Book Description

Growing Up : A Story of the Girlhood of Judith Mackenzie “I was not sure whether it were to write a book, or to teach, or to go as a foreign missionary; I think I hoped it would be the foreign missionary, because that was the most self-sacrificing. The book was all one great joy. The teaching was absorbing, but I must go away to study. I was afraid to go away, I did not like to go away from Bensalem, I would miss my mother away from Bensalem, and you, and all the parsonage, and the whole village. But I thought I was called; as called as Roger was to preach, or any woman, saint, or heroine, who had done a great thing. You cannot think what it was to me. It made me old. I wanted God to speak out of Heaven and tell me what to do. It began to lose its selfishness, after that. The first thing that began to shake my confidence was something Mrs. Lane said that afternoon she talked to Jean and me about what women were doing and could do. She did not make woman’s work attractive; she took the heart out of me. I did not know why she should do that. I knew better all the time. I knew what women had done and were doing. I knew she was doing a noble work, literary work, work in prisons, temperance work; the instances she gave me seemed trivial, as if she were laughing at me. But something opened my eyes; I felt that I might be disobedient to my heavenly vision, that I was looking up into the heavens for my call, and the voice might be all the time in my ear. That was the night I came back here and found you so cozy and satisfied under your own roof-tree, with the voice in your ear, and the work in your hand. The world went away from me. I stayed. I am glad I stayed. My only trouble is, and it is a real trouble, that God did not care for my purpose, or my prayers; that he has let them go as if they never entered into his mind; I thought they were in his heart as well as mine.”