son which those
are learning all day long who study the works of God with reverent
accuracy, lest by misrepresenting them they should be tempted to say that
God has done that which He has not; and in that wholesome discipline I
long that women as well as men should share.

And now I come to a thrift of the highest kind, as contrasted with a
waste the most deplorable and ruinous of all; thrift of those faculties
which connect us with the unseen and spiritual world; with humanity, with
Christ, with God; thrift of the immortal spirit. I am not going now to
give you a sermon on duty. You hear such, I doubt not, in church every
Sunday, far better than I can preach to you. I am going to speak rather
of thrift of the heart, thrift of the emotions. How they are wasted in
these days in reading what are called sensation novels, all know but too
well; how British literature--all that the best hearts and intellects
among our forefathers have bequeathed to us--is neglected for light
fiction, the reading of which is, as a lady well said, "the worst form of
intemperance--dram-drinking and opium-eating, intellectual and moral."

I know that the young will delight--they have delighted in all ages, and
will to the end of time--in fictions which deal with that "oldest tale
which is for ever new." Novels will be read: but that is all the more
reason why women should be trained, by the perusal of a higher, broader,
deeper literature, to distinguish the good novel from the bad, the moral
from the immoral, the noble from the base, the true work of art from the
sham which hides its shallowness and vulgarity under a tangled plot and
melodramatic situations. She should learn--and that she can only learn
by cultivation--to discern with joy, and drink in with reverence, the
good, the beautiful, and the true; and to turn with the fine scorn of a
pure and strong womanhood from the bad, the ugly, and the false.

And if any parent should be inclined to reply--"Why lay so much stress
upon educating a girl in British literature? Is it not far more
important to make our daughters read religious books?" I answer--Of
course it is. I take for granted that that is done in a Christian land.
But I beg you to recollect that there are books and books; and that in
these days of a free press it is impossible, in the long run, to prevent
girls reading books of very different shades of opinion, and very
different religious worth. It may be, therefore, of