STRICTURES ON THE MODERN SYSTEM OF
FEMALE EDUCATION.
VOL. I.
Domestic Happiness, thou only bliss
Of Paradise that has surviv'd the Fall!
Thou art not known where PLEASURE is ador'd,
That reeling Goddess with the zoneless waist.
Forsaking thee, what shipwreck have we made
Of honour, dignity, and fair renown!
COWPER.
STRICTURES ON THE MODERN SYSTEM OF
FEMALE EDUCATION.
WITH A VIEW OF THE PRINCIPLES AND CONDUCT PREVALENT AMONG WOMEN OF RANK AND FORTUNE.
By HANNAH MORE.
May you so raise your character that you may help to make the next age a better thing, and leave posterity in your debt, for the advantage it shall receive by your example.
LORD HALIFAX.
IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I.
LONDON:
PRINTED FOR T. CADELL JUN. AND W. DAVIES, IN THE STRAND. 1799.
CONTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME.
INTRODUCTION.
—Page ix
CHAP. I.
Address to women of rank and fortune on the effects of their influence on society.— Suggestions for the exertion of it in various instances. 1
CHAP. II.
On the education of women.—The prevailing system tends to establish the errors it ought to correct.—Dangers arising from an excessive cultivation of the fine arts. 55
CHAP. III.
External improvement.—Children's Balls. —French governesses.
—Page 80
CHAP. IV.
Comparison of the mode of female education in the last age with that of the present age.
Page 96
CHAP. V.
On the religious employment of time and money.—On the manner in which holidays are passed.—On selfishness and inconsideration. —Dangers arising from the world.
Page 109
CHAP. VI.
Filial obedience not the character of the age. —A comparison with the preceding age in this respect.—Those who cultivate the mind advised to study the nature of the soil.—Unpromising children often make strong characters.—Teachers too apt to devote their pains almost exclusively to children of parts.
Page 134
CHAP. VII.
On female study, and the initiation into knowledge.—Error of cultivating the imagination to the neglect of the judgment.— Books of reasoning recommended.
Page 154
CHAP. VIII.
On the moral and religious use of history and geography.
Page 175
CHAP. XI.
On the use of definitions, and the moral benefits of accuracy in language.
Page 196
CHAP. X.
On religion.—The necessity and duty of early instruction in religion shown by analogy with human learning.
Page 206
CHAP. XI.
On the manner of instructing young persons in religion.—General remarks on the genius of Christianity.
Page 228
CHAP. XII.
A scheme of prayer for young persons.
Page 257
INTRODUCTION.
IT is a singular injustice which is often exercised towards women, first to give them a most defective Education, and then to expect from them the most undeviating purity of conduct;—to train them in such a manner as shall lay them open to the most dangerous faults, and then to censure them for not proving faultless. Is it not unreasonable and unjust, to express disappointment if our daughters should, in their subsequent lives, turn out precisely that very kind of character for which it would be evident to an unprejudiced by-stander that the whole scope and tenor of their instruction had been systematically preparing them?
Some reflections on the present erroneous system are here with great deference submitted to public consideration. The Author is apprehensive that she shall be accused of betraying the interests of her sex by laying open their defects: but surely, an earnest wish to turn their attention to objects calculated to promote their true dignity, is not the office of an enemy: so to expose the weakness of the land as to suggest the necessity of internal improvement, and to point out the means of effectual defence, is not treachery, but patriotism.
Again, it may be objected to this little work, that many errors are here ascribed to women which by no means belong to them
exclusively,
and that it has seemed to confine to the sex those faults which are common to the species: but this is in some measure unavoidable. In speaking on the qualities of one sex the moralist is somewhat in the situation of the Geographer, who is treating on the nature of one country:—the air, soil, and produce of the land which he is describing, cannot fail in many essential points to resemble those of other countries under the same parallel; yet it is his business to descant on the one without adverting to the other: and though in drawing his map he may happen to introduce some of the neighbouring coast, yet his principal attention must be confined to that country he has undertaken to describe, without taking into account the resembling circumstances of the adjacent shores.
It may be objected also that the opinion here suggested on the state of manners among the higher classes of our countrywomen, may seem to controvert the just encomiums of modern travellers, who unanimously concur in ascribing a decided superiority to the ladies of this country over those of every other. But such is the state of manners in most of those countries with which the comparison has been made, that the comparative praise is almost an injury to
English
women. To be flattered for excelling those whose standard of excellence is very low, is but a degrading kind of commendation; for the value of all praise derived from superiority depends on the worth of the competitor. The character of British ladies, with all the unparalled advantages they possess, must never be determined by a comparison with the women of other nations, but by what they themselves might be if all their talents and unrivalled opportunities were turned to the best account.
Again, it may be said, that the Author is less disposed to expatiate on excellence than error: but the office of the historian of human manners is not panegyric, but delineation. Were the end in view eulogium and not improvement, eulogium would have been far more gratifying, nor would just objects for praise have been difficult to find. Even in her own limited sphere of observation, the Author is herself acquainted with much excellence in the class of which she treats;—with women who, possessing learning which would be thought extensive in the other sex, set an example of deep humility to their own;— women who, distinguished for wit and genius, are eminent for domestic qualities;—who, excelling in the fine arts, have carefully enriched their understandings;—who, enjoying great affluence, devote it to the glory of God;—who, possessing elevated rank, think their noblest style and title is that of a Christian.—
That there is also much worth which is little known, she is persuaded; for it is the modest nature of goodness to exert itself quietly, while a few characters of the opposite cast seem, by the rumour of their exploits, to fill the world; and by their noise to multiply their numbers. For it will generally be found in almost any bustle for notice, that the minority, by occupying the fore-ground, so seize the public attention and monopolize the public talk, that
they
appear to be the great body: and a few active spirits, provided their activity take the wrong turn and support the wrong cause, seem to fill the scene; and a few disturbers of order, who have the talent of thus exciting a false idea of their multitudes by their mischiefs, actually gain strength and swell their numbers by this fallacious arithmetic.
But the present work is no more intended for a panegyric on those purer characters who, acting from higher motives, seek not human praise, than for a satire on the avowedly licentious, who, acting from no motives but the impulse of the moment or the predominance of fashion, dislike not censure, so it may serve to rescue them from neglect or oblivion.
But there are multitudes of the young and the well-disposed, who have as yet taken no decided part, who are just launching on the ocean of life, just about to lose their own right convictions, and to counteract their better propensities, unreluctantly yielding themselves to be carried down the tide of popular practices, sanguine and confident of safety.—To these the Author would gently hint, that, when once embarked, it will be no longer easy to say to their passions, or even to their principles, "Thus far shall ye go, and no "further."
Should any reader revolt at what he conceives to be unwarranted strictness in this little book, let it not be thrown by in disgust before the following short consideration be weighed.—If in this Christian country we are actually beginning to regard the solemn office of Baptism as merely furnishing an article to the parish register;—if we are learning from our indefatigable Teachers, to consider this Christian rite as purely a legal ceremony retained for the sole purpose of recording the
age
of our children:—then, indeed, the prevailing System of Education and Manners on which these volumes presume to animadvert, may be adopted with propriety and persisted in with safety, without entailing on our children, or on our ourselves the peril of broken promises or the guilt of violated vows.—But, if the obligation which Christian Baptism imposes be really binding;—if the ordinance have, indeed, a meaning beyond a mere secular transaction, beyond a record of names and dates;—if it be an institution by which the child is solemnly devoted to God as his Father, to Jesus Christ as his Saviour, and to the Holy Spirit as his Sanctifier; if there be no definite period assigned when the obligation of fulfilling the duties it enjoins shall be superseded; —if, having once dedicated our offspring to their Creator, we no longer dare to mock Him by bringing them up in ignorance of His Will and neglect of His Laws;—if, after having enlisted them under the banners of Christ, to fight manfully against the three great enemies of mankind, we are no longer at liberty to let them lay down their arms; much less to lead them to act as if in alliance instead of hostility with these enemies; if after having promised that they shall renounce the vanities of the world, we are not allowed to invalidate the engagement; —if after such a covenant we should tremble to make these renounced vanities the supreme object of our own pursuit or of
their
instruction;—if all this be really so, then the Strictures on Modern Education in the first of these Volumes, and on the Habits of polished Life in the second, will not be found so repugnant to truth, and reason, and common sense, as may on a first view be supposed.
