indeed, speak plainly on this point. A woman's first duties are
to her own family, her own servants. Be not deceived: if anyone
cannot rule her own household, she cannot rule the Church of God.
If anyone cannot sympathise with the servants with whom she is in
contact all day long, she will not really sympathise with the poor
whom she sees once a week. I know the temptation not to believe
this is very great. It seems so much easier to women to do
something for the poor, than for their own ladies' maids, and
house-maids, and cooks. And why? Because they can treat the poor
as THINGS: but they MUST treat their servants as persons. A lady
can go into a poor cottage, lay down the law to the inhabitants,
reprove them for sins to which she has never been tempted; tell
them how to set things right, which, if she had the doing of them,
I fear she would do even more confusedly and slovenly than they.
She can give them a tract, as she might a pill; and then a
shilling, as something sweet after the medicine; and she can go
out again and see no more of them till her benevolent mood recurs:
but with the servants it is not so. She knows their characters;
and, what is more, they know hers; they know her private history,
her little weaknesses. Perhaps she is a little in their power,
and she is shy with them. She is afraid of beginning a good work
with them, because, if she does, she will be forced to carry it
out; and it cannot be cold, dry, perfunctory, official: it must
be hearty, living, loving, personal. She must make them her
friends; and perhaps she is afraid of doing that, for fear they
should take liberties, as it is called--which they very probably
will do, unless she keeps up a very high standard of self-
restraint and earnestness in her own life--and that involves a
great deal of trouble, and so she is tempted, when she wishes to
do good, to fall back on the poor people in the cottages outside,