Josephine E. Butler

Sir James Stansfeld, the dear friend and leader of our cause, has passed over to the other side. There are judgments on earth of men’s acts, and there are judgments in heaven. It is not improbable that the parts of his life and character regarded as the least praiseworthy on earth will appear up there as the brightest parts of all. He had nothing to gain, and much to lose by separating himself in a measure from his colleagues in office, and setting aside chances of brilliant promotion and political prestige in order to descend with us into the inferno of human woe, to bring a gleam of hope to that world of doomed women, who more than all human sufferers are cast out from the favour of earth and the light of heaven. I have seldom met with a man who had so much of the woman’s heart in this matter. He had so deep a respect for womanhood, even at its worst, and so much tenderness for the fallen, that – like another great friend of Mazzini – he felt“instinctively the impulse to lift his hat when he met one of that sad sisterhood in the street, as a mark of his reverence for her poor wrecked womanhood, which would not have been ruined but for the co-operation (to use no sterner word) of the stronger being —man”.

When he first appeared for us in public, and for years after, he was pretty well baited and abused in newspapers of the Saturday Review type as a “faddist,” a champion of the “shrieking sisterhood,” a “friend,” in fact, of “publicans and sinners.” All that is past for him. His record is in Heaven. He does not need, he never needed, and never desired the poor praise of men. The quality which stands out the most prominently in my remembrance of him is his courage, his dauntless hope and confidence of final victory in a good cause. That cheerful confidence, that pluck characterised him to the very last. I wish there were more like him in this. I never remember to have heard a word from him indicating a feeling of depression about our work, not even at its darkest times. Good workers in a good cause, even when they know it to be God’s cause, sometimes fall into a minor key, and utter sad wails concerning the gathering clouds, the dark outlook, and the power of evil. I do not think, that with all his command of speech, our friend would have known how to formulate any such wail.

He was a born forlorn hope leader. No one is fit or safe to lead, or even I would say to follow, in a misunderstood and unpopular cause, or ever so humble a forlorn hope, who has not attained to so much of self-control as to be able to close his lips if he has reason to fear any utterance may be coming forth from them which is not a note of victory. Courage and faith are highly infectious. A sigh, or a sad look, or a “but” from a leader is equally infectious, and not in a good sense. Sometimes they are disastrous. And after all what is this kind of courage except moral faith? It is that faith in God and in His eternal promise which removes mountains, and which sees hope in the darkest hour, and more than hope – certainty of victory. The love of justice and liberty was born in him; it was in his bones, so to speak. From his youth upward he was an uncompromising defender of those principles, which have contributed to the true greatness of England; and so far he was, as he often said himself, a Conservative, for he was jealous for the conservation of principles and truths, which Tories and Radicals alike lose sight of when personal and party ambition begins to take the first place with them, to the exclusion of what is nobler and worthier than one’s wretched self or one’s poor party. He was also an international man in the best sense. His friends, good men of other countries, felt the warmth of his friendship and the soundness of his judgment to be untainted by narrow or insular prejudices.

A great Spanish politician, Señor Emilio Castelar,16 published some thirty years ago a manifesto, in which he set forth the doctrines and principles of what he considered a true and moderate Republicanism. He expressed his belief that Democracy can never attain to any lasting reforms and real progress unless it holds in respect the best elements of national life – its history, religious faith, and most honourable traditions; and he therefore earnestly called upon the Liberals of Spain (a minority impatient of the stagnation of life in their nation) to give up their position of conspirators, to avoid all violence, and to seek reform by organised and legal action, and so to educate themselves and their countrymen for a better state of government and national life. His words and actions won for him and his group of friends the title of Los hombres de manana, “the men of to-morrow.”

For the salvation of our country, and indeed of the world, we need that there should arise amongst us men of to-morrow, and women of to-morrow, that there should be watchmen on all our watch-towers, more than in times past, who will “watch for the morning,” and be able, with a clear and unfaltering voice, to answer the cry of their brethren, “Watchman, what of the night?” Such men and women of to-morrow will possess a living, though often a silent power, in the midst of all the noise and hurry of our social and political life; they will be not only the party of true progress, but the party of true conservatism, watchers for and guardians of the preservation of precious principles which are constantly threatened with destruction.