But if on candidly summing up the evidence, the design and scope of the Author be fairly judged, not by the customs or opinions of the worldly, (for every English subject has a right to object to a suspected or prejudiced jury,) but by an appeal to that divine law which is the only infallible rule of judgment; if on such an appeal her views and principles shall be found censurable for their rigour, absurd in their requisitions, or preposterous in their restrictions, she will have no right to complain of such a verdict, because she will then stand condemned by that court to whose decision she implicitly submits.
Let it not be suspected that the Author arrogantly conceives herself to be exempt from that natural corruption of the heart which it is one chief object of this slight work to exhibit; that she superciliously erects herself into the impeccable censor of her sex and of the world; as if from the critic's chair she were coldly pointing out the faults and errors of another order of beings, in whose welfare she had not that lively interest which can only flow from the tender and intimate participation of fellow-feeling.
With a deep self-abasement arising from a strong conviction of being indeed a partaker in the same corrupt nature; together with a full persuasion of the many and great defects of these Volumes, and a sincere consciousness of her inability to do justice to a subject which, however, a sense of duty impelled her to undertake, she commits herself to the candour of that Public which has so frequently, in her instance, accepted a right intention as a substitute for a powerful performance.
PATH,
March
14, 1799.
ON THE
PREVAILING SYSTEM
OF EDUCATION, MANNERS, AND HABITS OF WOMEN OF RANK AND FORTUNE.
CHAP. I.
Address to women of rank and fortune, on the effects of their influence on society.— Suggestions for the exertion of it in various instances.
AMONG the talents for the application of which women of the higher class will be peculiarly accountable, there is one, the importance of which they can scarcely rate too highly. This talent is influence. We read of the greatest orator of antiquity, that the wisest plans which it had cost him years to frame, a woman could overturn in a single day; and when one considers the variety of mischiefs which an ill-directed influence has been known to produce, one is led to reflect with the most sanguine hope on the beneficial effects to be expected from the same powerful force when exerted in its true direction.
The general state of civilized society depends more than those are aware, who are not accustomed to scrutinize into the springs of human action, on the prevailing sentiments and habits of women, and on the nature degree of the estimation in which they are held. Even those who admit the power of female elegance on the manners of men, do not always attend to the influence of female principles on their character. In the former case, indeed, women are apt to be sufficiently conscious of their power, and not backward in turning it to account. But there are nobler objects to be effected by the exertion of their powers; and unfortunately, ladies, who are often unreasonably confident where they ought to be diffident, are sometimes capriciously diffident just when they ought to feel where their true importance lies; and, feeling, to exert it. To use their boasted power over mankind to no higher purpose than the gratification of vanity or the indulgence of pleasure, is the degrading triumph of those fair victims to luxury, caprice, and despotism, whom the laws and the religion of the voluptuous prophet of Arabia exclude from light, and liberty, and knowledge; and it is humbling to reflect, that in those countries in which fondness for the mere persons of women is carried to the highest excess,
they are slaves;
and that their moral and intellectual degradation increases in direct proportion to the adoration which is paid to mere external charms.
But I turn to the bright reverse of this mortifying scene; to a country where our sex enjoys the blessings of liberal instruction, of reasonable laws, of a pure religion, and all the endearing pleasures of an equal, social, virtuous, and delightful intercourse: I turn to them with a confident hope, that women, thus richly endowed with the bounties of Providence, will not content themselves with polishing, when they are able to reform; with entertaining, when they may awaken; and with captivating for a day, when they may bring into action powers of which the effects may be commensurate with eternity.
In this moment of alarm and peril, I would call on them with a "warning "voice," which should stir up every latent principle in their minds, and kindle every slumbering energy in their hearts; I would call on them to come forward, and contribute their full and fair proportion towards the saving of their country. But I would call on them to come forward, without departing from the refinement of their character, without derogating from the dignity of their rank, without blemishing the delicacy of their sex: I would call them to the best and most appropriate exertion of their power, to raise the depressed tone of public morals, to awaken the drowsy spirit of religious principle, and to re-animate the dormant powers of active piety. They know too well how imperiously they give the law to manners, and with how despotic a sway they fix the standard of fashion. But this is not enough; this is a low mark, a prize not worthy of their high and holy calling. For, on the use which women of the superior class may be disposed to make of that power delegated to them by the courtesy of custom, by the honest gallantry of the heart, by the imperious controul of virtuous affections, by the habits of civilized states, by the usages of polished society; on the use, I say, which they shall hereafter make of this influence, will depend, in no low degree, the well-being of those states, and the virtue and happiness, nay perhaps the very existence of that society.
At this period, when our country can only hope to stand by opposing a bold and noble
unanimity
to the most tremendous confederacies against religion and order, and governments, which the world ever saw; what an accession would it bring to the public strength, could we prevail on beauty, and rank, and talents, and virtue, confederating their several powers, to come forward with a patriotism at once firm and feminine for the general good! I am not sounding an alarm to female warriors, or exciting female politicians: I hardly know which of the two is the most disgusting and unnatural character. Propriety is to a woman what the great Roman critic says action is to an orator; it is the first, the second, the third requisite. A woman may be knowing, active, witty, and amusing; but without propriety she cannot be amiable. Propriety is the centre in which all the lines of duty and of agreeableness meet. It is to character what proportion is to figure, and grace to attitude. It does not depend on any one persection; but it is the result of general excellence. It shows itself by a regular, orderly, undeviating course; and never starts from its fober orbit into any splendid eccentricities; for it would be ashamed of such praise as it might extort by any aberrations from its proper path. It renounces all commendation but what is characteristic; and I would make it the criterion of true taste, right principle, and genuine feeling, in a woman, whether she would be less touched with all the flattery of romantic and exaggerated panegyric, than with that beautiful picture of correct and elegant propriety, which Milton draws of our first mother, when he delineates
Those thousand
decencies
which daily flow
From all her words and actions.
Even the influence of religion is to be exercised with discretion. A female Polemic wanders almost as far from the limits prescribed to her sex, as a female Machiavel or warlike Thalestris. Fierceness and bigotry have made almost as few converts as the sword, and both are peculiarly ungraceful in a female. Even
religious
violence has human tempers of its own to indulge, and is gratifying itself when it would be thought to be "working "the righteousness of God." But the character of a consistent Christian is as carefully to be maintained, as that of a fiery disputant is to be avoided; and she who is afraid to avow her principles, or ashamed to defend them, has little claim to that honourable title. A profligate, who laughs at the most sacred institutions, and keeps out of the way of every thing which comes under the appearance of formal instruction, may be disconcerted by the modest, but spirited rebuke of a delicate woman, whose life adorns the doctrines which her conversation defends: but she who administers reproof with ill-breeding, defeats the effect of her remedy. On the other hand, there is a dishonest way of labouring to conciliate the favour of a whole company, though of characters and principles irreconcilably opposite. The words may be so guarded as not to shock the believer, while the eye and voice may be so accommodated, modated, as not to discourage the infidel. She who, with a half earnestness, trims between the truth and the fashion; who, while she thinks it creditable to defend the cause of religion, yet does it in a faint tone, a studied ambiguity of phrase, and a certain expression in her countenance, which proves that she is not displeased with what she affects to censure; or that she is afraid to lose her reputation for wit, in proportion as she advances her credit for piety, injures the cause more than he who attacked it; for she proves, either that she does not believe what she professes, or that she does not reverence what fear compels her to believe. But this is not all: she is called on, not barely to repress impiety, but to excite, to encourage, and to cherish every tendency to serious religion.
Some of the occasions which are daily presenting themselves to ladies, of contributing to the general good, are almost too minute to be pointed out. Yet of the good which right-minded women, anxiously watching these minute occasions, and adroitly seizing them, might accomplish, we may form some idea by the ill effects which we actually see produced, by the mere leviry, carelesness, and inattention (to say no worse) of some of those ladies, who are looked up to as standards in the fashionable world.
I am persuaded, if many a one, who is now disseminating unintended mischief, under the dangerous notion that there is no harm in any thing short of positive vice; and under the false colours of that indolent humility, "What good can I "do?" could be brought to see in its collected force the annual aggregate of the random evil she is daily doing, by constantly throwing a
little
casual weight into the wrong scale, by mere inconsiderate and unguarded chat, she would start from her self complacent dream. If she could conceive how much she may be diminishing the good impressions of
young
men; and if she could imagine how little amiable levity or irreligion make her appear in the eyes of those who are older and abler, (however loose their own principles may be,) she would correct herself in the first instance, from pure good nature; and in the second, from worldly prudence and mere self-love. But on how much higher ground would she restrain herself, if she habitually took into account the important doctrine of consequences; and if she reflected that the lesser but more habitual corruptions make up by their number, what they may seem to come short of by their weight; then perhaps she would find that among the higher class of women,
inconsideration
is adding more to the daily quantity of evil than almost all the more ostensible causes put together.
