CHAPTER X

THE ELECT AMONG WOMEN

"The Gospel is the most tremendous engine of democracy ever forged. It is destined to break in pieces all castes, privileges, and oppressions. Perhaps the last caste to be destroyed will be that of sex."-HELEN B. MONTGOMERY.

"The power of educated womanhood in the world is simply the power of skilled service. .. The world is full of need and every opportunity is a duty. Preparation for these duties is education, whatever form it may take and whatever service may result. The trained, which means the educated in mind and hand, win influence and power simply because they know how."-ISABELLA THOBURN.

"There is nothing in the Universe that I fear, save that I shall not know all my duty or shall fail to perform it."-MARY LYON, 1849.

THE forces which were transforming and destroying the established traditions of women's lives in the last century produced very different effects upon them, according to their individual temperaments and breeding, and the degree of social restriction to which they were subjected. While some exploded in an indignant demand for their rights, others, scarcely less discontented, but lacking initiative and courage, set conventional

ity aside with more discretion. By far the larger number, however, unconscious of the impulse that moved them, instinctively responded to it while still endeavoring to remain within their appointed sphere. They accepted as ordained and necessary their indirect relation to the world outside the home, and adapted as best they might their fledgling spirits to the shell in which they found themselves. They were assured that woman's power lay in her "influence." If the lives of their men-folk showed small impress of their prayers and innocent admonitions, they, nevertheless, believed themselves appointed agents of morality and trusted to an inscrutable Providence to make that influence effective.

A few-whom we have called the Elect-felt a call from God which transcended any that women had ever known. To those who believed that their social responsibility lay in domestic sacrifice and consecration, the religious awakening of the early Nineteenth Century brought a special opportunity for the exercise of womanly devotion a way not in any wise inconsistent with the strictest canons of female duty, yet leading out into a foreign world, where profounder consecration was required. The terrifying, yet fascinating, tales of the heathen in kingdoms on the other side of the globe lent a

glamor to the work of foreign missions. Their strange unchristian customs woke, in hearts filled with religious fervor, the primal instinct of the born adventurer. And not alone among men; for among women missionaries there have been some with as great a desire as a Stanley or a Peary for the unknown and the picturesque.

Men who dedicated themselves to foreign missionary work were expected, as part of their preparation, to choose for wives women of exceptional piety and bodily vigor, not only as a safeguard against evil, but to double their own efficiency by establishing among lost souls a model Christian household. Now and then these quite human apostles took with them some exemplary but feeble young girl, who shortly laid down her life in a strange country for a cause that she did not comprehend; but, for the most part, they chose prayerfully some young woman whose local reputation for piety and competence marked her out as suitable for missionary labors. Many a romantic girl, filled with religious enthusiasm, and after the slightest acquaintance with a young clergyman, married the Cause rather than the Man.

Whether congenially mated or not, there was scant time for uxorious sentiment in the exactions of the arduous life to which they went. The hardships of their physical existence, and

the ever-pressing miseries of the needy creatures to whom they had dedicated their service, overtopped their merely personal griefs. Into many such families child after child was born, to fade away prematurely in an enervating climate; and such children as survived were of necessity sent to America to grow up among strangers. Both parents found their reward in the glory of the greater sacrifice; and the sons might well dedicate their easier tasks, as did the son of Adoniram Judson:

"To the children of the missionaries, the involuntary inheritors of their parents' sufferings and rewards."

On first thought it might seem that no woman. would be farther from sharing the discontents which were moving her sex in America to struggle against their social bonds, than the missionary wife. There was certainly nothing novel in the consecration of wives to their husbands and children, since it had been the accepted duty of woman throughout the ages. But little as she might sympathize with woman's rights, it was the peculiar distinction of the missionary wife to dedicate herself, not like plain women to her family, but to the Cause of Christ, counting it all glory to share the perils of the pioneers who car ried Christianity wherever men lay in darkness.

"Judson in his prison, Moffat with the savages in South Africa, Chalmers in the wilderness of New Guinea, Hunt and Calvert in blood-stained Fiji, Patson in the New Hebrides, all these and thousands more had some woman who stood shoulder to shoulder to them, sharing weariness, danger, loneliness, sickness, death."

It is written that of twelve missionaries sent to Sierra Leone in 1823, ten of whom were husbands and wives, six died that year, and four more in eighteen months; of the women none survived, and three were buried in the first year, with their babes beside them. However unaware of it, these women were as much fulfilling their inevitable share in the emancipation of their sex as those who suffered ostracism for demanding equal rights.

No more inspiring illustration of the unpremeditated manner in which such women took a new place in the world can be given, perhaps, than the lives of Ann Hasseltine, Sarah H. Boardman, and Emily Chubbock, each of whom successively became the wife of Adoniram Judson, the first missionary to Burmah. Of the first it has been said that her record and her sufferings have no parallel in missionary annals. A wellborn and well-educated New England girl, she was fascinated as much, it may be, by the mission as by the personality of the young theological student; and her life was looked upon by them