here can scarcely be found a religious family in which so few
anathemas have been denounced against this or that specific
diversion, as in ours. We aimed to take another road. The turn of
mind, the tendency of the employment, the force of the practice,
the bent of the conversation, the spirit of amusement, have all
leaned to the contrary direction, till the habits are gradually
worked into a kind of nature. It would be cruel to condemn a
creature to a retired life without qualifying her for retirement:
next to religion, nothing can possibly do this but mental
cultivation in women who are above the exercise of vulgar
employments. The girl who possesses only the worldly
acquirements--the singer and the dancer--when condemned to
retirement, may reasonably exclaim with Milton's Adam, when looking
at the constellations,

Why all night long shine these?
Wherefore, if none _behold_?

"Now the woman who derives her principles from the Bible, and her
amusements from intellectual sources, from the beauties of nature,
and from active employment and exercise, will not pant for
_beholders_. She is no clamorous beggar for the extorted alms of
admiration. She lives on her own stock. Her resources are within
herself. She possesses the truest independence. She does not wait
for the opinion of the world, to know if she is right; nor the
applause of the world, to know if she is happy.

"Too many religious people fancy that the infectious air of the
world is confined to the ball-room, or the play-house, and that
when you have escaped from these, you are got out of the reach of
its contagion. But the contagion follows wherever there is a human
heart left to its own natural impulse. And though I allow that
places and circumstances greatly contribute to augment or diminish
the evil; and that a prudent Christian will always avoid an
atmosphere which he thinks not quite wholesome; yet whoever lives
in the close examination of his own heart, will still find
something of the morbid mischief clinging to it, which will require
constant watching, whatever be his climate or his company.

"I have known pious persons, who would on no account allow their
children to attend places of gay resort, who were yet little
solicitous to extinguish the spirit which these pl