There is an instrument of inconceivable force, when it is employed against the interests of christianity. It is not reasoning, for that may be answered; it is not learning, for luckily the infidel is not seldom ignorant; it is not invective, for we leave so coarse an engine to the hands of the vulgar; it is not evidence, for happily we have that all on our side. It is RIDICULE, the most deadly weapon in the whole arsenal of impiety, and which becomes an almost unerring shaft, when directed by a fair and fashionable hand. No maxim has been more readily adopted, or is more intrinfically false, than that which the fafcinating eloquence of a noble sceptic of the last age contrived to render so popular, that "ridicule is the test of truth." It is no test of truth itself; but of their firmness who assert the cause of truth, it is indeed a severe test. This light, keen, missile weapon, the irresolute, unconfirmed Christian, will find it harder to withstand, than the whole heavy artillery of infidelity united.
A young man of the better sort, just entered upon the world with a certain share of good dispositions and right feelings, not ignorant of the evidences, nor 'destitute of the principles of Christianity; without parting with his respect for religion, he sets out with the too natural wish of making himself a reputation, and of standing well with the fashionable part of the female world. He preserves for a time a horror of vice, which makes it not difficult for him to resist the grosser corruptions of society; he can as yet repel profaneness; nay he can withstand the banter of a club. He has sense enough to see through the miserable fallacies of the new philosophy, and spirit enough to expose its malignity. So far he does well, and you are ready to congratulate him on his security. You are mistaken: the principles of the ardent, and hitherto promising adventurer are shaken, just in that very society, where, while he was looking for pleasure, he doubted not of safety. In the society of certain women of good fashion and no ill fame, he makes shipwreck of his religion. He sees them treat with levity or derision subjects which he has been used to hear named with respect. He could confute an argument, he could unravel a sophistry; but he cannot stand a laugh. A sneer, not at the truth of religion, for that perhaps they do not disbelieve, but at its gravity, its unseasonableness, its dulness, puts all his resolution to slight. He feels his mistake, and struggles to recover his credit; in order to which, he adopts the gay affectatation of trying to seem worse than he really is; he goes on to say things which he does not believe, and to deny things which he does believe; and all to efface the first impression, and to recover a reputation which he has committed to
their
hands, on whose report he knows he shall stand or fall, in those circles in which he is ambitious to shine.
That cold compound of irony, irreligion, selfishness, and sneer, which make up what the French (from whom we borrow the thing as well as the word) so well express by the term
persiflage,
has of late years made an increadible progress in blasting the opening buds of piety in young persons of fashion. A cold pleasantry, a temporary cant word, the jargon of the day, for the "great vulgar" have their jargon, blight the first promise of seriousness. The ladies of
ton
have certain watch-words, which may be detected as indications of this spirit. The clergy are spoken of under the contemptuous appellation of
The Parsons.
Some ludicrous association is infallibly combined with every idea of religion. If a warm-hearted youth has ventured to name with enthusiasm some eminently pious character, his glowing ardour is extinguished with a laugh; and a drawling declaration that the person in question is really a mighty
harmless
good creature, is uttered in a tone which leads the youth secretly to vow, that whatever else he may be, he will never be a good harmless creature.
Nor is ridicule more dangerous to true piety than to true taste. An age which values itself on parody, burlesque, irony, and caricature, produces little that is sublime, either in genius or in virtue; but they
amuse,
and we live in an age which
must
be amused, though genius, feeling, truth, and principle, be the sacrifice. Nothing chills the ardours of devotion like a frigid sarcasm; and, in the season of youth, the mind should be kept particularly clear of all light associations. This is of so much importance, that I have known persons who, having been early accustomed to certain ludicrous combinations, were never able to get their minds cleansed from the impurities contracted by this habitual levity, even after a thorough reformation in their hearts and lives had taken place: their principles became reformed, but their imaginations were indelibly soiled. They could desist from sins which the strictness of Christianity forbade them to commit, but they could not dismiss from their minds images, which her purity would not allow them to entertain.
There was a time when a variety of epithets were thought necessary to express various kinds of excellence, and when the different qualities of the mind were distinguished by appropriate and discriminating terms; when the words venerable, learned, sagacious, profound, acute, pious, ingenious, elegant, agreeable, wise or witty, were used as specific marks of distinct characters. But the legislators of fashion have of late years thought proper to comprise all merit in one established epithet, and it must be confessed to be a very desirable one as far as it goes. This epithet is exclusively and indiscriminately applied wherever commendation is intended. The word
pleasant
now serves to combine and express all moral and intellectual excellence. Every individual, from the gravest professors of the gravest profession, down to the trifler who is of no profession at all, must earn the epithet of
pleasant,
or must be contented to be nothing; but must be consigned over to ridicule, under the vulgar and inexpressive cant word of a
bore.
This is the mortifying designation of many a respectable man, who, though of much worth and much ability, cannot perhaps clearly make out his letters patent to the title of
pleasant.
But, according to this modem classisication, there is no intermediate state, but all are comprised within the ample bounds of one or other of these two terms.
We ought to be more on our guard against this spirit of ridicule, because, whatever may be the character of the present day, its faults do not spring from the redundancies of great qualities, or the overflowings of extravagant virtues. It is well if more correct views of life, a more regular administration of laws, and a more settled state of society, have helped to restrain the excesses of the heroic ages; when love and war were considered as the great and sole business of human life. Yet, if that period was marked by a romantic extravagance, and the present by an indolent selfishness, our superiority is not so triumphantly decisive, as, in the vanity of our hearts, we may be ready to imagine.
I do not wish to bring back the frantic reign of chivalry, nor to reinstate women in that fantastic empire in which they then sat enthroned in the hearts, or rather in the imaginations of men. Common sense is an excellent material of universal application, which the sagacity of latter ages has seized upon, and rationally applied to the business of common life. But let us not forget, in the insolence of acknowledged superiority, that it was religion and chastity, operating on the romantic spirit of those times, which established the despotic sway of woman; and though she now no longer looks down on her adoring votaries, from the pedestal to which an absurd idolatry had listed her, yet let her remember that it is the same religion and chastity which once raised her to such an elevation, that must still furnish the noblest energies of her character.
While we lawfully ridicule the absurdities which we have abandoned, let us not plume ourselves on that spirit of novelty which glories in the opposite extreme. If the manners of the period in question were affected, and if the gallantry was unnatural, yet the tone of virtue was high; and let us remember that constancy, purity, and honour, are not ridiculous in themselves, though they may unluckily be associated with qualities which are so: and women of delicacy would do well to reflect, when descanting on those exploded manners, how far it be decorous to deride with too broad a laugh, attachments which could subsist on remote gratifications; or grossly to ridicule the taste which led the admirer to sacrifice pleasure to respect, and inclination to honour; to sneer at that purity which made self-denial a proof of affection, and to call in question the found understanding of him who preferred the fame of his mistress to his own indulgence.
One cannot but be struck with the wonderful contrast exhibited to our view, when we contemplate the manners of the two periods in question. In the former, all the flower of Europe smit with a delirious gallantry; all that was young and noble, and brave and great, with a fanatic frenzy and preposterous contempt of danger, traversed seas, and scaled mountains, and compassed a large portion of the globe, at the expence of ease, and fortune, and life, for the unprofitable project of rescuing, by force of arms, from the hands of infidels, the sepulchre of that Saviour, whom,
in the other period,
their posterity would think it the height of fanaticism so much as to name in good company: whose altars they desert, whose temples they neglect; and though in more than one country at least they still call themselves by his name, yet too many consider it rather as a political than a religious distinction; too many, it is to be feared, contemn his precepts; still more are ashamed of his doctrines, and not a few reject his sacrifice.
But in an age when inversion is the order of the day, the modern idea of improvement does not consist in altering, but extirpating. We do not reform, but subvert. We do not correct old systems, but demolish them, fancying that when every thing shall be new it will be perfect. Not to have been wrong, but to have been at all is the crime. Excellence is no longer considered as an experimental thing which is to grow gradually out of observation and practice, and to be improved by the accumulating additions brought by the wisdom of successive ages.
Our
wisdom is not a child perfected by gradual growth, but a goddess which starts at once, full grown, mature, armed capa-pee, from the heads of our modern thunderers. Or rather, if I may change the allusion, a perfect system is
now
expected inevitably to spring at once, like the fabled bird of Arabia, from the ashes of its parent, and can receive its birth no other way but by the destruction of its predecessor.
