- A little wholesome neglect, a little discipline, plenty of play, and a fair chance to be glad and sorry as the hours swing by, these things are not too much to grant to childhood. That careful coddling which deprives a child of all delicate and strong emotions lest it be saddened, or excited, or alarmed, leaves it dangerously soft of fibre. Coleridge, an unhappy little lad at school, was lifted out of his own troubles by an acquaintance with the heroic sorrows of the world. There is no page of history, however dark, there is no beautiful old tale, however tragic, which does not impart some strength and some distinction to the awakening mind. It is possible to overrate the superlative merits of insipidity as a mental and moral force in the development of youth. There are people who surrender themselves without reserve to needless activities, who have a real affection for telephones, and district messengers, and the importunities of their daily mail. If they are women, they put special delivery stamps on letters which would lose nothing by a month's delay. If they are men, they exult in the thought that they can be reached by wireless telegraphy in mid-ocean. We are apt to think of these men and wo A woman whose every action is hurried, whose every hour is open to disturbance, whose every breath is drawn with superfluous emphasis, will talk about the nervous strain under which she is living, as though dining out and paying the cook's wages were the things which are breaking her down. The remedy proposed for such 'strain' is withdrawal from the healthy buffeting of life, not for three days, as Burke withdrew in order that he might read Evelina, and be rested and refreshed thereby; but long enough to permit of the notion that immunity from buffetings is a possible condition of existence, of all errors, the most irretrievable. It has been many centuries since Marcus Aurelius observed the fretful disquiet of Rome, which must have been strikingly like our fretful disquiet to-day, and proffered counsel, unheeded then as now: 'Take pleasure in one thing and rest in it, passing from one social act to another, thinking of God.' THE LADY ABBESS BY EMILY JAMES PUTNAM Set a price on thy love. Thou canst not name so much but I will give thee for thy love much more. - ANCREN RIWLE. I THE economic paradox that confronts women in general is especially uncompromising for the lady. In defiance of the axiom that he who works, eats, the lady who works has less to eat than the lady who does not. There is no profession open to her that is nearly as lucrative as marriage, and the more lucrative the marriage the less work it involves. The economic prizes are therefore awarded in such a way as directly to discourage productive activity on the part of the lady. If a brother and sister are equally qualified for, let us say, the practice of medicine, the brother has, besides the scientific motive, the economic motive. The ardent pursuit of his profession will, if successful, make him a rich man. His sister, on the other hand, will never earn absolutely as much money as he, and relatively her earnings will be negligible in comparison with her income if she should marry a millionaire. But if she be known to have committed herself to the study of medicine her chance of marrying a millionaire is practically eliminated. Apart from the crude economic question, the things that most women mean when they speak of 'happiness,' that is, love and children and the little republic of the home, depend upon the favor of men, and the qualities that win this favor are not in general those that are most useful for other purposes. A girl should not be too intelligent or too good or too highly differentiated in any direction. Like a ready-made garment she should be designed to fit the average man. She should have 'just about as much religion as my William likes.' The age-long operation of this rule, by which the least strongly individualized women are the most likely to have a chance to transmit their qualities, has given it the air of a natural law. Though the lady has generally yielded it unquestioning obedience, she often dreams of a land like that of the Amazons, where she might be judged on her merits instead of on her charms. Seeing that in the world a woman's social position, her daily food, and her chance of children, depend on her exerting sufficient charm to induce some man to assume the responsibility and expense of maintaining her for life, and that the qualities on which this charm depends are sometimes altogether unattainable by a given woman, it is not surprising that exceptional women are willing to eliminate from their lives the whole question of marriage and of motherhood, for the sake of a free development, irrespective of its bearing on the other sex. No institution in Europe has ever won for the lady the freedom of development that she enjoyed in the convent in the early days. The modern college for women only feebly reproduces it, since the college for women has arisen at a time when colleges in general are under a cloud. The lady abbess, on the other hand, was part of the two great social forces of her time, feudalism and the Church. Great spiritual rewards and great worldly prizes were alike within her grasp. She was treated as an equal