Opportunity and Other Essays and Addresses

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Contents

Pagb

II. Woman AND THE Higher Education . 45

III. The University: a Nursery of the

II Youth should be awed, religiously possessed

"With a conviction of the power that waits

On knowledge when sincerely sought and prized

For its own sake, on glory and on praise

If but by labor won, and fit to endure

The passing day : should learn to put aside

Her trappings here, should strip them off abashed

Before antiquity and steadfast truth.

And strong bookmindedness ; and over all

A healthy sound simplicity should reign,

A seemly plainness, name it what you will,

Republican or pious.

Wordsworth.

AS we look back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the achievements with which it has been crowded thrill us with a sense of gratitude and wonder. In its hundred years man has made greater progress than in any preceding thousand. His control of nature seems now first to have begun. Steam and electricity have placed him in a new world

^ Address delivered under the auspices of the Auxiliary Board of Trinity College, at the Columbian University, Washington, D. C, January 16, 189^ where time and space lose half their tyrannous power. With utmost speed he flies over oceans and continents, delivering his precious wares in every part of the earth; the electric current writes his thought at the distance of thousands of miles; he holds conversation from city to city; his streets and houses are as luminous almost by night as by day. Photography places before the eyes of all whatever is worth seeing in any part of the world. Spectrum analysis reveals the relative heat and chemical constitution of the stars; the Rontgen rays make the opaque transparent, while the use of anaesthetics and antiseptics renders the most difficult surgical operations painless and free from risk. The eighteenth century has not a single discovery or invention which may be compared with any one of these. In the seventeenth we have the telescope and some rude beginning of the steam engine ; in the sixteenth nothing of the first importance ; in the fifteenth, the printing press, and in the twelfth the mariner's compass, which made possible the discovery of America. To find another invention of world-wide import we must go back to the mythical time when the alphabet and the Arabic numerals were first introduced and became the great instruments for the increase^ diffusion, and preservation of knowledge, or to a still remoter period when man first began to understand the uses of fire or the power of culture to cause wild grasses and shrubs to bear nutritious grain and delicious fruits.

But the progress of the nineteenth century has not been solely or chiefly material and practical. The advance in theoretical knowledge has been great enough to change the point of view from which we contemplate the heavens and the earth. The principle of the conservation of energy, of definite and multiple proportions in chemistry, and the theory of organic evolution have given us deeper insight into the laws which govern the universe. The discovery of the function of the cell in all vital processes, and of the part germs play in zymotic affections, has given us a truer knowledge of the conditions of health and of the means of prevention and cure of disease. Geology has rewritten the history of the earth; physiology has reconstructed the human body; philology has thrown light on the origin and growth of language, and sociology has explained the principles by which human aggreg:ates are upbuilt and destroyed.

But it is especially in the matter of education that the superiority of our age over all others is most manifest. In the past, knowledge was the privilege of the few, and the masses were ignorant; and hence the State was monarchical or aristocratic, even when the form of government was called democratic. By the beginning of the present century, however, a gradual movement, which has been in progress from the beginning of our era, whose origin, impulse, and abiding force were Christian, had brought the multitude to a perception of their rights and powers, and in consequence had sharpened the sense of the need of popular education. All, it was felt, should be taught, since all have duties to perform and rights to defend. The public opinion which demanded that education should be made universal was led by a logical necessity to ask that it be made free, and therefore that the schools be maintained by a system of taxation imposed by the State. The result is that illiteracy has almost disappeared from the great Christian nations, and that the average intelligence of the world has become much higher than it has hitherto ever been. The theory that the citizen needs instruction that he may properly fulfil his functions as a member of a free State is now merging into the wider view that man must be educated to be made rightly human; and thus the ideal of good citizenship is giving way to that of perfect manhood. Having built schools for all, we feel that our chief business

WOMAAT AND THE HIGHER EDUCATION 49

now is to improve them until they become nurseries of a richer, nobler, and more Godlike Ufe.

In considering this question, another superiority of our century — its chief glory perhaps — a splendor which falls on our own country more than on any other, is revealed — the position and the opportunities it has given to woman. The indelible stain on the page of history is the world's treatment of woman. Through the ages man had been unjust to man, cruel even, but woman seemed to be almost beyond the pale of humanity. She was his drudge, his slave, his chattel. She was a thing to be bought and sold, to be played with in idle hours, and for the rest to be immured in the twofold darkness of ignorance and confining walls.