Instead of clearing away what is redundant, pruning what is cumbersome, supplying what is defective, and amending what is wrong, we adopt the indefinite rage for radical reform of Jack, who, in altering Lord Peter's
Swift's "Tale of a Tub."
coat, shewed his zeal by crying out,
Tear away, brother Martin, for the love of heaven; never mind, so you do but tear away.
This tearing system has unquestionably rent away some valuable parts of that strong, rich, native stuff which formed the antient texture of British manners. That we have gained much I am persuaded; that we have lost nothing I dare not therefore affirm. And though it fairly exhibits a mark of our improved judgment to ridicule the fantastic notions of love and honour in the heroic ages; let us not rejoice that that spirit of generosity in sentiment, and of ardour in piety, the exuberancies of which were then so inconvenient, are now sunk as unreasonably low. That revolution of manners which the unparalleled wit and genius of Don Quixote so happily effected, by abolishing extravagancies the most absurd and pernicious, was so far imperfect, that the virtues which he never meant to expose, fell into disrepute with the absurdities which he did: and it is become the turn of the present taste to attach in no small degree that which is ridiculous to that which is heroic. Some modern works of wit have assisted in bringing piety and some of the noblest virtues into contempt, by studiously associating them with oddity, childish simplicity, and ignorance of the world: and unnecessary pains have been taken to extinguish that zeal and ardour, which, however liable to excess and error, are yet the spring of whatever is great and excellent in the human character. The novel of Cervantes is incomparable; the Tartuffe of Moliere is unequalled; but true generosity and true religion will never lose any thing of their intrinsic value, because knight-errantry and hypocrisy are legitimate objects for satire.
But to return from this too long digression, to the subject of female influence. Those who have not watched the united operation of vanity and feeling on a youthful mind, will not conceive how much less formidable the ridicule of all his own sex will be to a very young man, than that of those women to whom he has been taught to look up as the arbitresses of elegance. Such an one, I doubt not, might be able to work himself up, by the force of genuine christian principle, to such a pitch of true heroism, as to refuse a challenge, (and it requires more real courage to refuse a challenge than to accept one,) who would yet be in danger of relapsing into the dreadful pusillanimity of the world, when he is told that no woman of fashion will hereafter look on him but with contempt. While we have cleared away the rubbish of the Gothic ages, it were to be wished we had not retained the most criminal of all their institutions. Why chivalry should indicate a madman, while its leading object, the
single combat,
should designate a gentleman, has not yet been explained. Nay the original motive is lost, while the sinful practice is continued; for the fighter of the duel no longer
pretends
to be a glorious redresser of the wrongs of strangers; no longer considers himself as piously appealing to heaven for the justice of his cause; but from the slavish fear of unmerited reproach, often selfishly hazards the happiness of his nearest connections, and always comes forth in direct defiance of an acknowledged command of the Almighty. Perhaps there are few occasions in which female influence might be exerted to a higher purpose than in this, in which laws and conscience have hitherto effected so little; but while the duellist (who perhaps becomes a duellist only because he was first a seducer) is welcomed with smiles; the more hardy youth, who, not because he fears man but God, declines a challenge; who is resolved to brave disgrace rather than commit sin, would be treated with cool contempt by those very persons to whose esteem he might reasonably look, as one of the rewards of his true and substantial fortitude.
But how shall it be reconciled with the decisions of principle, that delicate women should receive with complacency the successful libertine, who has been detected by the wretched father or the injured husband in a criminal commerce, the discovery of which has too justly banished the unhappy partner of his crime from virtuous society? Nay, if he happen to be very handsome, or very brave, or very fashionable, is there not sometimes a kind of dishonourable competition for his favour? But, whether his popularity be derived from birth, or parts, or person, or (what is often a substitute for all) from his having made his way into
good company,
women of distinction sully the sanctity of virtue by the too visible pleasure they sometimes express at the attentions of a popular libertine, whose voluble small talk they admire, and whose sprightly nothings they quote, and whom perhaps their very favour tends to prevent from becoming a better character, because he finds himself more acceptable as he is.
May I be allowed to introduce a new part of my subject, by remarking that it is a matter of inconceivable importance, though not perhaps sufficiently considered, when any popular work, not on a religious topic, but on any common subject, such as politics, history, or science, has happened to be written by an author of sound Christian prineiples? It may not have been necessary, nor prudently practicable, to have a single page in the whole work professedly religious: but still, when the living principle informs the mind of the writer, it is almost impossible but that something of its spirit will diffuse itself even into subjects with which it should seem but remotely connected. It is at least a comfort to the reader, to feel that honest confidence which results from knowing that he has put himself into safe hands; that he has committed himself to an author, whose known principles are a pledge that his reader need not be driven to watch himself at every step with anxious circumspection; that he need not be looking on the right hand and on the left, as if he knew there were pitfalls under the flowers which are delighting him. And it is no small point gained, that on subjects in which you do not look to
improve
your religion, it is at least secured from deterioration. If the Athenian laws were so delicate that they disgraced any one who shewed an inquiring traveller the wrong road, what disgrace, among Christians, ians, should attach to that author who, when a youth is inquiring the road to history or philosophy, directs him to blasphemy and unbelief?
In animadverting farther on the reigning evils which the times more particularly demand that women of rank and influence should repress, Christianity calls upon them to bear their decided testimony against every thing which is notoriously contributing to the public corruption. It calls upon them to banish from their dressing rooms, (and oh, that their influence could banish from the libraries of their sons and husbands!) that sober and unsuspected mass of mischief, which, by assuming the plausible names of Science, of Philosophy, of Arts, of Belles Lettres, is gradually administering death to the principles of those who would be on their guard, had the poison been labelled with its own pernicious title. Avowed attacks upon revelation are more easily resifted, because the malignity is advertised. But who suspects the destruction which lurks under the harmless or instructive names of
General History, Natural History, Travels, Voyages, Lives, Encyclopedias, Criticism, and Romance?
Who will deny that many of these works contain much admirable matter; brilliant passages, important facts, just descriptions, faithful pictures of nature, and valuable illustrations of science? But while "the "dead fly lies at the bottom," the whole will exhale a corrupt and pestilential stench.
Novels, which used chiefly to be dangerous in one respect, are now become mischievous in a thousand. They are continually shifting their ground, and enlarging their sphere, and are daily becoming vehicles of wider mischief. Sometimes they concentrate their force, and are at once employed to diffuse destructive politics, deplorable profligacy, and impudent infidelity. Rousseau was the first popular dispenser of this complicated drug, in which the deleterious infusion was
strong, and the effect proportionably fatal. For he does not attempt to seduce the affections but through the medium of the principles. He does not paint an innocent woman, ruined, repenting, and restored; but with a far more mischievous refinement, he annihilates the value of chastity, and with pernicious subtlety attempts to make his heroine appear almost more amiable without it. He exhibits a virtuous woman, the victim not of temptation but of reason, not of vice but of sentiment, not of passion but of conviction; and strikes at the very root of honour by elevating a crime into a principle. With a metaphysical sophistry the most plausible, he debauches the heart of woman, by cherishing her vanity in the erection of a system of male virtues, to which, with a lofty dereliction of those that are her more peculiar and characteristic praise, he tempts her to aspire; powerfully insinuating, that to this splendid system chastity does not necessarily belong: thus corrupting the judgment and bewildering the understanding, as the most effectual way to inflame the imagination and deprave the heart.
The rare mischief of this author consists in his power of seducing by falsehood those who love truth, but whose minds are still wavering, and whose principles are not yet formed. He allures the warmhearted to embrace vice, not because they prefer vice, but because he gives to vice so natural an air of virtue: and ardent and enthusiastic youth, too confidently trusting in their integrity and in their teacher, will be undone, while they fancy they are indulging in the noblest feelings of their nature. Many authors will more infallibly complete the ruin of the loose and ill-disposed; but perhaps (if I may change the figure) there never was a net of such exquisite art and inextricable workmanship, spread to entangle innocence and ensnare inexperience, as the writings of Rousseau: and, unhappily, the victim does not even struggle in the toils, because part of the delusion consists in imagining that he is set at liberty.
