you read, and you will be fitter for real work if it comes, as come it will.

I dare say you find reading is cold work,—very few women really enjoy knowledge for its own sake,—you are tempted to throw it up, and to drift in an easy good-tempered way, which pleases the others much more than your shutting yourself up to read. And the others are quite right in expecting you, now school is over, to be a woman, "with a heart at leisure from itself" and from self-improvement. One of the hardest home lessons for some girls to learn is the power of sitting idle and chatting. They feel it waste of time; they long to be doing something tangible; and yet a home atmosphere is mainly the result of the mother having acquired the art of leisure. You will be very unrestful house-mothers when your turn comes, and very unsatisfactory daughters and sisters in the mean time, if you are always at high pressure, and giving your family to understand that you must not be spoken to!

Too often the girl, who by dint of conscientious struggles keeps up real study, gets out of touch with her surroundings, and sees the stream of family confidences, and affections, and appeals for help and sympathy flowing towards the easy-going sister, who makes no struggles of any kind. Your great wish is to be a true woman, "with continual comfort in her face." Are your books, and your self-discipline, and your time-table, only a hindrance to this? Must you starve either head or heart? Why cannot you seem outwardly at leisure, and yet live an inner life of thought and work? It needs self-denial, forethought, economy of time, and that most Christian grace of tact; but these are all attainable, all part of that Wisdom which "orders all things sweetly and strongly," and which is the rightful heritage of every true woman. Let no delusion about a............