It is not enough to be wide-awake men of to-day. There is an urgent need for some among us to look on in advance. We need seers as well as workers. History teaches us how much we need them, and how much of human suffering has been needlessly inflicted and prolonged by the want of such seers among men. Especially is this evident in the moral and political life of a nation. A leader in politics of the early half of the century, speaking of a wrong to which he wished to put his hand in order to remove it, said, “We did not know, we did not perceive; and only now we are learning, and only now we begin to see.” There is a deep sadness in this confession, even when humbly and honestly made. It brings to our minds the words, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if thou hadst known the things that belong to thy peace; but now they are hid from thine eyes.” It is well to ask ourselves truthfully before God, “How far has such ignorance the character of moral guilt?” And it is well that we should realise that that moral guilt of ignorance needs none the less to be repented of and purged away because it is shared by thousands and because it may even be chiefly laid to the charge of generations gone by. Daniel the prophet was a great patriot and a wise politician. His confession was, We and our fathers have sinned; and prophet-like, and like a high priest of the people, he pleaded with God, as if he himself bore on his shoulders alone the guilt of the whole nation, in the past and the present.

It is impossible for the Christian patriot to look forward to the future of our English race, and even into the next few years, without some misgiving. The outlook also for the whole of Europe and of the world seems charged with the clouds and portents of a coming storm. “The morning cometh, and also the night.” The shadows of night will deepen, and the darkness increase awhile, before the glad cry is heard: “The morning cometh.”“Now is come the kingdom of our God and of His Christ.” God grant that heaven-taught spirits may again arise among us, not only one here and there, but many, like the stars appearing in the firmament as the shadows of evening deepen into night. God has such in preparation, I cannot doubt. They are arising – the prophets and prophetesses, the seers of the latter days. They are found and will be found among those who elect to live in the silence very near to God, and who realise in the most tenderly human sense the saving friendship of Christ.

A mother writes: “I fear he is going to the bad.” This she says of her son, her only son, who has left home to serve his country. “I fear he is going to the bad, but I must,” she says, “be like the woman in the Bible, who came to Jesus to cast the devil out of her daughter, and would not leave Him till He did it.” Yes, poor mother, you must, you must. That is your only hope; and you will conquer, only hold on. A mother’s love is most like the love of God of any human love. He made the mother’s heart, and He knows it to its depths. Secrets have been revealed to mothers which have not been shared by any other human being. Your heart is fixed, trusting in the Lord. You shall not be “afraid of evil tidings.” If troubling reports reach you, and if things seem to have come to the worst, and friends speak coldly of your son, and shake their heads (as even Christian friends will do) over your hope and confidence, yet hold on. You have suffered, they perhaps have not. They are “miserable comforters,” though they think they are speaking truly, and for your good. Listen to the voice of God only; look into the face of Jesus only – as she did, the Syrophenician mother, of whom the disciples only said, “Send her away.” Those, who have never known a mother’s woes, know little of the consolations God has for mothers, nor of the secrets which He reveals to them. “I have been with God in the dark. Go, you may leave me alone!” Thus a mother spoke concerning her dead son, when neighbours bewailed him as a lost soul. “I have been with God in the dark,” not in the light only, when there is hope and outward evidence to cheer the heart, but in the dark. It is in the dark that His light shines the brightest. One hour with Him, alone, in the dark, in the gloom of despair and helpless woe, has taught me more than years when I walked in the light of happy and hopeful circumstances. I fear nothing now, for I have been alone with God in the dark. Hold on, poor mother! Christ has given us His word of honour. That is enough for you and me.

