the very highest
importance to a girl to have her intellect, her taste, her emotions, her
moral sense, in a word, her whole womanhood, so cultivated and regulated
that she shall herself be able to discern the true from the false, the
orthodox from the unorthodox, the truly devout from the merely
sentimental, the Gospel from its counterfeits.

I should have thought that there never had been in Britain, since the
Reformation, a crisis at which young Englishwomen required more careful
cultivation on these matters; if at least they are to be saved from
making themselves and their families miserable; and from ending--as I
have known too many end--with broken hearts, broken brains, broken
health, and an early grave.

Take warning by what you see abroad. In every country where the women
are uneducated, unoccupied; where their only literature is French novels
or translations of them--in every one of those countries the women, even
to the highest, are the slaves of superstition, and the puppets of
priests. In proportion as, in certain other countries--notably, I will
say, in Scotland--the women are highly educated, family life and family
secrets are sacred, and the woman owns allegiance and devotion to no
confessor or director, but to her own husband or to her own family.

I say plainly, that if any parents wish their daughters to succumb at
last to some quackery or superstition, whether calling itself scientific,
or calling itself religious--and there are too many of both just now--they
cannot more certainly effect their purpose than by allowing her to grow
up ignorant, frivolous, luxurious, vain; with her emotions excited, but
not satisfied, by the reading of foolish and even immoral novels.

In such a case the more delicate and graceful the organization, the more
noble and earnest the nature, which has been neglected, the more certain
it is--I know too well what I am saying--to go astray.

The time of depression, disappointment, vacuity, all but despair, must
come. The immortal spirit, finding no healthy satisfaction for its
highest aspirations, is but too likely to betake itself to an unhealthy
and exciting superstition. Ashamed of its own long self-indulgence, it
is but too likely to flee from itself into a morbid asceticism. Not
having been taught its God-given and natural duties in the world, it is
but too likely to betake itself, from the mere craving for action, to
self-invented and unnatural duties out of the