Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays(社会卫生讲座)

VIP免费

2024-12-26 1 0 635.25KB 164 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

Sanitary and Social

Lectures and Essays

by Kingsley

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

WOMAN'S WORK IN A

COUNTRY PARISH {1}

I have been asked to speak a few words to you on a lady's work in a

country parish. I shall confine myself rather to principles than to details;

and the first principle which I would impress on you is, that we must all be

just before we are generous. I must, indeed, speak plainly on this point.

A woman's first duties are to her own family, her own servants. Be not

deceived: if anyone cannot rule her own household, she cannot rule the

Church of God. If anyone cannot sympathise with the servants with whom

she is in contact all day long, she will not really sympathise with the poor

whom she sees once a week. I know the temptation not to believe this is

very great. It seems so much easier to women to do something for the

poor, than for their own ladies' maids, and house-maids, and cooks. And

why? Because they can treat the poor as THINGS: but they MUST

treat their servants as persons. A lady can go into a poor cottage, lay

down the law to the inhabitants, reprove them for sins to which she has

never been tempted; tell them how to set things right, which, if she had the

doing of them, I fear she would do even more confusedly and slovenly

than they. She can give them a tract, as she might a pill; and then a shilling,

as something sweet after the medicine; and she can go out again and see

no more of them till her benevolent mood recurs: but with the servants it is

not so. She knows their characters; and, what is more, they know hers;

they know her private history, her little weaknesses. Perhaps she is a

little in their power, and she is shy with them. She is afraid of beginning

a good work with them, because, if she does, she will be forced to carry it

out; and it cannot be cold, dry, perfunctory, official: it must be hearty,

living, loving, personal. She must make them her friends; and perhaps

she is afraid of doing that, for fear they should take liberties, as it is called-

-which they very probably will do, unless she keeps up a very high

standard of self- restraint and earnestness in her own life--and that

involves a great deal of trouble, and so she is tempted, when she wishes to

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

do good, to fall back on the poor people in the cottages outside, who, as

she fancies, know nothing about her, and will never find out whether or

not she acts up to the rules which she lays down for them. Be not

deceived, I say, in this case also. Fancy not that they know nothing about

you. There is nothing secret which shall not be made manifest; and what

you do in the closet is surely proclaimed (and often with exaggeration

enough and to spare) on the house-top. These poor folks at your gate

know well enough, through servants and tradesmen, what you are, how

you treat your servants, how you pay your bills, what sort of temper you

have; and they form a shrewd, hard estimate of your character, in the light

of which they view all that you do and say to them; and believe me, that if

you wish to do any real good to them, you must begin by doing good to

those who lie still nearer to you than them. And believe me, too, that if

you shrink from a hearty patriarchal sympathy with your own servants,

because it would require too much personal human intercourse with them,

you are like a man who, finding that he had not powder enough to fire off

a pocket-pistol, should try to better matters by using the same quantity of

ammunition in an eighty-four pound gun. For it is this human friendship,

trust, affection, which is the very thing you have to employ towards the

poor, and to call up in them. Clubs, societies, alms, lending libraries are

but dead machinery, needful, perhaps, but, like the iron tube without the

powder, unable to send the bullet forth one single inch; dead and useless

lumber, without humanity; without the smile of the lip, the light of the eye,

the tenderness of the voice, which makes the poor woman feel that a soul

is speaking to her soul, a heart yearning after her heart; that she is not

merely a THING to be improved, but a sister to be made conscious of the

divine bond of her sisterhood, and taught what she means when she

repeats in her Creed, "I believe in the communion of saints." This is my

text, and my key-note--whatever else I may say to-day is but a carrying

out into details of the one question, How may you go to these poor

creatures as woman to woman?

Your next duties are to your husband's or father's servants and

workmen. It is said that a clergyman's wife ought to consider the parish

as HER flock as well as her husband's. It may be so: I believe the

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

dogma to be much overstated just now. But of a landlord's, or employer's

wife (I am inclined to say, too, of an officer's wife), such a doctrine is

absolutely true, and cannot be overstated. A large proportion, therefore,

of your parish work will be to influence the men of your family to do their

duty by their dependants. You wish to cure the evils under which they

labour. The greater proportion of these are in the hands of your men

relatives. It is a mockery, for instance, in you to visit the fever-stricken

cottage, while your husband leaves it in a state which breeds that fever.

Your business is to go to him and say, "HERE IS A WRONG; RIGHT IT!"

This, as many a beautiful Middle Age legend tells us, has been woman's

function in all uncivilised times; not merely to melt man's heart to pity, but

to awaken it to duty. But the man must see that the woman is in earnest:

that if he will not repair the wrong by justice, she will, if possible (as in

those old legends), by self-sacrifice. Be sure this method will conquer.

