be the first in this higher field, to lead man and pay her debt to his educational
institutions, by resuming her crown. The ideal institutions, however, for the two
will always be radically and probably always increasingly divergent.
As a psychologist, penetrated with the growing sense of the predominance of the
heart over the mere intellect, I believe myself not alone in desiring to make a
tender declaration of being more and more passionately in love with woman as I
conceive she came from the hand of God. I keenly envy my Catholic friends
their Maryolatry. Who ever asked if the Holy Mother, whom the wise men
adored, knew the astronomy of the Chaldees or had studied Egyptian or
Babylonian, or even whether she knew how to read or write her own tongue, and
who has ever thought of caring? We can not conceive that she bemoaned any
limitations of her sex, but she has been an object of adoration all these centuries
because she glorified womanhood by being more generic, nearer the race, and
richer in love, pity, unselfish devotion and intuition than man. The glorified
madonna ideal shows us how much more whole and holy it is to be a woman
than to be artist, orator, professor, or expert, and suggests to our own sex that to
be a man is larger than to be gentleman, philosopher, general, president, or
millionaire.
But with all this love and hunger in my heart, I can not help sharing in the
growing fear that modern woman, at least in more ways and places than one, is
in danger of declining from her orbit; that she is coming to lack just confidence
and pride in her sex as such, and is just now in danger of lapsing to mannish
ways, methods, and ideals, until her original divinity may become obscured. But,
if our worship at her shrine is with a love and adoration a little qualified and
unsteady, we have a fixed and abiding faith without which we should have no
resource against pessimism for the future of our race, that she will ere long
evolve a sphere of life and even education which fits her needs as well as, if not
better than those of man fit his.
Meanwhile, if the eternally womanly seems somewhat less divine, we can turn
with unabated faith to the eternally childish, the best of which in each are so
closely related. The oracles of infancy and childhood will never fail. Distracted
as we are in the maze of new sciences, skills, ideals, knowledges that we can not
fully coördinate by our logic or curriculize by our pedagogy; confused between
the claims of old and new methods; needing desperately, for survival as a nation
and a race, some clue to thrid the mazes of the manifold modern cultures, we
have now at least one source to which we can turn—we have found the only