Some of our recent popular publications have adopted all the mischiefs of this school, and the principal evil arising from them is, that the virtues they exhibit are almost more dangerous than the vices. The chief materials out of which these delusive systems are framed, are characters who practise superfluous acts of generosity, while they are trampling on obvious and commanded duties; who combine sentiments of honour with actions the most flagitious: a high-tone of self-confidence, with a perpetual breach of self-denial: pathetic apostrophes to the passions, but no attempt to resist them. They teach that no duty exists which is not prompted by feeling: that impulse is the main spring of virtuous actions, while laws and principles are only unjust restraints; the former imposed by arbitrary men, the latter by the absurd prejudices of timorous and unenlightened conscience. In some of the most splendid of these characters, compassion is erected into the throne of justice, and justice is degraded into the rank of plebeian virtues. Creditors are defrauded, while the money due to them is lavished in dazzling acts of charity to some object that affected their senses; which fits of charity are made the sponge of every sin; and the substitute of every virtue: the whole indirectly tending to intimate how very
benevolent people are who are not Christians.
From many of these compositions, indeed, Christianity is systematically, and always virtually excluded; for the law and the prophets and the gospel
can
make no part of a scheme in which this world is looked upon as all in all; in which poverty and misery are considered as evils arising solely from human governments, and not from the dispensations of God: this poverty is represented as the greatest of evils, and the restraints which tend to keep the poor honest, as the most flagrant injustice. The gospel can have nothing to do with a system in which sin is reduced to a little human imperfection, and Old Bailey crimes are softened down into a few engaging weaknesses; and in which the turpitude of all the vices a man himself commits, is done away by his
candour
in tolerating all the vices committed by others.
But the most fatal part of the system to that class whom I am addressing is, that even in those works which do not go all the lengths of treating marriage as an unjust infringement on liberty, and a tyrannical deduction from general happiness; yet it commonly happens that the hero or heroine, who has practically violated the letter of the seventh commandment, and continues to live in the allowed violation of its spirit, is painted as so amiable and so benevolent, so tender or so brave; and the temptation is represented as so
irresistible,
(for all these philosophers are fatalists,) the predominant and cherished sin is so filtered and purged of its pollutions, and is so sheltered and surrounded, and relieved with shining qualities, that the innocent and impressible young reader is brought to lose all horror of the awful crime in question, in the complacency she feels for the engaging virtues of the criminal.
But there is a new and strong demand for the exertion of that power I am humbly endeavouring to direct to its true end. Those ladies who take the lead in society are loudly called upon to act as the guardians of public taste as well as public virtue, in an important instance. They are called upon to oppose with the whole weight of their influence, the irruption of those swarms of publications that are daily issuing from the banks of the Danube; which, like their ravaging predecessors of the darker ages, though with far other arms, are overrunning civilized society. Those readers, whose purer taste has been formed on the correct models of the old classic school, see with indignation and astonishment the Vandals once more overpowering the Greeks and Romans. They behold our minds, with a retrograde but rapid motion, hurried back to the reign of "chaos and old night," by wild and mis-shapen superstitions; in which, with that
consistency
which forms so striking a feature of the new philosophy, those who deny the immortality of the soul are most eager to introduce the machinery of ghosts; and by terrisic and unprincipled compositions, which unite the taste of the Goths with the morals of Bagshot
The newspapers announce that Schiller's 'Tragedy of the Robbers, which inflamed the young nobility of Germany to inlist themselves into a band of highwaymen to rob in the forests of Bohemia, is
now acting in England by persons of quality!
.
Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras dire!
The writings of the French infidels were some years ago circulated in England with uncommon industry, and with some effect: but the good sense and good principles of the far greater part of our countrymen resisted the attack, and rose superior to the trial. Of the doctrines and principles here alluded to, the dreadful consequences, not only in the unhappy country where they originated and were almost universally adopted, but in every part of Europe where they have been received, have been such as to serve as a beacon to surrounding nations, if any warning can preserve them from destruction. In this country the subject is now so well understood, that every thing which issues from the
French
press is received with jealousy; and a work, on the first appearance of its exhibiting the doctrines of Voltaire and his associates, is rejected with indignation.
But let us not on account of this victory repose in confident security. The modern apostles of infidelity and immorality, little less indefatigable in dispersing their pernicious doctrines than the first apostles were in propagating gospel truths, have only changed their weapons, but they have by no means desisted from the attack. To destroy the principles of Christianity in this island, appears at the present moment to be their grand aim. Deprived of the assistance of the French press, they are now attempting to attain their object under the close and more artificial veil of German literature. Conscious that religion and morals will stand or fall together, their attacks are sometimes levelled against the one and sometimes against the other. With occasional strong professions of attachment to both of them, the feelings and the passions of the reader are engaged on the side of some one particular vice, or some one objection to revealed religion. Poetry as well as prose, romance as well as history; writings on philosophical as well as political subjects, have thus been employed to instil the principles of
Illuminatism,
while incredible pains have been taken to obtain able translations of every book which it was supposed could be of use in corrupting the heart, or misleading the understanding. In many of these translations, the strongest passages, which, though well received in Germany, would have excited disgust in England, are wholly omitted, in order that the mind may be more certainly, though more slowly prepared for the full effect of the poison at another period.
Let not those to whom these pages are addressed deceive themselves, by supposing this to be a fable; but let them inquire most seriously whether I speak the truth, when I assert that the attacks of infidelity in Great Britain are at this moment principally directed against the female breast. Conscious of the influence of women in civil society, conscious of the effect which female infidelity produced in France, they attribute the ill success of their attempts in this country to their having been hitherto chiefly addressed to the male sex. They are now sedulously labouring to destroy the religious principles of women, and in too many instances they have fatally succeeded. For this purpose not only novels and romances have been made the vehicles of vice and infidelity, but the same allurement has been held out to the women of our country, which was employed by the original tempter to our first parent—Knowledge. Listen to the precepts of the new German enlighteners, and you need no longer remain in that situation in which Providence has placed you! Follow their examples, and you shall be permitted to indulge in all those gratifications which custom, not religion, has too far overlooked in the male sex!
We have hitherto spoken only of the German
writings;
but as there are multitudes who never read, equal pains have been taken to promote the same object through the medium of the stage: and this weapon is, of all others, that against which it is at the present moment the most important to warn my countrywomen. As a specimen of the German drama, it may not be unseasonable to offer a few remarks on the admired play of the
Stranger.
In this piece the character of an
adultress,
which, in all periods of the world, ancient as well modern, in all countries heathen as well as christian, has hitherto been held in detestation, and has never been introduced but to be reprobated, is for the first time presented to our view in the most pleasing and fascinating colours. The heroine is a woman who forsook a husband, the most affectionate and the most amiable, and lived for some time in the most criminal commerce with her seducer. Repenting at length of her crime, she buries herself in retirement. The talents of the poet during the whole piece are exerted in attempting to render this woman the object, not only of the compassion and forgiveness, but of the esteem and affection, of the audience. The injured husband, convinced of his wife's repentance, forms a resolution, which every man of true feeling and christian piety will probably approve. He forgives her offence, and promises her through life his advice, protection, and fortune, together with every thing which can alleviate the misery of her situation, but refuses to replace her in the situation of his wife. But this is not sufficient for the
German
author. His efforts are employed, and it is to be feared but too successfully, in making the audience consider the husband as an unrelenting savage, while they are led by the art of the poet anxiously to wish to see an adultress restored to that rank of women who have not violated the most solemn covenant that can be made with man, nor disobeyed one of the most positive laws which has been enjoined by God.
About the same time that this first attempt at representing an adultress in an exemplary light was made by a German dramatist, which forms an aera in manners; a direct vindication of adultery was for the first time attempted by a
woman,
a professed admirer and imitator of the German suicide Werter. The Female Werter, as she is styled by her biographer, asserts in a work, intitled
The Wrongs of Woman,
that adultery is justifiable, and that the restrictions placed on it by the laws of England constitute part of the
wrongs of woman.
But let us take comfort. These fervid pictures are not yet generally realised. These atrocious principles are not yet adopted into common practice. Though corruptions seem to be pouring in upon us from every quarter, yet there is still left among us a discriminating judgment. Clear and strongly marked distinctions between right and wrong still subsist. While we continue to cherish this sanity of mind, the case is not desperate. Though the crime above alluded to, the growth of which always exhibits the most irrefragable proof of the dissoluteness of public manners; though this crime, which cuts up order and virtue by the roots, and violates the sanctity of vows, is awfully increasing,
'Till senates seem,
For purposes of empire less conven'd
Than to release the adult'ress from her bonds;
yet, thanks to the surviving efficacy of a holy religion, to the operations of virtuous laws, and the energy and unshaken integrity with which these laws are
now
administered; and still more perhaps to a standard of morals which continues in force, when the principles which fanctioned it are no more; this crime, in the female sex at least, is still held in just abhorrence; if it be practised, it is not honourable; if it be committed, it is not justified; we do not yet affect to palliate its turpitude; as yet it hides its abhorred head in lurking privacy; and reprobation hitherto follows its publicity.