Do but say: "If you will not new-roof that cottage, if you will not make

that drain, I will. I will not buy a new dress till it is done; I will sell the

horse you gave me, pawn the bracelet you gave me, but the thing shall be

done." Let him see, I say, that you are in earnest, and he will feel that

your message is a divine one, which he must obey for very shame and

weariness, if for nothing else. This is in my eyes the second part of a

woman's parish work. I entreat you to bear it in mind when you hear, as I

trust you will, lectures in this place upon that SANITARY REFORM,

without which all efforts for the bettering of the masses are in my eyes not

only useless, but hypocritical.

I will suppose, then, that you are fulfilling home duties in self-

restraint, and love, and in the fear of God. I will suppose that you are

using all your woman's influence on the mind of your family, in behalf of

tenants and workmen; and I tell you frankly, that unless this be first done,

you are paying a tithe of mint and anise, and neglecting common

righteousness and mercy. But you wish to do more: you wish for

personal contact with the poor round you, for the pure enjoyment of doing

good to them with your own hands. How are you to set about it? First,

there are clubs-- clothing-clubs, shoe-clubs, maternal-clubs; all very good

in their way. But do not fancy that they are the greater part of your

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

parish work. Rather watch and fear lest they become substitutes for your

real parish work; lest the bustle and amusement of playing at shopkeeper,

or penny-collector, once a week, should blind you to your real power--

your real treasure, by spending which you become all the richer. What

you have to do is to ennoble and purify the WOMANHOOD of these poor

women; to make them better daughters, sisters, wives, mothers: and all

the clubs in the world will not do that; they are but palliatives of a great

evil, which they do not touch; cloaks for almsgiving, clumsy means of

eking out insufficient wages; at best, kindly contrivances for tricking into

temporary thriftiness a degraded and reckless peasantry. Miserable,

miserable state of things! out of which the longer I live I see less hope of

escape, saving by an emigration, which shall drain us of all the healthy,

strong, and brave among the lower classes, and leave us, as a just

punishment for our sins, only the cripple, the drunkard, and the beggar.

Yet these clubs MUST be carried on. They make life a little more

possible; they lighten hearts, if but for a moment; they inculcate habits of

order and self-restraint, which may be useful when the poor man finds

himself in Canada or Australia. And it is a cruel utilitarianism to refuse

to palliate the symptoms because you cannot cure the disease itself. You

will give opiates to the suffering, who must die nevertheless. Let him

slip into his grave at least as painlessly as you can. And so you must use

these charitable societies, remembering all along what a fearful and

humbling sign the necessity for them is of the diseased state of this

England, as the sportula and universal almsgiving was of the decadence of

Rome.

However, the work has to be done; and such as it is, it is especially

fitted for young unmarried ladies. It requires no deep knowledge of

human nature. It makes them aware of the amount of suffering and

struggling which lies around them, without bringing them in that most

undesirable contact with the coarser forms of evil which house-visitation

must do; and the mere business habits of accuracy and patience to which it

compels them, are a valuable practical schooling for them themselves in

after-life. It is tiresome and unsentimental drudgery, no doubt; but

perhaps all the better training on that account. And, after all, the magic

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

of sweetness, grace, and courtesy may shed a hallowing and humanising

light over the meanest work, and the smile of God may spread from lip to

lip, and the light of God from eye to eye, even between the giver and

receiver of a penny, till the poor woman goes home, saying in her heart, "I

have not only found the life of my hand--I have found a sister for time and

for eternity."

But there is another field of parish usefulness which I cannot

recommend too earnestly, and that is, the school. There you may work as

hard as you will, and how you will--provided you do it in a loving, hearty,

cheerful, HUMAN way, playful and yet earnest; two qualities which,

when they exist in their highest power, are sure to go together. I say, how

you will. I am no pedant about schools; I care less what is taught than

how it is taught. The merest rudiments of Christianity, the merest

rudiments of popular instruction, are enough, provided they be given by

lips which speak as if they believed what they said, and with a look which

shows real love for the pupil. Manner is everything--matter a secondary

consideration; for in matter, brain only speaks to brain; in manner, soul

speaks to soul. If you want Christ's lost- lambs really to believe that He

died for them, you will do it better by one little act of interest and affection,

than by making them learn by heart whole commentaries--even as Miss

Nightingale has preached Christ crucified to those poor soldiers by acts of

plain outward drudgery, more livingly, and really, and convincingly than

she could have done by ten thousand sermons, and made many a noble lad,

I doubt not, say in his heart, for the first time in his wild life, "I can

believe now that Christ died for me, for here is one whom He has taught to

die for me in like wise." And this blessed effect of school-work,

remember, is not confined to the children. It goes home with them to the

parents. The child becomes an object of interest and respect in their eyes,

when they see it an object of interest and respect in yours. If they see

that you look on it as an awful and glorious being, the child of God, the

co-heir of Christ, they learn gradually to look on it in the same light.