by the men of her class, as is witnessed by letters we still have from popes and emperors to abbesses. She had the stimulus of competition with men, in executive capacity, in scholarship, and in artistic production, since her work was freely set before the general public; but she was relieved by the circumstances of her environment from the ceaseless competition in common life of woman with woman for the favor of the individual man. In the cloister of the great days, as on a small scale in the college for women to-day, women were judged by one another, as men are everywhere judged by one another, for sterling qualities of head and heart and character. The strongest argument against the co-educational college is that the presence of the male brings in the factor of sexual selection, and the girl who is elected to the class-office is not necessarily the ablest or the wisest, or the kindest, but the possessor of the longest eyelashes. The lady does not often rise to the point of deciding against sex. The choice is a cruel one, and in the individual case the rewards of the ascetic course are too small and too uncertain. At no (other time than the aristocratic period of the cloister have the rewards so preponderated as to carry her over in numbers. In studying this interesting phenomenon we must divest our minds of the conventional picture of the nun. The Little Sister of the Poor is the product of a number of social motives that had not begun to operate when the lady abbess came into being. In fact, her day is almost over when the Poor Clares appear. Her roots lie in a society that is pre-feudal, though feudalism played into her hand; and in a psychology that is pre-Christian, though she ruled in the name of Christ. The worship of Demeter the mothergoddess, which was one of the central facts of Greek religious life, spread and flourished in the west. Sicily, the granary of the ancient world, became naturally in legend the scene of the rape of Persephone and of the wanderings of her mother, the giver of grain to men. The Romans adopted the worship of this ancient hypostasis of woman's share in primitive culture, ranging it beside the cult of their own Bona Dea, and indeed sometimes confusing the two. Catania was one of the places where the great festivals of the Lesser and the Greater Eleusinia were celebrated in spring and autumn with high devotion and with all the pomp of the rubric. The main features of the festivals were everywhere the same; the carrying, on a cart through the streets, of the symbolic pomegranate and poppy-seed, the great procession walking with torches far into the night to typify the search of the goddess for her child, the mumming, the ringing of bells, the exhibition of the sacred veil, the mystic meal of bread for the initiate, and the mystic pouring out of wine. At Catania, as Ovid tells us, these customary elements of the feast were supplemented by a horse-race. Miss Eckenstein calls attention to the description, given early in the last century by the English traveler Blunt, of the festival of Saint Agatha as he saw it in Catania,-and, I may add, as it is celebrated there to this day. It begins with a horse-race, and its chief event, next to the mass, is a great procession, lasting into the night, in which the participants carry torches and ring bells as they follow a wagon which bears the relics of the saint, among them her veil and her breasts, torn off by her persecutors. The saint has two festivals yearly, one in the autumn and one in the spring. It remains to point out that though it is disputed whether the breasts were or were not part of the ancient ritual, they are a likely enough symbol of exuberance. Also, 'Agatha'. is the Greek word for 'Bona,' and does not occur as a proper name before the appearance of the saint. But the Acta Sanctorum knows all about Saint Agatha, a Christian virgin and martyr of Catania in the third century, and is able to give full details of her parentage and history, adding that her fame spread at an early date into Italy and Greece. The process here visible went on everywhere as Christianity spread in Europe. The places, the persons, and the ritual of heathen worship were taken in bodily by the new religion, with a more or less successful effort at + assimilation. Not only the classic cults of Greece and Rome, but the cruder religions of the barbarians of the north, were to be conciliated. And in all of these, classic and crude alike, the old status of woman was abundantly reflected. A purely patriarchal religion would not serve; the Virgin and the female saints became more and more necessary to bridge the chasm. It is not by accident that the festivals of the Virgin so often coincide with those of heathen deities, for in the seventh century Pope Sergius ordered that this should be so, as a matter of policy. In the long centuries needed for the Christianizing of Europe, heathendom reacted powerfully on the new faith. Local saints everywhere are its work. In the early days a saint needed not to be canonized by Rome; it was necessary only that he should be entered in a local calendar, and the local calendar was in the hands of local dignitaries of the + Church. Under pressure of popular demand, every sacred place in heathendom bade fair to have its saint, and