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[218]
but “Mamma” rubbed us, and that was a whole pharmacopoeia in itself.
At this time she gave her first public lecture before the Parker Fraternity.
This was an important event to her; she had earnestly desired yet greatly dreaded it. She found the hall pleasant, the audience attentive.
“When I came to read the lecture,” she says, “I felt that it had a value.”
“All these things in my mind point one way, viz.: towards the adoption of a profession of Ethical exposition, after my sort.”
She had been asked to give a lecture at Tufts College, and says of this: “The difficulties are great, the question is to me one of simple duty.
If I am sent for, and have the word to say, I should say it.”
And again: “I determine that I can only be good in fulfilling my highest function — all else implies waste of power, leading to demoralization.”
She declined the invitation, “feeling unable to decide in favor of accepting it.”
“But I was sorry,” she says, “and I remembered the words: ‘He that hath put his hand to the plough and looketh back is not fit for the kingdom of heaven.’
God keep me from so looking back!”
The Journal of this spring is largely devoted to philosophic speculations and commentaries on Kant, whose theories she finds more and more luminous and convincing; now and then comes a note of her own:--
“ ‘I am God!’
says the fool.
‘I see God!’
says the wise man. For while you are your own supreme, you are your own God, and self-worship is true atheism.”
Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. 1916.
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