But on YOUR exerting your influence, with just application and increasing energy, it may in no small degree depend whether this corruption shall still continue to be resisted. For, from admiring to adopting, the step is short, and the progress rapid; and it is in the moral as in the natural world, the motion, in the case of minds as well as of bodies, is accelerated on a nearer approach to the centre to which they are tending.
O ye to whom this address is particularly directed! an awful charge is, in this instance, committed to your hands; as you shrink from it or discharge it, you promote or injure the honour of your daughters and the happiness of your sons, of both which you are the depositaries. And, while you resolutely persevere in making a stand against the encroachments of this crime, suffer not your firmness to be shaken by that affectation of charity, which is growing into a general substitute for principle. Abuse not so noble a quality as Christian candour, by misemploying it in instances to which it does not apply. Pity the wretched woman you dare not countenance; and bless HIM who has
made you to differ.
If unhappily she be your relation or friend, anxiously watch for the period when she shall be deserted by her betrayer; and see if, by your Christian offices, she can be snatched from a perpetuity of vice. But if, through the Divine blessing on your patient endeavours, she should ever be awakened to remorse, be not anxious to restore the forlorn penitent to that society against whose laws she has so grievously offended; and remember, that her soliciting such a restoration, furnishes but too plain a proof that she is not the penitent your partiality would believe; since penitence is more anxious to make its peace with heaven, than with the world. Joyfully would a truly contrite spirit commute an earthly for an everlasting reprobation! To restore a criminal to public society, is perhaps to tempt her to repeat her crime, or to deaden her repentance for having committed it; while to restore a strayed soul to God will add lustre to your Christian character, and brighten your eternal crown.
In the mean time, there are other evils, ultimately perhaps tending to this, into which we are falling, through that sort of fashionable candour which, as was hinted above, is among the mischievous characteristics of the present day. Of which period perhaps it is not the smallest evil, that vices are made to look so like virtues, and are so assimilated with them, that it requires watchfulness and judgment to analyze them and to discriminate between them. There are certain women of good fashion who practise irregularities not consistent with the strictness of virtue; while their good sense and knowledge of the world make them at the same time keenly alive to the value of reputation. They want to retain their indulgences, without quite forfeiting their credit; but finding their fame fast declining, they artfully cling, by flattery and marked attentions, to a few persons of more than ordinary character; and thus, till they are driven to let go their hold, continue to prop a falling fame.
On the other hand, there are not wanting women of distinction, of very correct general conduct, and of no ordinary sense and virtue, who, confiding with a high mind on what they too confidently call
the integrity of their own hearts;
anxious of deserving a good fame on the one hand, by a life free from reproach, yet secretly too desirous on the other of securing a worldly and fashionable reputation; while their general associates are persons of honour, and their general resort places of safety; yet allow themselves to be occasionally present at the midnight orgies of revelry and gaming, in houses of no honourable estimation; and thus help to keep up characters, which, without their sustaining hand, would sink to their just level of reprobation and contempt. While they are holding out this plank to a drowning reputation, rather, it is to be feared, to show their own strength than to assist another's weakness, they value themselves, perhaps, on not partaking of the worst parts of the amusements which may be carrying on; but they sanction them by their presence; they lend their countenance to corruptions they should abhor, and their example to the young and inexperienced, who are looking about for some such sanction to justify them in what they were before inclined to do, but were too timid to have done without the protection of such unsullied names. Thus these respectable characters, without looking to the general consequences of their indiscretion, are thoughtlessly employed in breaking down, as it were, the broad fence, which should ever separate two very different sorts of society, and are becoming a kind of unnatural link between vice and virtue.
But the great object to which you who are, or may be mothers, are more especially called, is the education of your children. If we are responsible for the use of influence in the case of those over whom we have no definite right; in the case of our children we are responsible for the exercise of acknowledged
power:
a power wide in its extent, indefinite in its effects, and inestimable in its importance. On YOU, depend in no small degree the principles of the whole rising generation. To your direction the daughters are almost exclusively committed; and to a certain age, to you also is consigned the mighty privilege of forming the hearts and minds of your infant sons. By the blessing of God on the principles you shall, as far as it depends on you, infuse into both sons and daughters, they will hereafter
arise and call you blessed.
And in the great day of general account may every Christian mother be enabled through divine grace to say, with humble confidence to her Maker and Redeemer,
Behold the children whom thou hast given me!
Christianity, driven out from the rest of the world, has still, blessed be God! a "strong hold" in this country. And though it be the special duty of the appointed "watchman,
now
that he seeth
the sword come upon the land, to blow the trumpet and warn the people, which if he neglect to do, their blood shall be required of the watchman's hand
Ezekiel, xxxiii. 6.
: yet, in this sacred garrison, impregnable but by neglect, YOU too have an awful post, that of arming the minds of the rising generation,
with the shield of faith, whereby they shall be able to quench the fiery darts of the wicked;
that of girding them with
that sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
If you neglect this your bounden duty, you will have done your utmost to expel Christianity from her last citadel. And, remember, the dignity of the work to which you are called, is no less than that of preserving the ark of the Lord.
CHAP. II.
On the education of women.—The prevailing system tends to establish the errors which it ought to correct.—Dangers arising from an excessive cultivation of the arts.
IT is far from being the object of this slight work to offer a regular plan of female education, a task which has been often more properly assumed by far abler writers;
but
it is intended rather to suggest a few remarks on the existing mode, which, though it has had many panegyrists, appears to be defective, not only in a few particulars, but as a general system. There are indeed numberless honourable exceptions to an observation which will be thought severe; yet the author questions if it be not the natural and direct tendency of the prevailing and popular system, to excite and promote those very defects, which it ought to be the main end and object of Christian education to remove; whether, instead of directing this important engine to attack and destroy vanity, selfishness, and inconsideration, that triple alliance in league against female virtue; the combined powers of instruction are not sedulously confederated in confirming their strength and establishing their empire?
If indeed the
material
substance, if the body and limbs, with the organs and senses, be really the more valuable objects of attention, then is there little room for animadversion and improvement. But if the immaterial and immortal mind; if the heart,
out of which are the issues of life,
be the main concern; if the great business of education be to implant ideas, to communicate knowledge, to form a correct taste and a sound judgment, to resist evil propensities, and, above all, to seize the favourable season for infusing principles and confirming habits; if education be a school to fit us for life, and life be a school to fit us for eternity; if such, I repeat it, be the chief work and grand ends of education, it may then be worth inquiring how far these ends are likely to be effected by the prevailing system.
Is it not a fundamental error to consider children as innocent beings, whose little weaknesses may perhaps want some correction, rather than as beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature and evil dispositions, which it should be the great end of education to rectify? This appears to be such a foundation-truth, that if I were asked what quality is most important in an instructor of youth, I should not hesitate to reply,
such a strong impression of the corruption of our nature, as should insure a disposition to counteract it; together with such a deep view and thorough knowledge of the human heart, as should be necessary for developing and controlling its most secret and complicated workings.
And let us remember that to
know the world,
as it is called, that is, to know its local manners, temporary usages, and evanescent fashions, is not to
know human nature:
and where this last mentioned knowledge is wanting, those natural evils which ought to be counteracted will be fostered.
Vanity, for instance, is reckoned among the light and venial errors of youth; nay, so far from being treated as a dangerous enemy, it is often called in as an auxiliary. At worst, it is considered as a harmless weakness, which subtracts little from the value of a character; as a natural effervescence, which will subside of itself, when the first ferment of the youthful passions shall have done working. But those know little of the conformation of the human, and especially of the female heart, who fancy that vanity is ever exhausted, by the mere operation of time and events. Let those who maintain this opinion look into our places of public resort, and there behold if the ghost of departed beauty is not to its last flitting fond of haunting the scenes of its past pleasures; the soul, unwilling (if I may borrow an allusion from the Platonic mythology) to quit the spot in which the body enjoyed its former delights, still continues to hover about the same place, though the same pleasures are no longer to be found there. Disappointments indeed may divert vanity into a new direction; prudence may prevent it from breaking out into excesses, and age may prove that it is "vexation of "spirit;" but neither disappointment, prudence, nor age can
cure
it; for they do not correct the principle. Nay, the very disappointment itself serves as a painful evidence of its existence.
