'Godliness and Manliness.’

Evening Star, Issue 7255, 5 July 1887, Page 3

'Godliness and Manliness.’

From a book which has been published, entitled ‘ Godliness and Manliness,’ by J. W. Diggle, M.A., we take the following extracts :—“ The Fifth Commandment asst - ciates the mother co-ordinately and equally with the father in the esteem and affections of the child. According to ancient law, the mother was a species of nobody in the family. At her husband’s death she descended as a kind of property to the eldest son. But such a servile position, with no higher dignity than that of chattel, was repudiated for the mother by the Fifth Commandment. It exalted the mother to the father’s side as co-regnant sovereign with him upon the throne of the children s affection and obedience. It did not endow the father with despotic power jus vita 1 , necisque —as an Eastern tyrant, and degrade the mother into a harem slave. It upraised father and _ mother to a conjoint scat of family king and family queer, and placed in the hands the sceptre of a co-equal claim upon their children’s regard. It bade every child, in tones which must have sounded strange and startling to the ears of those accustomed to regard the mother as the property of the father, Honor thy father and thy mother ! This recognition of the dignity and sacredness of motherhood is one of the most benignant educational provisions of the Decalogue. It is an evidence of the great advance of Jewish legislation beyond all other legislations of the ancient world, and a sign of its foreordained purpose of preparations for Christ, in whose Virgin Mother all motherhood finds its sweetest emblem and uttermost perfection.” Of a kindred typo is the admirable chapter on “ The Fidelity of Women.” It is very brief :—“ A man gives up a sinking cause sooner than a woman does. The men ran away from the Cross ; the women were faithful unto death. Men like the winning side; women are champions of the desperate hope. Deborah saved Israel, and Joan of Arc delivered France, when no man could be found to lead an enterprise so unpromising. The men outran one another to catch a glimpse of the risen and victorious Christ; but it is doubtful whether they would have gone to the sepulchre at all simply for the sake of embalming the dead and defeated Christ. Women, too, linger in memory over the past with a richer tenderness than men. Women are retrospective; men anticipative. Women tarry long, with a fidelity painful and sweet, over the recollections of their childhood, and the little incidents of their betrothal, and the buried faces of their lost children. Women have more keepsakes than men, more dried flowers, more faded photographs, more associations with old spots, more packages of oft-read letters, more tendrils rooted round the long-left home.”