Steam is excellent if it be controlled. It can cause disaster if it be misused. God has given every girl a power that can be productive of immense good or incalculable harm.
Rachel, the lovely daughter of Laban, possessed this power, though she may not, at first, have even realized it. She came one day to the well to water her father's sheep and there she met, for the first time, her cousin Jacob. The effect on him was instantaneous and lasting. She exercised an attraction for him, and, to gain her, he willingly offered to serve her father for seven years. When they had passed "they seemed but a few days because of the greatness of his love." Laban was loath, even then, to part with the girl, and Jacob had to serve yet another seven years before he could marry Rachel.
Every girl has a power of this kind. It is necessary that she should recognize the value of this Godgiven possession. If she does not, she may easily fall into the disaster of using it for evil. There is a fascination for a girl in feeling that she can bend men to her will, make them her lackeys, use her power to attract in order to drive them wild with passion. Girls have done this; they are doing it still; they will always do it _ some of them, but not the Catholic girl who understands the sacredness of the gift God has given her.
An old woman of eightytwo said to a priest: "Father, please tell, everywhere you go, what I am now going to say to you. When I was young, I was supposed to be attractive and pretty. I am certain that I gloried in the power I knew myself to possess. As I lie here, coming to the end of my long life, I am tortured with the memory of the sins of boys which they would never have committed only for me. In my vanity and conceit I fancied myself smart; now I am sadly disabused and would wish to disabuse as many others as possible."
It is easy to be giddy and thoughtless, easy to laugh airily at those who venture in with a word of warning. But no Catholic girl can dismiss with a shrug of the shoulder her weighty responsibility. Certainly she should be as lighthearted and cheerful as any, but she has wisdom too behind her assumption of frivolity. She is very conscious that her power to attract could easily prove to be a spark setting a boy's passions on fire, and she is quite determined that she is never going to use God's gift against Him.
A priest recently received an anonymous letter from a Catholic mother. She wanted to know what to answer her daughter, aged fifteen, who had asked her to go away for a few days with "her boyfriend" _ the same age as the girl! What is the sense of writing such a letter? That mother might as well have asked the priest what to do if her girl had wanted to throw a lighted match into the haybarn.
Hoary and oldfashioned and outofstep with the modern generation, are we? I sincerely hope not. But truth does not change with the march of the years, and what was a danger to our mothers and grandmothers is not less a danger now. Would to God that the evidence for this statement were not overwhelming!
Jesus, Mary, to you I consecrate this gift, given me by God for His own purposes. I have a serious responsibility to you for it and for the use I make of it. Never let any person who comes into my life be a lesser friend of yours for being a friend of mine.