cise enough for me.' Her whole
life is reversed."

The assumption is that all this is just as it should be. The thoughtless
person may fancy that it is a pity; but it is not a pity. This is
a model mother and a model state of things. It is not simply to be
submitted to, not simply to be patiently borne; it is to be aspired to
as the noblest and holiest state.

That is the strychnine. You may counsel people to take joyfully the
spoiling of their goods, and comfort, encourage, and strengthen them by
so doing; but when you tell them that to be robbed and plundered is of
itself a priceless blessing, the highest stage of human development,
you do them harm; because, in general, falsehood is always harmful, and
because, in particular, so far as you influence them at all, you prevent
them from taking measures to stop the wrong-doing. You ought to counsel
them to bear with Christian resignation what they cannot help; but you
ought with equal fervor to counsel them to look around and see if there
are not many things which they can help, and if there are, by all means
to help them. What is inevitable comes to us from God, no matter how
many hands it passes through; but submission to unnecessary evils is
cowardice or laziness; and extolling of the evil as good is sheer
ignorance, or perversity, or servility. Even the ills that must be borne
should be borne under protest, lest patience degenerate into slavery.
Christian character is never formed by acquiescence in or apotheosis of
wrong.

The principle that underlies these extracts, and makes them ministrative
of evil, is the principle that a woman can benefit her children by
sacrificing herself. It teaches, that pale, thin faces and feeble steps
are excellent things in young mothers,--provided they are gained by
maternal duties. We infer that it is meet, right, and the bounden
duty of such to give up society, reading, riding, music, and become
indifferent to dress, cultivation, recreation, to everything, in short,
except taking care of the children. It is all just as wrong as it can
be. It is wrong morally; it is wrong socially; wrong in principle, wrong
in practice. It is a blunder as well as a crime, for it works woe. It is
a wrong means to accomplish an end; and it does not accomplish the end,
after all, but demolishes it.

On the contrary, the duty and dignity of a mother require that she
should never subordinate herself to her children. When she does so, she
does it to t