A picture is now held up before the eyes of the whole world of the consequences which may wait upon an injustice inflicted on a single human being. All eyes are fixed upon the bitter conflict raging around the fate of that solitary prisoner in the Devil’s Island. A combination of unusual and wondrously significant circumstances has caused this case to become a cause célèbre, engrossing the interest of the whole civilised world. We may thank God indeed for the deep teachings of this terrible drama. But let us think for a moment of the thousands who have suffered as much, and more than this typical victim; of the crushed hearts of the host of women and men whose martyrdom has been known to none but God; or if known or guessed, has been unheeded, the sufferers being of humble rank, of character suspect, friendless, poor, and uncared for. Their cry has entered into the ears of the God of Sabaoth, as much as the “sorrowful sighing” of those noble prisoners of to-day. That great injustice, against which the “elect spirits” of France are so nobly protesting, could scarcely have been perpetrated among a people trained in respect for justice, and in a measure of self-restraint. It has beneath it a foundation of stricken souls and outraged hearts. It has been built up upon a Golgotha. Those who have eyes to see are beginning to see that the smoke of the impious sacrifice of even one of the humblest and most insignificant of human beings may serve to cloud the heavens, and to shut out the favour of God from a nation; and what must it be when that one is multiplied by thousands?

For thirty years past I have pleaded as well as I could the cause of the outcast. The time may not be long in which I shall be permitted to continue to plead it in this world. Pardon me then, Christian people – and all just men and just women, Christian or not – for uttering this cry from the depths of my soul at this close of the year, and approaching close of the century. The happiest of women myself in all the relations of life, God has done me the great favour of allowing me in a manner to be, for these thirty years, the representative of the outcast, of “the woman of the city who was a sinner.” It is her voice which I utter. Oh, hear it, I beseech you! It is by right of the great sorrow with which God pierced my heart long ago for His outcasts, that I speak; a sorrow which will never be wholly comforted till the day when I shall see millions of those cold, dead hands now stretched upon the threshold of our social and national life lifted to the throne of God in adoring and wondering praise for His final deliverance.“Thy dead men shall live” – all who have been done to death in sorrow and anguish; and God shall wipe the tears from all faces. And even for the present, for the near future there is hope, abundant hope, for Jehovah reigns, and the day of sifting has dawned.

My heart is often pained by hearing good women reiterate the statement that “men cannot be expected to exercise the self-restraint which is expected of women.” They say, “Men cannot be strictly virtuous; we women do not know what they have to overcome, nor the force of their temptations; in fact they must sin.” And women, even Christian women, whisper this the one to the other, even to their daughters, and so the low standard is perpetuated. The women who foster this opinion seem not to perceive that in announcing it they are (unconsciously probably) bringing a terrible accusation against God. They are representing Him as not only an illogical, but a cruel and unjust Being. What are the facts? God has created man with a conscience and with a will. He has given to man a Law and has attached penalties to the breaking of that Law; and yet you say that He has so created man that it is not possible for him to obey that Law. If this doctrine is widely accepted by women, it is no wonder that so many of them are atheists at heart. How can you, how can I reverence such a God as you represent Him to be? You might as well ask me to love and worship Baal or Moloch or Juggernaut as such a God as that. But it is not as you say. Look a little deeper.

It has been imposed upon me from time to time during my long life work to speak with men on this point – not only with men of blameless life, but with others who have fallen low. “Is it indeed the very truth,” I have asked, “that you absolutely cannot resist temptation?” And the answer has generally been, if coming from an honest heart, “I could resist if I determined to do so;” or,“I could once have resisted and overcome, but now– ” Ah, there is the secret, the sorrowful truth! After repeated and continual yielding, the will of man comes to be broken down. There comes upon him that most fatal of all moral diseases, the paralysis of the will; what he could do once he can no longer do. The will is as the citadel of a beleaguered city; when the citadel is taken the whole city yields, and then it may be and is true that there comes a time when the man cannot any longer combat or resist.

Shall we then, in so terrible a case as this, seeing such men and such women gliding down the slippery incline, regard them as hopeless, as beyond recovery? Shall we go on repeating the fatalist’s doctrine, which we hear so much around us, that it cannot be helped, it must be so, the man must go on sinning, he cannot recover himself? No, a thousand times no. With God all things are possible. He can restore power to the paralysed will, even as He can raise the dead. He does it, and we have seen with our eyes these His miracles of power and love.

