MORAL MONEY-CLIPPERS.
MOST
of us, I fancy, are under the impression that the
pretty little crimped edge round all our coins except
the small threepenny piece is there for ornament.
The only practical use I ever heard of its being put to in
modern times was by the man whom Spurgeon describes as
nervously feeling round the edge of a threepenny-bit in his
waistcoat pocket, lest he should be betrayed into the
irreparable blunder of giving his God a penny too much. Few
of us know the tragical uses and meaning of that little
crimped border, how it has stood between many a man. and
a death of shame; how it has stood between the nation and
the greatest blow that can befall the prosperity of a nation,
a debased currency; how it put an end to a crime that was
seriously threatening the coin of the realm.
In olden time the crime of money-clipping was
extensively practised. Gangs were perpetually at work
clipping the edge of every coin that passed through their
hands, but so neatly that it was impossible to detect it
except by the scales. Every coin was in danger of giving
light weight, and falling below a true standard of value,
while the money-clippers drove a most profitable business
by melting down the gold and silver filings. Poor clumsy
humanity could think of no other way of putting a stop to
it but by hanging up his fellow-creature by the neck till he
was dead. The crime, from the excessive gravity of its
consequences, was pronounced capital. But all the hanging
in the world did not put a stop to money-clipping. At
length some nimble-witted man suggested that little crimped
edge which necessitated immediate detection; and the
crime of money-clipping disappeared.
By that simple device we got rid of the base
money-clipper. Would that there were any device by which we
could get rid of the baser conscience-clipper, who commits
the capital crime of debasing the moral currency! In this
connexion I know no sadder study than the study of
words, the current coin by which we exchange ideas.
Words that were stamped with the sovereignty of the
moral law, which once were 'defenders of the faith,' of
'The mighty truths that make us men,'
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have been deliberately so clipped and debased as to lose
their divine image and superscription, and we are left to
carry on the highest transactions of man with man by
means of a debased currency. Had not Christian
influence and Christian teaching been able in some degree
to hold its own, and even to restore some of this debased
coinage to its original value, we should have been in danger
of moral bankruptcy.
Our word 'Craft,' for instance; it is only the German
word for strength — Kraft, the attribute of God Himself.
'In the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength.' You see this
in the word 'handicraft,' the strength and cunning of the
right hand, that marvellous instrument which has been
given to man for working out the purposes of an intelligent
will. But through the tricks of trade the word 'strength'
has come to mean 'deceit and lying,' and the strength of
God is clipped down into the craft of the devil.
Or the word 'wealth' again. Emerson laughs at John
Bull for going down on his knees and blurting out the thick
desires of his heart for his sovereign, 'health and wealth.'
But when that prayer was written 'wealth' meant simply weal,
as it still does in commonwealth; and what better could we
pray for than weal of soul and health of body for our
sovereign? But, alas for John Bull's conception of what is
the highest weal! 'Wealth,' which can be alone realised in
living the highest, and purest, and best life we can to the
glory of our God, has been clipped down to the possession
of money, in the abundance of which our Lord emphatically
says a man's life, his weal, does not consist.
Or, once again, take the word 'Feast.' It comes from a
Latin word, which simply means holiday. The French
word 'fête,' or the Italian 'festa,' has got little or no idea of
eating in it. It means banners, and music, and bright
processions, and glorious sunshine, and plenty of fun and
merriment. A merry mind,' Solomon tells us, 'is a
continual feast.' But in England the word has been clipped
down to mean, first and foremost, what a schoolboy would
call 'a jolly blow-out;' that full feeding which is one of the
least honourable of our national characteristics, and which
forms one of the greatest obstacles to a high and pure life,
'the plain living and high thinking' that Wordsworth speaks
of. No wonder Lowell says of us, 'The sense of the invisible
has been considerably fattened out of John Bull. To move
Jonathan an abstract idea is enough; but to move John
Bull you must make your fulcrum of beef and mutton.'
His very idea of enjoyment is plenty to eat — 'a Feast.'
But it is in the direction of pureness of living that the
disastrous activity of the conscience-clipper in debasing the
moral coinage is chiefly seen. We will begin with the word
'Virtue.' Look it out in Chambers' Dictionary, and you
will find for one of its meanings, 'Female purity.' But why
female purity? Why do we talk of a woman losing her
virtue? Why do we not also speak of a man falling from
virtue? The word is masculine in its derivation, not
feminine. It is simply the Latin for manliness. As we
have changed the thing, why not let us be honest and
change the word? change the Latin 'vir' ('man') to
'mulier' ('woman,') and speak in future of muliertue, frankly
acknowledging that, as manliness has been found impossible
to men, the word must be given over to women?