The savage went wife-hunting as he hunted beasts of prey; the barbarian also captured his woman in war, or he bought her ; the civilized pagan was a polygamist, or looked on himself as wholly free from obligations of marital fidelity. Woman was the great outcast of the human race, and it would seem that only the coming of a god could have given her courage to hope for a better fate.

" She is an impudent animal," says Seneca, " and unless she has advanced in philosophical 4 knowledge and in various learning, she is cruel and incontinent." "Neither in woes nor in welcome prosperity," says iEschylus, "may I be associated with womankind." In the Hebrew Scriptures we have indeed a nobler view of woman's worth; it is, however, but a partial light. It was Christianity that gave the first impulse to the recognition of her dignity and mission. The Virgin Mother of Jesus was lifted up before the eyes of the world as an ideal ; women were the Master's most devoted disciples ; they were among the first and most enthusiastic converts the Apostolic preaching made ; and as mart>TS for the faith they met death with a constancy and heroism unsurpassed by their husbands and sons.

" What women these Christians have ! " exclaimed Libanius, the friend of Julian. It is on the womanly virtues that Christ seems to lay chief stress, as it is in propagating them that His religion has been most successful. Love, chastity, enthusiasm, devotion, self-surrender, and self-consecration to the highest aims, are woman's strength and glory, and in the exercise of these heavenly powers she has shown herself superior to man. The great renunciation, the supreme act whereby one turns from the superficial and animal self to the real self, whose world is unseen and permanent, the condition on which alone one can enter Christ's Kingdom, is easier for woman than for man. Unlike the philosophers, the divine Master appeals to the heart rather than to the head, and to such appeal woman more readily than man yields glad and spontaneous assent. What He asks first and last is that we be drawn to Him, that we love Him with a personal love, stronger than all earthly ties, and of such love woman is more capable than man. He first understood the heart of woman, and the divine words He spoke to her who dried with her hair the feet she had bathed in tears, lifted the whole sex to a higher and wider plane of life. Woman, who followed Him in life, who stood beneath His cross, who watched by His grave till she saw Him rise immortal, has ministered to Him with an undying devotion through all the centuries even until now, when at last she stands side by side with man, as mother, wife, and friend ; his equal, his counsellor, his inspirer, his guide and best defence.

The transformation has indeed been slow, as the whole upward movement of the race has been slow, but the force that has wrought the change is not machinery or trade or philosophy or science, but the Christian religion which consecrated purity and deified love.

The custom of ages, become a second nature, which led man to look upon woman as inferior because she had less muscular strength, was not easily overthrown, nay, it has not yet been wholly done away with; but the enlightened opinion of the world is no longer guided by physical standards in its estimate of human worth, and woman's delicacy of bodily structure, in ceasing to be a disgrace, has become the vesture and symbol of her spiritual excellence.

The Christian ideal is moral rather than intellectual. The followers of Christ find themselves in a school of religion and virtue, not in a school of philosophy. A pure and loving heart, yearning for peace and righteousness, is to be preferred to a mind curious for knowledge and busy with speculation about what is beyond man's reach. The childlike enter the kingdom of heaven. It is the home of the meek and humble. The world of the senses is transitory, is largely an unreal world; the soul's abiding dwelling is in the unseen, which is permanent and infinite, toward which it stretches the arms of faith, hope, and love. The rest is illusion of the senses, is vanity. The farthest vision of the mind can but show us that God loves the good. Do right and fear him — this is the whole of life.

It is but natural, then, that the Christian world should have turned its first thought and devoted its prime energy to moral culture. Nay, it is forever true that knowledge without virtue is worthless, that the science which does not make man better is as though it were nescience.

Let us therefore be patient as we watch the slow progress of the world in the things of the mind. In the end, few of us can know much, and all of us are called on to do much. Little learning is needed when the heart is right, and great learning will profit nothing if it be wrong.

Nevertheless, reason is man's highest attribute — it is what makes him man ; it is the power which gives meaning and value to all he hopes or loves or does. It is the immediate revelation of God in each soul ; the arbiter of conscience, the master-light of all our seeing, the fulcrum on which we rest to move the universe in the direction of divine and eternal purposes.