Since then there is a season when the youthful must cease to be young, and the beautiful to excite admiration; to grow old gracefully is perhaps one of the rarest and most valuable arts which can be taught to woman. It is for this sober season of life that education should lay up its rich resources. However disregarded they may hitherto have been, they will be wanted now. When admirers fall away, and flatterers become mute, the mind will be driven to retire into itself, and if it find no entertainment at home, it will be driven back again upon the world with increased force. Yet forgetting this, do we not seem to educate our daughters, exclusively, for the transient period of youth, when it is to maturer life we ought to advert? Do we not educate them for a crowd, forgetting that they are to live at home? for the world, and not for themselves? for show, and not for use? for time, and not for eternity?
Vanity (and the same may be said of selfishness) is not to be resisted like any other vice, which is sometimes busy and sometimes quiet; it is not to be attacked as a single fault, which is indulged in opposition to a single virtue; but it is uniformly to be controlled, as an active, a restless, a growing principle, at constant war with all the Christian graces; which not only mixes itself with all our faults, but insinuates itself into all our virtues too; and will, if not checked effectually, rob our best actions of their reward. Vanity, if I may use the analogy, is, with respect to the other vices, what feeling is in regard to the other senses; it is not confined in its operation to the eye, or the ear, or any single organ, but diffused through the whole being, alive in every part, awakened and communicated by the slightest touch.
Not a few of the evils of the present day arise from a new and perverted application of terms; among these perhaps, there is not one more abused, misunderstood, or misapplied, than the term
accomplishments.
This word in its original meaning, signifies
completeness, perfection.
But I may safely appeal to the observation of mankind, whether they do not meet with swarms of youthful females, issuing from our boarding schools, as well as emerging from the more private scenes of domestic education, who are introduced into the world, under the broad and universal title of
accomplished young ladies,
of
all
of whom it cannot very truly and correctly be pronounced, that they illustrate the definition by a completeness which leaves nothing to be added, and a perfection which leaves nothing to be desired.
This phrenzy of accomplishments, unhappily, is no longer restricted within the usual limits of rank and fortune; the middle orders have caught the contagion, and it rages with increasing violence, from the elegantly dressed but slenderly portioned curate's daughter, to the equally fashionable daughter of the little tradesman, and of the more opulent, but not more judicious farmer. And is it not obvious, that as far as this epidemical mania has spread, this very valuable part of fociety declines in usefulness, as it rises in its unlucky pretensions to elegance? And this revolution of the manners of the middle class has so far altered the character of the age, as to be in danger of rendering obsolete the heretofore common saying,
that most worth and virtue are to be found in the middle station.
For I do not scruple to assert, that in general, as far as my little observation has extended, this class of females, in what relates both to religious knowledge and to practical industry, falls short both of the very high and the very low. Their new course of education, and the habits of life, and elegance of dress connected with it, peculiarly unfits them for the active duties of their own very important condition; while, with frivolous eagerness and secondhand opportunities, they run to snatch a few of those showy acquirements which decorate the great. This is done apparently with one or other of these views; either to make their fortune by marriage, or if that fail, to qualify them to become teachers of others: hence the abundant multiplication of supersicial wives, and of incompetent and illiterate governesses. The use of the pencil, the performance of exquisite but unnecessary works, the study of foreign languages and of music, require (with some exceptions, which should always be made in favour of great natural genius) a degree of leisure which belongs exclusively to affluence
Those among the class in question, whose own good sense leads them to avoid these mistaken pursuits, cannot be offended at a reproof which does not belong to them.
One use of learning languages is, not that we may know what the terms which express the articles of our dress and our table are called in French or Italian; not that we may think over a few ordinary phrases in English, and then translate them, without one foreign idiom; for he who cannot
think
in a language cannot be said to understand it: but the great use of acquiring any foreign language is, either that it enables us occasionally to converse with foreigners unacquainted with any other, or that it is a key to the literature of the country to which it belongs; and those humbler females, the chief part of whose time is required for domestic offices, are little likely to fall in the way of foreigners; and so far from enjoying opportunities for the acquisition of foreign literature, have seldom time to possess themselves of all that valuable knowledge, which the books of their own country so abundantly furnish; and the acquisition of which would be so much more useful and honourable than the paltry accessions they make, by hammering out the meaning of a few passages in a tongue they but imperfectly understand, and of which they are likely to make no use.
It would be well if the reflection how eagerly this redundancy of accomplishments is seized on by their inferiors, were to operate as in the case of other absurd fashions, which the great can feldom be brought to renounce from any other consideration than that they are adopted by the vulgar.
But, to return to that more elevated, and, on account of their more extended influence only, that more important class of females, to whose use this little work is more immediately dedicated. Some popular authors, on the subject of female instruction, had for a time established a fantastic code of artificial manners. They had refined elegance into insipidity, frittered down delicacy into frivolousness, and reduced manner into
minauderie.
But
to lisp and to amble and to nick-name God's creatures,
has nothing to do with true gentleness of mind; and to be silly makes no necessary part of softness. Another class of cotemporary authors turned all the force of their talents to excite
emotions,
to inspire
sentiment,
and to reduce all moral excellence into
sympathy
and
feeling.
These softer qualities were elevated at the expence of principle; and young women were incessantly hearing unqualified sensibility extolled as the perfection of their nature; till those who really possessed this amiable quality, instead of directing, and chastising, and restraining it, were in danger of fostering it to their hurt, and began to consider themselves as deriving their excellence from its excess; while those less interesting damsels, who happened not to find any of this amiable sensibility in their
hearts,
but thought it creditable to have it somewhere, fancied its seat was in the
nerves;
and here indeed it was easily found or feigned; till a false and excessive display of feeling became so predominant, as to bring in question the actual existence of that true tenderness, without which, though a woman may be worthy, she can never be amiable.
Fashion then, by one of her sudden and rapid turns, instantaneously struck out sensibility and affectation from the standing list of female perfections; and, by a quick touch of her magic wand, shifted the scene, and at once produced the bold and independent beauty, the intrepid female, the hoyden, the huntress, and the archer; the swinging arms, the confident address, the regimental, and the four-in-hand. These self-complacent heroines made us ready to regret their softer predecessors, who had aimed only at pleasing the other sex, while these aspiring fair ones struggled for the bolder renown of rivalling them. The project failed; for, whereas the former had sued for admiration, the latter challenged, seized, compelled it; but the men, as was natural, continued to prefer the more modest claimant to the sturdy competitor.
It were well if we, who have the advantage of contemplating the errors of the two extremes, were to look for truth where she is commonly to be found, in the plain and obvious middle path, equally remote from each excess; and, while we bear in mind that helplessness is not delicacy, let us also remember that masculine manners do not necessarily include strength of character nor vigour of intellect. Should we not reflect also, that we are neither to train up Amazons nor Circassians, but to form Christians? that we have to educate not only rational but accountable beings? and, remembering this, should we not be solicitous to let our daughters learn of the well-taught, and associate with the well-bred? In training them, should we not carefully cultivate intellect, implant religion, and cherish modesty? then, whatever is delicate in manners, would be the natural result of whatever is just in sentiment, and correct in principle: then, the decorums, the proprieties, theelegancies, and even the graces, as far as they are simple, pure, and honest, would follow as an almost inevitable consequence; for to follow in the train of the Christian virtues, and not to take the lead of them, is the proper place which religion assigns to the graces.
Whether we have made the best use of the errors of our predecessors, and of our own numberless advantages, and whether the prevailing system be really consistent with sound policy or with Christian principle, it may be worth our while to inquire.
Would not a stranger be led to imagine by a view of the reigning mode of female education, that human life consisted of one universal holiday, and that the grand contest between the several competitors was, who should be most eminently qualified to excel, and carry off the prize, in the various shows and games which were intended to be exhibited in it? And to the exhibitors themselves, would he not be ready to apply Sir Francis Bacon's observation on the Olympian victors, that they were so excellent in these unnecessary things, that their perfection must needs have been acquired by the neglect of whatever was necessary?
What would the polished Addison, who thought that one great end of a lady's learning to dance was, that she might know how to sit still gracefully; what would even the Pagan historian
Sallust.
of the great Roman conspirator, who could commemorate it among the defects of his hero's
accomplished
mistress,
that she was too good a singer and dancer for a virtuous woman;
what would these refined critics have said, had they lived as we have done, to see the art of dancing lifted into such importance, that it cannot with any degree of safety be confided to one instructor, but a whole train of successive masters are considered as absolutely essential to its perfection? What would these accurate judges of female manners have said, to see a modest young lady first delivered into the hands of a military sergeant to instruct her in the feminine art of marching? and when this delicate acquisition is attained, to see her transferred to a professor who is to teach her the Scotch steps; which professor, having communicated his indispensable portion of this indispensable art, makes way for the professor of French dances; and all perhaps in their turn, either yield to, or have the honour to co-operate with a finishing master; each probably receiving a stipend which would make the pious curate or the learned chaplain rich and happy?