They become afraid and ashamed (and it is a noble fear and shame) to do

and say before it what they used to do and say; afraid to ill-use it. It

becomes to them a mysterious visitor (sad that it should be so, but true as

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

sad) from a higher and purer sphere, who must be treated with something

of courtesy and respect, who must even be asked to teach them something

of its new knowledge; and the school, and the ladies' interest in the school,

become to the degraded parents a living sign that those children's angels

do indeed behold the face of their Father which is in heaven.

Now, there is one thing in school-work which I wish to press on you;

and that is, that you should not confine your work to the girls; but bestow

it as freely on those who need it more, and who (paradoxical as it may

seem) will respond to it more deeply and freely--THE BOYS. I am not

going to enter into the reasons WHY. I only entreat you to believe me, that

by helping to educate the boys, or even (when old enough), by taking a

class (as I have seen done with admirable effect) of grown-up lads, you

may influence for ever not only the happiness of your pupils, but of the

girls whom they will hereafter marry. It will be a boon to your own sex

as well as to ours to teach them courtesy, self-restraint, reverence for

physical weakness, admiration of tenderness and gentleness; and it is one

which only a lady can bestow. Only by being accustomed in youth to

converse with ladies, will the boy learn to treat hereafter his sweetheart or

his wife like a gentleman. There is a latent chivalry, doubt it not, in the

heart of every untutored clod; if it dies out in him (as it too often does), it

were better for him, I often think, if he had never been born: but the only

talisman which will keep it alive, much more develop it into its fulness, is

friendly and revering intercourse with women of higher rank than himself,

between whom and him there is a great and yet a blessed gulf fixed.

I have left to the last the most important subject of all; and that is,

what is called "visiting the poor." It is an endless subject; if you go into

details, you might write volumes on it. All I can do this afternoon is to

keep to my own key-note, and say, Visit whom, when, and where you will;

but let your visits be those of woman to woman. Consider to whom you

go--to poor souls whose life, compared with yours, is one long malaise of

body, and soul, and spirit--and do as you would be done by; instead of

reproving and fault-finding, encourage. In God's name, encourage. They

scramble through life's rocks, bogs, and thornbrakes, clumsily enough, and

have many a fall, poor things! But why, in the name of a God of love

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

and justice, is the lady, rolling along the smooth turnpike-road in her

comfortable carriage, to be calling out all day long to the poor soul who

drags on beside her over hedge and ditch, moss and moor, bare-footed and

weary- hearted, with half-a-dozen children at her back: "You ought not

to have fallen here; and it was very cowardly to lie down there; and it was

your duty, as a mother, to have helped that child through the puddle; while,

as for sleeping under that bush, it is most imprudent and inadmissible?"

Why not encourage her, praise her, cheer her on her weary way by loving

words, and keep your reproofs for yourself--even your advice; for SHE

does get on her way, after all, where YOU could not travel a step forward;

and she knows what she is about perhaps better than you do, and what she

has to endure, and what God thinks of her life-journey. The heart

knoweth its own bitterness, and a stranger intermeddleth not with its joy.

But do not be a stranger to her. Be a sister to her. I do not ask you to

take her up in your carriage. You cannot; perhaps it is good for her that

you cannot. It is good sometimes for Lazarus that he is not fit to sit at

Dives's feast--good for him that he should receive his evil things in this

life, and be comforted in the life to come. All I ask is, do to the poor soul

as you would have her do to you in her place. Do not interrupt and vex

her (for she is busy enough already) with remedies which she does not

understand, for troubles which you do not understand. But speak

comfortably to her, and say: "I cannot feel WITH you, but I do feel FOR

you: I should enjoy helping you, but I do not know how--tell me. Tell

me where the yoke galls; tell me why that forehead is grown old before its

time: I may be able to ease the burden, to put fresh light into the eyes;

and if not, still tell me, simply because I am a woman, and know the relief

of pouring out my own soul into loving ears, even though in the depths of

despair." Yes, paradoxical as it may seem, I am convinced that the only

way to help these poor women humanly and really, is to begin by

confessing to them that you do not know how to help them; to humble

yourself to them, and to ask their counsel for the good of themselves and

of their neighbours, instead of coming proudly to them, with nostrums

ready compounded, as if a doctor should be so confident in his own

knowledge of books and medicine as to give physic before asking the

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

patient's symptoms.