It is not the privilege of a few ; but all, if they be rightly educated, may be made capable of judging truly and discerning wisely ; and the public opinion which recognizes this principle in theory impels more and more to its actualization. In the primary and secondary schools throughout Christendom girls and boys are taught the same things, by the same methods, and with equal success ; but the inveterate prejudice which held woman to be mentally as well as physically inferior to man has not yet altogether or everywhere been overcome when there is question of the highest intellectual culture. The old sophisms have not wholly lost their persuasiveness, despite the marvellous progress in education made by woman, especially during the latter half of the present century.

It is still asserted that woman is incapable of serious mental training, and that the habits she forms in attempting to acquire the best education make her discontented with her proper work, unfit her to become wife and mother, take from her something of the sweetness, purity, and moral beauty which constitute her greatest charm, and on which the welfare of the race so largely depends. A learned woman still appears to some of us to be an abnormal being. We do not, of course, agree with F^nelon when he says that contact with learning would be almost as fatal to womanly delicacy as contact witl^ vice ; nor with Lessing in the opinion that the woman who thinks is as ridiculous as the man who puts on rouge ; but there are still many serious minds who are not without grave misgivings as to the result of the higher education of women. In reply to whatever doubts and objections of this kind, it is enough to say that the adversaries of the highest intellectual culture for women either do not understand what education is or do not believe in its divine efficacy. Education is

Simply the process whereby the powers which constitute a human being are strengthened, developed, and brought into act. If these endowments are good, education is good; and the best is best, whether for man or woman. What interests the one must interest the other ; what benefits the one must benefit the other. Women not less than men need strong and open minds, the capacity to form definite ideas and sound judgments, to deduce conclusions logically from premises, to weigh evidence and to estimate the value of proof. They, more than men even, may be helped if they are permitted to live in the high and serene worlds which the study of philosophy, poetry, history, and science will throw open to them ; for they, probably more than men, dwell in the present, are too much dominated by the senses ; and a better education, by enabling them to live more in the past and the future, will tranquillize, deepen, and purify their whole being.

What shall women learn ? Whatever experience and the insight of the wisest have shown to have most efficacy in opening, strengthening, and suppling the mind, whether literature or science or metaphysics or history. Is not such superficial acquaintance with these branches of knowledge as may be made in our academies and other similar schools for girls sufficient for them? It is sufficient for those who cannot or will not take up the work of intellectual culture in a serious spirit and with earnest purpose, and these unfortunately are the many, whether there be question of women or of men. A few only are urged by the impulse to grow ceaselessly in mental power, as but a few hunger and thirst for righteousness. They are the best ; their value is greater thcin that of numbers, because their life is of a higher quality and potency. It is they who uplift the ideals in whose light the multitude walk ; it is they who open ways to undiscovered worlds; it is they who show to the crowd what right-hoping and right-daring human souls may achieve. Were it not for them the whole people would sink to lower planes of thought and aspiration.

Now, these chosen ones, whom God bids grow unceasingly, are not found in one sex alone.

The eternal womanly, which the poet says draws us up and onward, leads woman herself to yearn for the infinite best. Who shall hope by futile argument to stay her feet in the way in which the inner voice bids her ascend? Her average intelligence is not less than that of man, and if hitherto no one of her sex has been able to enter the small circle of supreme achievement, it is permitted to believe that this may be due to the force of custom, habit, opinion, and fVOMAJ\r AND THE HIGHER EDUCATION 5/

law, and not to inferiority of mental endowment If a few women of exceptional gifts and attainments have seemed to lose something of feminine virtue and refinement, this, it is lawful to think, is to be ascribed to the accidents of individual character or to the environment into which they have been thrown. The best intellectual culture can have no tendency to make man or woman coarse or flippant or irreverent. On the contrary, it is favorable to the virtues and graces which go to the making of a gentleman or a lady. An open, flexible, and enlightened mind wins its way to all companies more surely than the charm that lies in mere accomplishments or in tricks of dress and behavior. Beauty itself, to which a very real value belongs — beauty of feature, and above all beauty of expression, the luminous mind suffusing the countenance with a spiritual glow and radiance, is heightened by intellectual culture.

