She loses parents, husband, and
only child, and her faith has vanished, and she even doubts whether
there be any God, since he can allow so much misery. She asks why, if he
were good and kind and loved his children, he could not have divided his
gifts more equally, why he could not have taken one child from her
neighbor who has seven, instead of her one ewe lamb. Allowance must be
made for the first unreason of terrible torture to the affections, and
the first heart-broken exclamations are not always to be trusted as an
index of the religious faith. But when in many a woman, this becomes a
chronic state of mind, is it not a serious question for educators to
ask, whether the fault does not lie in her narrow education? Ought she
not to have had her intellect so cultured that she should be able to
hold at once in her thought, and without confusion, these two truths:
that God's thought and care for the Universe must be a thought of Law
which cannot be broken for individual cases, and also that even one
sparrow does not fall without his notice?

Ought she not to have been educated into so wide a horizon of thought
that she herself, and her affairs, her loves, and hates, should not loom
up before her in such disproportionate size? A woman is to live in her
affections? But what if her affections have been outraged, betrayed, or
crushed? The sentiment is a very good one, but it is but sentiment
still, and our American girls will not be less strong in their
affections if we educate them into thought and knowledge, as well as
into emotion and blind belief. If the mere religious feeling which
belonged to the child is not led over into a something stronger and
surer, it becomes morbid and degenerates into sentimentality and
mysticism. Can we afford to let the strong feeling in our American girls
be lost for all real good, in this way? Shall we not rather direct it by
a sound religious education, into more healthy channels? In such a
completed education alone can we find the ground for any active
acceptance of our lot. "The constant new birth out of the grave of the
past, to the life of a more beautiful future, is the only genuine
reconciliation with destiny."

* * * * *

Only when we have accomplished such an education as this for our
American girls, the best material the world has ever yet seen, may we
safely trust the interests of future generations to their strong,
intelligent, and religious gui