I cannot but think that every man must feel a twinge
of shame over that poor clipped and debased word. I
cannot but believe that the young men of to-day will vow to
restore the word to its original value. I have faith that
they will see that purity is virtue, an essentially virile grace;
that which, as every boat-trainer and college-tutor will tell
you, gives the clear brain, the iron nerve, and the strong
muscle; that in attaining to which we gain moral mastery
and strength of will; that which essentially 'differentiates'
the man from the brute, and lifts the manhood up into God,
and gives the power of divine vision, and high seeing, and
self-sacrificing endeavour; that which enables him, like
every true man, to use his strength as the guardian of
womanhood, to keep that womanhood pure and undefiled,
and fit to be the mother of our noble English race.
Young men, I leave that word with you. Look to it that
the dictionaries of the future define it not as 'female
purity,' but as 'unfallen manhood.'
Well, then, let us take another word, the word 'Virgin.'
Virtue is an exclusively masculine word in its derivation.
But this word has no sex. It simply comes from a Latin
word, 'virideo,' to be fresh and green, like one of those
great fragrant boughs of May that we break off from our
hawthorns in spring, with its fresh blossoms and its pure
green. In the Bible it is used indiscriminately of both
sexes. Tennyson so uses it in his Idyls of the King. How,
then, has it come to mean an unmarried woman, and not
equally an unmarried man? How is it that a man expects
the woman he loves to come to him on her marriage morn
a virgin, pure and undefiled, and would be half mad at the
wrong done to him if he found himself deceived; and yet
recognises no corresponding obligation upon himself, nor
thinks himself guilty of intolerable baseness in passing
himself off as an undamaged article on the woman who loves and
trusts him? Has not the woman who gives herself to the
man she loves with such boundless self-giving that her very
name is merged in his, has she not a right to require that
he should come to her in the virginal strength and freshness
of his unfallen manhood, as he expects her to come to him
in the beauty of her spotless maidenhood? Do you really
think that women or men either will go on being content
with this monstrous moral code, of which one half lives and
the other half is a corpse? How is it that the word 'virgin,'
under the influence of this code, has been clipped of halt
of its equivalence, and has taken on the feminine gender
alone?
We all know what, in the fearfully debased moral coinage
that some men seem to affect, the Latin word 'virideo' — to
be fresh and green, to be virgin — has got to mean. It
means to be drunk and silly! Truly the moral coin-clipper
has been at work here with a vengeance!
But we have not reached the bottom of the depth to
which the debasement of the moral currency can go. There
is a word which expresses a peculiarly heroic form of
courage. Our English history has never been wanting in
instances of gallantry. Our English race has always
blossomed into that brave flower. But latterly we have had its
perfect embodiment. The man who, at a moment's notice,
went off on a service of danger for his country; the man who,
abandoned till it was too late, bated no jot of high heart, or
lofty courage, or splendid endeavour; the man who lavished
prodigies of military genius and valour on an impossible
task, true to the last to the lives entrusted to him, one man
holding a host at bay, one man bearing up the whole weight
of the honour of England, till at length, through treachery,
he fell dead at his country's feet, before his loving comrades
could reach him; — there you have the perfect gallantry of
the Christian hero. But what have the miserable debasers
and clippers of our moral coinage done with this brave
word? Only a few generations back gallantry had come to
mean defiling the temple of a woman's body, breaking a
woman's heart, and destroying a woman's soul. The man
who got a name for gallantry was the man who could boast
of the number of his 'conquests,' like an Indian savage
displaying the number of his scalps. At least, the savage
adorned himself with the scalps of strong men who died in
open battle; but this gallant fellow embellishes his manly
person with the scalps of weak women and love-sick girls,
and it would seem that the ladies of that day thought it no
mean set-off to his charms. That we have wrested that
word back to its original meaning, and restored its
kingly stamp, shows that our moral advance, though slow,
is sure.
Would we could say that we had equally got back another
word which in some respects is a still more ghastly mockery.
There is a certain strong and unvarnished statement in an
old-fashioned book, which emphatically does not lend
itself to conscience-clippers. The statement is this:
'Whore-mongers and adulterers God will judge.' But do you think
that the man who is thus branded as a monger in a woman's
shame and degradation, a truckster by whose filthy money
the trade in the bodies and souls of his fellow-creatures is
alone made possible, do you think that he ever thinks of
himself under that stern and disgraceful name? By no
means. He only talks airily of himself as 'gay.' You
would think he was speaking of a flower-bed! The stern
old Bible word is clipped down into the word which we use
of flowers, and young children, and the mirth of innocent
things.