The more we learn to live in the serene air of delightful studies the longer do we retain the freshness and charm of youth. The more adaptable also do we become, the more capable of high and ennobling companionship. In marriage, as in friendship, as in whatever sphere of life, human relations are chiefly spiritual, and the more thoroughly educated a woman is the more able is she to fulfil in a noble way the duties of wife and mother. The primary aim, however, is not to make a good wife and mother, any more than it is to make a good husband and father. The educational ideal is human perfec-/ tion, perfect manhood, and perfect womanhood./ Given the right kind of man or woman, and whatever duties are to be performed, whatever functions are to be fulfilled, will be well performed and well fulfilled. Woman's sphere Hes wherever she can live nobly and do useful work. The career open to ability applies to her not less than to man. We may not put legal or social restrictions on the spiritual growth of the one or the other. It is good to have a strong and enlightened mind ; therefore it is good for woman to have such a mind. It is always good to know a thing ; therefore, it is good for woman to know whatever she is capable of knowing. To be a human being, many-sided and well-rounded, is to be like God; therefore, it is good that woman be developed on many sides in harmony and completeness.

Since the close of our civil war America has entered on the work of providing for the higher education of women, with an energy and a generosity unequalled by any other country. With us women have access to all kinds of schools, and to nearly all the professions. They are no longer accustomed to look to marriage as to their one aim in life. They are brought up to trust to their own intelligence and industry to maintain themselves in the world. Their success in study is equal to that of men, and their eagerness to improve themselves seems to be greater. The number of women who, in the various institutions, are receiving the higher intellectual culture is large, and it is rapidly increasing. These institutions are of three kinds : In the first, men and women are educated together, as at Oberlin and most of the Western universities ; in the second — Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, and Bryn Mawr — women alone are received; and then there is a third type — Radcliffe, Barnard, and Evelyn — in which education is given exclusively to women by Professors of Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton.

These higher schools for women, to whichever type they belong, are not all equally good, and in some of them doubtless grave defects are found ; but the best of them afford facilities for thorough intellectual training or special research not existing in similar institutions elsewhere, even in Europe, and certainly not in our Catholic academies for young ladies. Our Catholic schools have grown to be a fact of national significance. In them we are already instructing more than a million pupils, and, while the number is constantly increasing, we are making strenuous efforts to improve the efficiency of the teaching. Our Sisterhoods have made this work possible, and their spirit of self-sacrifice, their courage, their eagerness to follow in the way of pedagogical progress are our chief ground for having confidence in the continuance and development of our system of religious schools.

Of the education they give to girls it is not necessary to speak in praise. Their success in cultivating the virtues which are woman's glory — lacking which no degree of mental culture can make her beneficent and delightful, — pure-mindedness, modesty, patience, piety, reverence, gentleness, amiability, and helpfulness — is conceded by friend and foe. On this foundation must we build if we would raise woman's mind to the ethereal heights of intellectual truth and splendor, without risking the loss of her heart of goodness and love. It is from this foundation that Trinity College shall rise. It is the logical result of our secondary schools or academies for girls, as the university stands as the natural development of our system of secondary schools or colleges for boys. A woman's heart founded the University, and women will upbuild and maintain Trinity College. Here shall they stand side by side, a light and encouragement, each to other, twins

WOMAN AND THE HIGHER EDUCATION 6l

of learning, to scatter over the land the blessings of religion and knowledge. The graduates of our academies, who feel the impulse to mental progress urgent as the growth of wings, will flock here as to a central home of learned men and wise women.

The genuinely great are seldom to be met with. How rare is a great poet, artist, historian, orator, general, physician, or lawyer. So rare also are great teachers. Nay, rarest of all, it may be, since it is not the intellect or the imagination or the heart alone that educates, but the whole man. Agassiz held that a student gains more by being brought into contact even for a brief time with a man of profound knowledge on whatever subject, than a professor who knows little more than he attempts to teach could give him in many months. As we become capable of deeper insight, the clearer shall we see that only the greatest men and women can educate. The rest are repeaters and trainers. Take from any nation the hundred minds who are first in all the spheres of human activity, and the national life is lowered.