Therefore, I entreat you to bear in mind (for without this all visiting of

the poor will be utterly void and useless), that you must regulate your

conduct to them, and in their houses, even to the most minute particulars,

by the very same rules which apply to persons of your own class. Never

let any woman say of you (thought fatal to all confidence, all influence!):

"Yes, it is all very kind: but she does not behave to me as she would to

one of her own quality." Piety, earnestness, affectionateness, eloquence--

all may be nullified and stultified by simply keeping a poor woman

standing in her own cottage while you sit, or entering her house, even at

her own request, while she is at meals. She may decline to sit; she may

beg you to come in, all the more reason for refusing utterly to obey her,

because it shows that that very inward gulf between you and her still exists

in her mind, which it is the object of your visit to bridge over. If you

know her to be in trouble, touch on that trouble as you would with a lady.

Woman's heart is alike in all ranks, and the deepest sorrow is the one of

which she speaks the last and least. We should not like anyone--no, not

an angel from heaven, to come into our houses without knocking at the

door, and say: "I hear you are very ill off--I will lend you a hundred

pounds. I think you are very careless of money, I will take your accounts

into my own hands;" and still less again: "Your son is a very bad,

profligate, disgraceful fellow, who is not fit to be mentioned; I intend to

take him out of your hands and reform him myself." Neither do the poor

like such unceremonious mercy, such untender tenderness, benevolence at

horse-play, mistaking kicks for caresses. They do not like it, they will

not respond to it, save in parishes which have been demoralised by

officious and indiscriminate benevolence, and where the last remaining

virtues of the poor, savage self-help and independence, have been

exchanged (as I have too often seen them exchanged) for organised

begging and hypocrisy.

I would that you would all read, ladies, and consider well the traits of

an opposite character which have just come to light (to me, I am ashamed

to say, for the first time) in the Biography of Sidney Smith. The love and

admiration which that truly brave and loving man won from everyone, rich

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays

or poor, with whom he came in contact, seems to me to have arisen from

the one fact, that without perhaps having any such conscious intention, he

treated rich and poor, his own servants and the noblemen his guests, alike,

and ALIKE courteously, considerately, cheerfully, affectionately--so

leaving a blessing and reaping a blessing wheresoever he went.

Approach, then, these poor women as sisters, and you will be able

gradually to reverse the hard saying of which I made use just now: "Do

not apply remedies which they do not understand, to diseases which you

do not understand." Learn lovingly and patiently (aye, and reverently,

for there is that in every human being which deserves reverence, and must

be reverenced if we wish to understand it)--learn, I say, to understand their

troubles, and by that time they will have learnt to understand your

remedies, and they will appreciate them. For you HAVE remedies. I do

not undervalue your position. No man on earth is less inclined to

undervalue the real power of wealth, rank, accomplishments, manners--

even physical beauty. All are talents from God, and I give God thanks

when I see them possessed by any human being; for I know that they, too,

can be used in His service, and brought to bear on the true emancipation of

woman--her emancipation, not from man (as some foolish persons fancy),

but from the devil, "the slanderer and divider" who divides her from man,

and makes her live a life-long tragedy, which goes on in more cottages

than in palaces--a vie e part, a vie incomprise--a life made up half of ill-

usage, half of unnecessary, self-willed, self-conceited martyrdom, instead

of being (as God intended) half of the human universe, a helpmeet for man,

and the one bright spot which makes this world endurable. Towards

making her that, and so realising the primeval mission by every cottage

hearth, each of you can do something; for each of you have some talent,

power, knowledge, attraction between soul and soul, which the cottager's

wife has not, and by which you may draw her to you with (as the prophet

says) human bonds and the cords of love: but she must be drawn by

them alone, or your work is nothing, and though you give the treasures of

Ind, they are valueless equally to her and to Christ; for they are not given

in His name, which is that boundless tenderness, consideration, patience,

self-sacrifice, by which even the cup of cold water is a precious offering--

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

SanitaryandSocialLecturesandEssays1SanitaryandSocialLecturesandEssaysbyKingsleySanitaryandSocialLecturesandEssays2WOMAN'SWORKINACOUNTRYPARISH{1}Ihavebeenaskedtospeakafewwordstoyouonalady'sworkinacountryparish.Ishallconfinemyselfrathertoprinciplesthantodetails;andthefirstprinciplewhichIwouldimpresson...

展开>> 收起<<

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays(社会卫生讲座).pdf

共164页,预览33页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays(社会卫生讲座)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: