Chapter XLII

“But, Haydn,” said I, “your strange convent, fill’d
With age and vowless maids—you banish thence
Christ’s life, self-sacrifice.”
“And sacrifice
But sates the worst of vanity,” he said,
“Unless our yielding yield to higher good.
Christ’s work here glorified humanity—
I must believe that souls, not when outside
The world but in the world, though not of it,
And in the body acting bodily,
The lives transfiguring our common lives
And common cares, the most resemble His.—
The one who seeks to glorify herself
In feigning burial to human cares,
Humiliates rather her humanity.
She hints—not so?—that truest womanhood
Is maidenhood?—By Eve and Mary, false!—
The mother lives the model of her sex,
And not the maid. And she who seeks to lower
The mother’s rank that she may lift her own,
Yields less than she bids others yield to her.”

“But she serves God,” I said, “and others men.”

“How serves one God in doing this?” he ask’d.
“God made our nature. Who make way with it,
Make way with manhood, turn to suicide.
He made the world where works His Providence
To train our life. Who leave the world, leave Him—
May add but more damnation to their woe.”

“But if men leave the world,” I said, “for this,—
That they may serve the Church, how leave they God?—
They rather go to him.”
“What is the Church?”
He ask’d.
“The kingdom of the Lord,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” he cried; “and add the Master’s words:
‘The kingdom is within you.’—And, if so,
I own some right to heed the voice within;
And none can rightly bid my spirit bend,
A passive slave to laws outside of me.”