is not broad and absorbing enough? See what are some of its
objects of influence and endeavors. First, here are the very faintest
beginnings of intelligent existence to impress and mould--the embryos of
character to stamp. And who knows how important this moulding and
stamping may be? To go farther back still: Who knows what indelible
constitution may be, is, fixed upon the individual organism, for better,
for worse, by the authors of its life, that, if evil, no training, no
education, no work of grace, not even omnipotence, can expunge or alter?
This motherhood of woman, in its awful sanctity and mystery, in its
bearings upon the immortality of personal identity, is a fearful
dignity. Therein consists the first and chief claim of Woman to honor
and reverence. She who has been a mother has measured the profoundest as
well as the most exalted experience of which humanity is susceptible.
Let her see to it that she honor herself.

Here is the white and plastic tablet of the new-born soul. Let woman
fear and tremble to write on that, for the writing shall confront her
forever. Like the Roman Pilate, _what she has written, she has written_.
Here are the purblind human instincts to direct and culture; the
vagrant, unbridled hosts of the spontaneous emotions to be tutored and
restrained; the affections and the tastes to be trained toward the true,
the beautiful, and the good; the warring passions to be curbed and
disciplined; in short, the whole glorious domain of the heart and soul,
the moral and spiritual nature, is to be surveyed, studied, swayed by
that potential agency which woman possesses in a very eminent
degree--personal influence. By this agency, informed and vitalized by
love, she becomes the great educator in the great school of life, in the
family, in society, in the world. Women do not sufficiently appreciate
the importance of their work as the architects of character.
_Character!_ That, after all, is the man, the enduring individual, the
real _I_, to whom the Creator has said, _Live forever_! Character is
simply what education and habit make of a person, starting from the
foundation of his inherited organic idiosyncrasies. It is a result--the
work of time and countless shapings and impressings. It is not what a
man thinks of himself, nor what others think of him, but _what he really
is in the sight of God, his Maker_. This is what shall come out, at
last, from the obscurations and uncertainties of this lower atmo