And that other stern and disgraceful word, weighted
with the thunders of Sinai. Alas for England! our outcast
women make but one and the same statement all over the
country: 'But for the married men, we could not make a
living.' But do you think that these men, who lay the
dynamite of their own lawless passions at the very base of
the keystone on which the family, and, with the family, all
progress, all social life, rests — these men who are ready to
wreck, not only a train, but all society, to get at their own
vile pleasures — these men who are perjured by their own
marriage-vows, and false to the mother of their own
children — do you think that they ever designate themselves
by that disgraceful name? Do you think, as they open the
Bible for family prayers — I assure you some of these men
are most pious, like the keeper of a den of infamy who
assured us that hers was a most excellently conducted
house, she always had prayers the last thing at night — do
you think that he ever apostrophises himself, 'Thou
adulterer and hypocrite! God shall judge thee?' By no
means. If he speaks of it, he speaks of it as a grey-haired
married man and eminent seat-holder did the other day to
his minister, 'as his little game;' or he owns to a few
'irregularities,' or he has been guilty of some 'indiscretions.'
The word which expresses the gravest offence against God
and man is clipped down to language which might be
adequate for a game at bagatelle, a hasty speech, or being
late two or three days running for dinner.
'The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked,' but in
nothing is it more deceitful than in its use of words, and in
nothing is it more desperately wicked than in the deliberate
way it debases the moral currency to pay its own debts.
Now the first obligation that rests upon us as men — an
obligation to our own souls, to our children who will come
after us, to our country — is, at any cost, at any sacrifice to
ourselves, to restore this debased moral currency. We will
resolve to have nothing to do with this coinage that gives
light weight when weighed in a just balance. We will have
no irregularities and indiscretions, when the 'irregularity' in
a man's path is an open sewer into which he has plunged
head foremost, when the 'indiscretion' is that of breaking
the law of God and defying the Judge of all the earth. The
adulterer shall be to us the man who deliberately poisons
the wells of the national life by defiling the sanctity of the
family and the purity of the home from which alone a
nation can draw its vigorous vitality. The man who
commits that sin which, at any rate in our public liturgy,
we class with all other deadly sins, shall be to us the man
who has incurred the awful sentence, 'He that defileth that
temple' — ay, the temple of his own body, and the shrine of
a woman's nature — 'him will God destroy.' We will speak
in deep sadness of heart of sins and transgressions and
crimes, not of irregularities and indiscretions and
misfortunes. We will not call 'gay' what God and the moral
sense He has implanted within us calls cursed. The man
who betrays a woman's trust, and then deserts her in her
hour of great pain, and shame, and peril, shall be to us
the unutterable sneak and coward he is, and the gallantry
of Englishmen shall be, so far, at least, as we are
concerned, shown in guarding and shielding the honour of
the unprotected girls of the poor, and taking care of the
weakest woman who comes in our path. If, alas! it is too
late for some of us, we will at least train those who are to
come after us to make it their ideal to wear the white
flower of a blameless life in all its virginal freshness; and
virtue shall again mean in our English tongue the perfect
manliness 'whose strength is as the strength of ten, because'
its 'heart is pure;' the manhood which is lifted up into God,
and has the whole wealth of the Divine nature to draw
upon, and keeps the continual feast of a joyful, fearless
spirit.
Above all, we will determinately maintain the 'law of
purity, as equally binding on men and women alike.' We
will not be like the Brahmins, who punish the crime of
adultery with the most awful severity, even to burning the
offender alive, unless he happened to belong to the caste of
the Brahmins who made the law, when he got off with only
the loss of his hair. It is men who make the laws, and we
must see to it that that which the law, the written and
unwritten law alike, requires of the woman it requires of the
man also who makes the law; and that, as at present, he
does not get off without the loss of so much as his hair for
that which he punishes with such awful severity in the
woman.
The man must be required in honour to come a virgin
to the woman as the woman to the man. 'If chastity is a
law for woman, it must be for every woman without exception;
and if it is a law for every woman it follows necessarily
that it must be so for every man,' unless we are going
to indulge in the moral turpitude of recognising a pariah
class of women made up of other men's sisters and other
men's daughters — not our own, God forbid that they should
be our own! — set apart for the uncleanness of men. This,
yea, this equal obligation of the law of purity is the great
natural law of the kingdom of which as men we are citizens,
and as citizens of that realm we will never rest till we have
restored to its moral currency the image of its King, till it is
stamped again with the sovereignty of the moral law, and
bears the ancient superscription, 'Holiness to the Lord.'
Inquiries respecting the White Cross Movement may be addressed to
the Rev, the Resident Chaplain to the Bishop of Durham, Auckland
Castle, Bishop Auckland. Specimens of Cards and Rules, and other
printed information, may be obtained on application (enclosing stamps) to
the Central Office of the Church of England Purity Society, 111 Palace
Chambers, 9 Bridge Street, Westminster, S.W.
Those who prefer the title, White Cross Union, Brotherhood, League,
&c., can obtain specially printed Cards of Membership at Hatchards,
Piccadilly.
LONDON:
Printed by STRANGEWAYS & SONS, Tower Street, Upper St. Martin's Lane.