And how, you ask me, by what means may such a restoration be accomplished? Replying from my own experience, I would say it is brought about very frequently by means of the divinely energised wills of others – chiefly of those creatures so dear to God, those mothers, wives, sisters, daughters and friends who have, through the teaching of the heart and the inspiration of God, learned and embraced that holiest of all ministries, the ministry of intercession. It has been said that the nearest, shortest way to a man’s heart is round by the throne of God. It is true. Direct advice, counsel, and warning to those who err may sometimes be effectual, and especially with the young. But too often they are wholly useless, and even excite antagonism. But the love, the power, the promise of God never fail.

But you tell me, “Oh, I am not good enough to pray for others, and to receive answers to my prayer.” This is a great mistake. What is our goodness to God? We are none of us good. Think of all the people mentioned in the Gospels who sought after Christ. What was it that brought them to His feet? It was not their goodness, but their great needs, wants and desires, their miseries, their sicknesses, their deep heart griefs, and the griefs and miseries of those dear to them. Our only claim in coming to Him is that we need Him and want Him. There is none other. It is written that God “turned the captivity of Job when he prayed for his friends.” We learn to know God in drawing near to Him on behalf of others. We fathom the deeper treasures of His love in pleading for those whom we love.

I hear people say sometimes, “But I have prayed for So-and-so for weeks, for months, and I have received no answer.” This reminds me of a little boy who made some childish request of God, and ended his prayer by saying, “I will wait three weeks, God, and no more.” We limit God. We measure the great work of His Spirit by the span of our little lives. We must rise above that thought, with courage and patience, and persistent trust and confidence, remembering that His years are not limited. He has all eternity to work in, all eternity in which to remember and fulfil our hearts’ desires.

When the case is one the issues of which reach into eternity, when it is the bringing from darkness into light of an immortal spirit, when it is the training and teaching of a soul, the correction of faults which sometimes requires a whole life’s discipline, or the evolution of some great good from a family’s or a nation’s griefs, then all childish impatience is out of place, foolish, and fatal often to the very fulfilment of that which is desired. “Though it tarry, wait for it,” said the seer, “because it will surely come.”

But your sad hearts are asking still concerning the wanderers whom you love. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? There is, there is. There is hope, not only for the weak and erring, but for the criminal who has been guilty of the moral death of another, for him on whose head rests the guilt of cruelty and treachery. “Nazarene, Thou hast conquered,” were the last words of Julian the Apostate, at the close of a lifetime of rebellion and defiance. The Nazarene is a great conqueror. The heart of the most scornful of the rebels against God’s holy laws may be broken, softened and laid bare to the healing dews of heaven; and his eyes may be opened to see, like Hagar, close at hand a well of water which he knew not of.

In speaking of life and love to some of the most fallen and wrecked of men and women, it has sometimes appeared as if I were speaking into the ears of a corpse, of one in whom there remains no longer any conscience or will to respond to the call of God. Sometimes I have been answered by the wildest blasphemies on the part of men, who later asked with hungry eyes, “Tell me truly, is there any hope for me?” Love is not easily persuaded that the moment of death has arrived. Love, like Rizpah, watches with a constancy stronger than death by the silent corpses of her dearly beloved and longed-for, with all her strength denying that they shall be given as carrion to the wolves and the vultures.

