careless as to the life you lead, are you going to pass yourself off as an undamaged article on the woman who loves and worships you, and who gives herself so unreservedly to you that she loses her very name and takes yours?  Is it fair, is it honorable, is it even manly?  No, I see by your faces you are saying, ’I don’t think it is, I should have to confess.’  Well, that is better than basing your life on a dishonorable lie.  But, alas! it is no way out of the misery.  At the very moment when you would give all you possess to be worthy of that great love she gives you, you have to prove that you are unworthy; and the whole of the only last gleam of Eden that is left to this poor life of yours, the pure love of a man to a pure woman, is blotted out with bitter and jealous tears; the trail of the serpent is over it all.  I know well that women can love, and love passionately, impure men; but every woman will tell you that there is a love that a woman can only give to a man who has been faithful to her before marriage as well as after; and for ever and for ever there will be a shut door at the very heart of your Eden of which you have flung away the key, a love that might have been yours had you kept yourself worthy of it.  There is but one way out of the difficulty, now that in the changed position of women you can no longer honorably keep them in the dark—­to make up your mind that you will come to the woman you love in the glory of your unfallen manhood, as you expect her to come to you in the beauty of her spotless maidenhood.”

I did not know for one moment whether they would not break out into cooing like doves; but, on the contrary, they listened to me with profound attention, and I could see that none of my words went so home to them as those.  When I had finished my address a member of the committee said to one of the professors, “I think if she had asked them to go off and storm Edinburgh Castle they would have marched off in a body and done it.”  So great is the power of a woman pleading for women.

If I could use this sacred plea with effect under circumstances of—­I think you will allow—­such unspeakable difficulty, must it not be possible to you, the mother from whom such an appeal would come so naturally, to use this same influence, and in the quiet Sunday walk through the fields and woods where Nature herself seems to breathe of the sanctity of life in every leaf and flower, or in the quiet talk over the winter fireside before he leaves home, to plead with your son to keep himself faithful to his future wife, so that when he meets the woman he can love and make his wife, he may have no shameful secrets to confess, or, worse still, to conceal from her, no base tendencies to hand down to his unborn children after him?  Thank God! how many an American and English wife and mother can speak here from personal experience of the perfect love and perfect trust which have been bred of a pure life before marriage, and a knowledge that the sacraments of love and life had never been desecrated or defiled, so that no shadow of distrust or suspicion can ever darken the path of her married happiness.  How powerful the pleading of such a mother may become with her son, to give his future wife the same perfect trust and unclouded happiness in her husband’s love!