This is also true of the Church, for in the supernatural as in the natural, God works through agents; and the radical blunder is to imagine that He will do immediately what He has made us capable of doing for ourselves.

Indeed, there is nothing which Catholics more need to learn, in whatever part of the world they may live, than that it is vain and superstitious to hope that God in some miraculous way will come to save them from the perils into which blindness, sloth, and indifference may have thrown them. Human endowments remain latent unless self-activity bring them into play. We are not born men, nor do we become men through a process of spontaneous development. We make ourselves men by long study and labor, by observation and reflection, by holding the mind steadfastly to the light of reason and the will to obedience to the stern voice of duty. True manhood is the result of severe and constant discipline, and the merely natural man is little more than animal.

But culture, like religion, is propagated ; it is a light transmitted by luminous minds and ardent souls. It is a torch carried in the hands of genius, or in the hands of those whom deep yearning for truth and beauty makes twin brothers of genius, and whoever would catch a spark from the heavenly flame must draw near to these light-bearers. Since the propagators of culture are few, is it not wise to gather them in centres to which all who seek illumination may repair? It is idle to hope that we shall find genuine teachers in many places. Such

IVOMAN AND THE HIGHER EDUCATION 63

teachers are not many, and to have their proper influence they require the right environment.

What we most need in America to-day is concentration, not expansion. The depth, not the tumult of the soul, is pleasing to the gods. It is easier to found a hundred schools than to create one which shall radiate enthusiasm, courage, and enlightenment. For us the Catholic University is the one institution which it is possible to make a centre of intellectual life for the Church in America. Of the urgent demand for such a centre it is scarcely necessary to speak. To those who cry. Wait ! echo will answer. Too late. On all sides there is a vast and eager movement toward higher culture of mind. The material aids, both the State and the generosity of individuals provide with a lavishness which in other ages would have seemed fabulous. The progress America is making in university education, if not the most striking, is one of the most real and potent influences in shaping our national character and destiny.

The relatively higher intelligence of the masses makes thorough mental discipline indispensable in the few. Not only are the multitude more intelligent than they have ever been, but the best knowledge on all subjects is now within the reach of many readers, so that in every community, in every audience, there are some at least who will not tolerate that the accredited public teachers should give evidence of ignorance or of the lack of the best training. In former centuries there have been men of superior genius, as well as individual minds of wide knowledge, but never has there been an age so enlightened as our own. In the presence of all this it were blindness in Catholics to rest content with what they have done or are doing. The life that is not growing is decaying. The selfcomplacent are, at the best, futile beings — as leaders and educators of men they are wholly incompetent. We are striving to help the abandoned, the fallen, the old who have none to care for them. Let us do more to bring into play the endowments of the strong, quick to recognize and appreciate talent in man or woman, and ready to offer opportunities for its development

Let us not be so dull as to ignore the gifts of woman. Let us not be of those who still doubt whether it is not better that she should be a simpleton; who think that only superficially educated women can make good wives and mothers. If, as Goethe says, it is a frightful thing to see ignorance at work, is it not most frightful when the work is that which woman is called to do in the home and in the school? In all companionship the lower tends to pull the higher down, for it is easy to sink and hard to rise. Hence, an ignorant wife and mother will dull the minds of her husband and children, while one Who is intelligent and appreciative will be for them a strong stimulus to self-activity. It is the nature of an enlightened mind to diffuse light, of a generous soul to make love prevail, of a noble character to build character. American education, whether given by the State or by the various religious denominations, is now largely and increasingly in the hands of women, and if progress is to be made, they must themselves receive a more thorough mental culture. If to demand the higher education for women still seems absurd to some, let us recall that for ages it was deemed preposterous to give her any education at all. If in the past she has been mentally inferior, is it not because the incentives, means, and opportunities of intellectual growth were denied her? If her capacity has seemed to be chiefly that of a domestic, is it not because she was refused admission to wider fields?

To discourage is to enfeeble ; to destroy self-confidence is to blunt the spur to noble action ; and yet it has been held wise and by many is still thought proper to take a deprecatory tone whenever there is question of conceding to 5 women the opportunities of education and work which are given to men. Let us assume their capacity ; let us help them to believe that they are able, and they will be able. Above all, let us applaud and assist every effort made by women themselves to uplift, strengthen, and enlighten woman.