many of these improvised saints were gradually fitted out with legends and historical relations. It was not until the twelfth century that Rome felt that the process had gone far enough and withdrew the power of canonization into her own hands. Although the German tribes were already patriarchal in organization when they came in contact with the Romans, they carried abundant evidence in their traditions, their customs, and their cults, of an earlier social system. The queen of saga and of history, the tribal mother with her occult powers and her status of priestess to goddesses who were also tribal, the recognized existence of certain bodies of women outside the family, are all survivals of the motherage, with its primitive culture and social organization. With these various phenomena the Church dealt in various ways: roughly we may say that the tribal goddess she used as a saint, the priestess she banned as a witch, the unattached woman she segregated under a somewhat summary classification as either nun or castaway. There seems to be no doubt that we must regard the immense popularity of the convent in Europe in early times as largely due to the uneasiness of women under a patriarchal régime. We think to-day of the cloister as a refuge from the distracting liberty of secular life; it seems paradoxical, and yet it is apparently true, that the women of early Christendom fled from the constraint of home to the expansion of the cloister. Under patriarchalism the problem of the unassigned woman becomes one of considerable perplexity to herself and to society. A stigma is attached to her, which acts as a deterrent to rebels in the ranks. The 'loose,' that is, the unattached, woman is sharply marked off from the lady, so that the choice lies between the constraints of social and economic dependence on the one hand, and social outlawry on the other. These considerations account for the fact that the nun of early northern Christianity was by no means a type of self-effacement, but was often a spirited and sometimes a lawless person; and that the abbess was more generally than not a woman of good birth, strong character, and independent ways. Sometimes she had tried marriage, sometimes she had condemned it without a trial. It offered little scope for the free development of women, but there were many women <insisting on free development. To such the convent was a godsend, and we may almost say that the lady abbess is the successor of the saga heroine. + Monasticism as the Eastern world practiced it was by no means congenial in general to the Frankish habit of mind. The worn-out races embraced it as a refuge from the growing difficulties of life with which they had no longer energy to cope. The fresh races on the other hand had an immense amount of the will-to-live to work off before they in their turn should dwindle toward selfeffacement, abnegation, and the meeker virtues. The men among the Franks felt no call to the cloister. There is no record that any Frankish prince entered a convent of his free will. For men the world was too full of opportunity. But maidens, wives, and widows of the royal house joined religious communities, not because they were spiritually unlike their men, but because they were like them. The impulse toward leadership which kept the men in the world sent the women out of it. Radegund, founder of the convent of Poitiers, was fifth among the seven recognized wives of King Clothair. She was a princess of the untamed Thurin gians, whom Clothair captured with her brother on one of his raids into the eastern wilds. She was a person of great spirit, and perfect personal courage. She was the sort of woman (her biographers say) who keeps her husband's dinner waiting while she visits the sick, and annoys him by her open preference for the society of learned clerks. When finally she made up her mind to leave her husband, she fastened upon an unhappy prelate, Bishop Medardus of Noyon, the dangerous task of sealing her from the world. 'If you refuse to consecrate me,' she said grimly, 'a lamb will be lost to the flock.' The Bishop quailed before the lamb, and Radegund entered the life at Poitiers that gave play to her great powers of organization, diplomacy, and leadership. Her nuns were her true spiritual children. After her death, two rival claimants for the office of abbess contended even with violence. Leubover was the regularly appointed successor, but Chrodield, daughter and cousin of kings, heading a faction, attacked and put to flight the clerics who excommunicated her party. Gregory of Tours tells how Chrodield, having collected about her a band of murderers and vagrants of all kinds, dwelt in open revolt and ordered her followers to break into the nunnery at night and forcibly to bear off the abbess. But the abbess, who was suffering from a gouty foot, on hearing the noise of their approach, asked to be carried before the shrine of the Holy Ghost. The rebels rushed in with swords and lances, and mistaking in the dark the prioress for the abbess, carried her off, disheveled and stripped of her cloak. The bishops were afraid to enter Poitiers, and the nuns kept the district terrorized until the king sent troops to reduce them. Only after the soldiers had actually charged them, cutting them down with |