Suffer me to recall an incident, one only. On entering the ward of a large city hospital, reserved for women of the lowest class, I met the chaplain leaving the ward, his hands pressed upon his ears in order to shut out the sound of a torrent of blasphemy and coarse abuse, hurled after him by one of the inmates to whom he had spoken as his conscience had prompted him, and under a sincere sense of duty. I drew near to that woman. She was hideous to look at, dying and raging; a married woman who had had children and lost them, who had lived the worst of lives, descending lower and lower. She had been kicked (as it proved, to death) by the man, her temporary protector. Her broken ribs had pierced some internal organ, and there was no cure possible. Though dying, she was hungry, as indeed she had been for years, and was tearing like a wild beast at some scraps of meat and bread which had been given to her. An unseen power urged me to go near to her. Was it possible for anyone to love such a creature? Could she inspire any feeling but one of disgust? Yes, the Lord loved her, loved her still, and it was possible for one who loved Him to love the wretch whom He loved. I do not recollect what I said to her, but it was love which spoke. She gazed at me in astonishment, dropped her torn-up food, and flung it aside. She took my hand, and held it with a death-grip. She became silent, gentle. Tears welled from the eyes which had been gleaming with fury. The poor soul had been full to the brim of revenge and bitterness against man, against fate, against God. But now she saw something new and strange; she heard that she was loved, she believed it, and was transformed.

I loved her. It was no pretence, and she knew it. At parting I said, “I will come again,” and she gasped, “Oh, you will, you will!” I came again the morning of the next day. The nurse told me that she died at midnight, quiet, humble, “as peaceful as a lamb,” always repeating, “Has she come back? She will come again. Is she coming? Yes, she will come again.” If I had been asked, as I sometimes am, “But had she any clear perception of her own sinfulness, did she understand, etc.?” I could give no answer. I know not. I only know that love conquered, and that He who inspired the love which brought the message of His love to the shipwrecked soul knew what He was doing, and does not leave His work incomplete.

It is told among the many beautiful incidents of the early Church, that a young Roman soldier, converted to Christianity, and received as a catechumen, awaiting baptism, was called to serve in the field with the legion to which he belonged. The night after a battle, he found himself lying under the stars wounded and faint. Near him a fellow-soldier in the same condition as himself was groaning heavily. The night was cold, and his comrade’s wounds were exposed to the frosty air. “Take my cloak,” whispered Martin; and though in sore pain, and shivering himself, he folded his cloak tenderly around his comrade and fell asleep. Then there arose before him in his sleep a strange and beautiful vision. He saw in the skies a number of angelic beings and saints in light, in the midst of whom stood the Saviour, clothed in “raiment white and glistening,” and – strange! – wearing on His kingly shoulders, over the resplendent white, the poor, torn, bloodstained cloak of a Roman soldier. As Martin gazed in astonishment, the Saviour smiled, and turning to His angelic attendants said, “Behold Me with the cloak which Martin the catechumen hath given Me! For inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto Me.”

In one of the African provinces of Rome, partly Christianised, there occurred in the second century a sore famine. The inhabitants were driven to terrible straits. In a certain town, it is recorded by one of the old chroniclers, there lived a saintly bishop – not one of “my lords” of modern times, dwelling in a palace, but a humble shepherd or overseer of a scanty flock gathered out of the heathen city in which he dwelt. There lived in the same city a poor street musician, called Xanthus, an ignorant fellow of no good reputation. When the famine had endured some months, and Xanthus’ body presented the appearance of a walking skeleton, he saw, one evening in the twilight, a female form at the corner of a street, with the figure and bearing of a refined lady, though closely veiled and wearing a poor, used, black robe. She was holding out her hand for alms and receiving none, and worn and faint she yielded to the stress of hunger, and was about to accept the last terrible resource of selling her own person to a passer-by, who was apparently far above want. Penetrated with a sudden feeling of pity and horror, Xanthus interposed, and reverently begged the lady to accept of such poor help as he could give her. “Lady, I have little, but all I have shall be yours until these times of tribulation are over.” She moved towards him without replying, her tears alone proving her grateful acceptance of his aid. He led her back to her abode, and from that time forward he worked for her day and night, plying to the utmost his poor skill as a musician, affecting a cheerful manner, and adding to his fiddling various tricks and jokes to arrest the attention of the citizens who crossed his path. Every day he brought to the lady (for such she was) his modest gains, finding her food, and waiting on her, deeming it an honour that she should accept the help of such a creature as he.