of nuns has gone forever. A higher development must be
sought for. The nun becomes impossible when we train the _intellect_;
Devotion says, Worship; the Mind adds, The Lord thy God. The Conscience
says, Do right; the Intellect shows what is right. The Heart says, Love
thy fellow-men; the Intellect tells the right way of loving them. Piety
and charity! these are glorious! these are the two angels from Heaven
which prompt us to help our brothers who need our help; but intellect
must show us the way to do it. To take a single instance. Piety and
charity cannot show us how to drain and ventilate and rebuild the hovels
of the poor in New York. No, every spade, every saw, every hammer
employed in that most righteous undertaking must be directed by
intellect, by science. Piety and charity may prompt, but intellect must
guide.

I know full well that many a woman's heart, guided only by her sacred
instinct of loving, acts out the law of right without any conscious
questioning of the intellect; that a thousand tender feet carry the
gospel of Christ along the alleys of New York and London, or along the
corridors of the Crimean hospital, though even there also woman's wit
has to aid woman's heart. The noble heart, the Christian love of
Florence Nightingale took her to those eastern shores; this made the
voice tender and the hand gentle. But whoso reads the account of what
she did, will see that beside these, wit and wisdom, keen discerning of
means to ends, ability to see what ought to be done, intellect, reason
in short, was necessary in order to make a Florence Nightingale
possible, together with an exhaustless fund of bodily endurance,
fortitude and stoicism.

Thus, then, we find that devotion, conscience, heart, and intellect are
all necessary to each other in the harmonious development of Human
Nature. Will they be found sufficient for a perfect life?

Put together a strong soul, a tender conscience, a woman's heart, and a
man's intellect, and we have a Charlotte Bronte,--surely one of the best
types of the modern mind. Will she find these four noble parts of Human
Nature sufficient for the task of living?

Let Charlotte Bronte answer, walking painfully across the moor with hand
held hard to beating side, sitting now and then upon a stone to keep
herself from falling, wondering why the daylight blinds her so, obliged
to give up Villette owing to the terrible headaches which it brings on.
Let Charlotte Bronte answer, dying