The science of music, which used to be communicated in so competent a degree by one able instructor, is now distributed among a whole band. A young lady now requires, not a master, but an orchestra. And my country readers would accuse me of exaggeration were I to hazard enumerating the variety of musical teachers who attend in the same family; the daughters of which are summoned, by at least as many instruments as the subjects of Nebuchadnezzar, to worship the idol which fashion has set up. They would be incredulous were I to produce real instances, in which the delighted mother has been heard to declare, that the visits of masters of every art, and the masters for various gradations of the same art, followed each other in such close and rapid succession during the whole London residence, that her girls had not a moment's interval to look into a book; nor could she contrive any method to introduce one, till she happily devised the scheme of reading to them herself for half an hour while they were drawing, by which means no time was lost.
Before the evil is past redress, it will be prudent to reflect that in all polished countries an entire devotedness to the fine arts has been one grand source of the corruption of the women; and so justly were these pernicious consequences appreciated by the Greeks, among whom these arts were carried to the highest possible perfection, that they seldom allowed them to be cultivated to a very exquisite degree by women of great purity of character. And if the ambition of an elegant British lady should be fired by the idea that the accomplished females of those polished states were the admired companions of the philosophers, the poets, the wits, and the artists of Athens; and their beauty or talents the favourite subjects of the muse, the lyre, the pencil, and the chissel; so that their pictures and statues furnished the most consummate models of Grecian art: if, I say, the accomplished females of our days are panting for similar renown, let their modesty chastise their ambition, by recollecting that these celebrated women are not to be found among the chaste wives and the virtuous daughters of the Aristides's, the Agis's, and the Phocions; but that they are to be looked for among the Phrynes, the Lais's, the Aspasias, and the Glyceras. I am persuaded the Christian female, whatever be her talents, will renounce the desire of any celebrity when attached to impurity of character, with the same noble indignation with which the virtuous biographer of the above-named heroes renounced all dishonest fame, by exclaiming,
I had rather it should be said there never was a Plutarch, than that they should say Plutarch was malignant, unjust, or envious
No censure is levelled at the exertions of real genius, which is as valuable as it is rare; but at the absurdity of that system which is erecting
the whole sex
into artists.
And while this corruption, brought on by an excessive cultivation of the arts, has contributed its full share to the decline of states, it has always furnished an infallible symptom of their impending fall. The satires of the most penetrating and judicious of the Roman poets, corroborating the testimonies of the most accurate of their historians, abound with invectives against the depravity of manners introduced by the corrupt habits of female education. The bitterness and gross indelicacy of some of these satirists (too gross to be either quoted or referred to) make little against their authority in these points; for how shocking must those corruptions have been, and how obviously offensive their causes, which could have appeared so highly disgusting to minds not likely to be scandalized by slight deviations from decency! The famous ode of Horace, attributing the vices and disasters of his country to the same cause, might, were it quite free from the above objections, be produced, I will not presume to say as an exact picture of the existing manners of this country; but may I not venture to say, as a prophecy, the fulfilment of which cannot be very remote? It may however be observed, that the modesty of the Roman matron, and the chaste demeanor of her virgin daughters, which amidst the stern virtues of the state were as immaculate and pure as the honour of the Roman citizen, fell a sacrifice to the luxurious dissipation brought in by their Asiatic conquests; after which the females were soon taught a complete change of character. They were instructed to accommodate their talents of pleasing to the more vitiated tastes of the other sex; and began to study every grace and every art which might captivate the exhausted hearts, and excite the wearied and capricious inclinations of the men: till by a rapid and at length complete enervation, the Roman character lost its signature, and through a quick succession of slavery, effeminancy, and vice, sunk into that degeneracy of which some of the modern Italian states serve to furnish a too just specimen.
It is of the essence of human things that the same objects which are highly useful in their season, measure, and degree, become mischievous in their excess, at other periods, and under other circumstances. In a state of barbarism, the arts are among the best reformers; and they go on to be improved themselves, and improving those who cultivate them, till, having reached a certain point, those very arts which were the instruments of civilization and refinement, become instruments of corruption and decay; enervating and depraving in the second instance as certainly as they refined in the first. They become agents of voluptuousness. They excite the imagination; and the imagination thus excited, and no longer under the government of strict principle, becomes the most dangerous stimulant of the passions; promotes a too keen relish for pleasure, teaching how to multiply its sources, and inventing new and pernicious modes of artificial gratification.
May the author be allowed to address to our own country and our own circumstances, to both of which they seem peculiarly applicable, the spirit of that beautiful apostrophe of the most polished poet of antiquity to the most victorious nation?
Let us leave to the inhabitants of conquered countries the praise of carrying to the very highest degree of perfection, sculpture and the sister arts; but let
this
country direct her own exertions to the art of governing mankind in equity and peace, of shewing mercy to the submissive, and of abasing the proud among surrounding nations.
CHAP. III.
External improvement.—Children's balls.— French governesses.
LET me not however be misunderstood. The customs which fashion has established, when not in direct opposition to what is right, should unquestionably be pursued in the education of ladies. Piety maintains no natural war with elegance, and Christianity would be no gainer by making her disciples unamiable. Religion does not forbid that the exterior be made to a certain degree the object of attention. But the admiration bestowed, the sums expended, and the time lavished on arts which add little to the intrinsic value of life, should have limitations. While these arts should be admired, let them not be admired above their just value: while they are practised, let it not be to the exclusion of higher employments: while they are cultivated, let it be to amuse leisure, but not to engross life.
But it happens unfortunately, that to ordinary observers, the girl who is really receiving the worst education often makes the best figure. The outward accomplishments have the dangerous advantage of addressing themselves more immediately to the senses, and of course, meet every where with those who can in some measure appreciate as well as admire them; for all can see and hear, but all cannot scrutinize and discriminate. External acquirements too recommend themselves the more, because they are more rapidly as well as more visibly progressive. While the mind is led on to improvement by slow motions and imperceptible degrees; while the heart must now be admonished by reproof, and now allured by kindness; its liveliest advances being suddenly impeded by obstinacy, and its brightest prospects often obscured by passion; it is slow in its acquisitions of virtue, and reluctant in its approaches to piety. The unruly and turbulent propensities of the mind are not so obedient to the forming hand as defects of manner or awkwardness of gait. Often when we fancy that a troublesome passion is completely crushed, we have the mortification to find that we have "scotch'd the snake, not killed "it." One evil temper starts up before another is conquered. The subduing hand cannot cut off the ever-sprouting heads so fast as the prolific Hydra can re-produce them, nor fell the stubborn Antaeus so often as he can recruit his strength, and rise in vigorous and repeated opposition.
Hired teachers are also under a disadvantage resembling tenants at rack-rent; it is their interest to bring in an immediate revenue of praise and profit, and, for the sake of present rich crop, those who are not strictly conscientious, do not care how much the ground is impoverished for future produce. But parents, who are the lords of the soil, must look to permanent value, and to continued fruitfulness. The best effects of a careful education are often very remote; they are to be discovered in future scenes, and exhibited in as yet untried connections. Every event of life will be putting the heart into fresh situations, and making new demands on its prudence, its firmness, its integrity, or its forbearance. Those whose business it is to form and model it, cannot foresee those contingent situations specifically and distinctly; yet, as far as human wisdom will allow, they must enable it to prepare for them all by general principles, correct habits, and an unremitted sense of dependence on the Great Disposer of events. The young Christian militant must learn and practise all his evolutions; though he does not know on what service his leader may command him, by what particular foe he shall be most assailed, nor what mode of attack the enemy may employ.
But the contrary of all this is the case with external acquisitions. The master, it is his interest, will industriously instruct his young pupil, to set all her improvements in the most immediate and conspicuous point of view. To allure and to shine is the great principle sedulously inculcated into her young heart; and is considered as the fundamental maxim; and, perhaps, if we were required to condense the reigning system of the brilliant education of a lady into an aphorism, it might be comprised in this short sentence,
To make the most of herself.
This system however is the fruitful germ, from which a thousand yet unborn vanities, with all their multiplied ramifications will spring. A tender mother cannot but feel an honest triumph in completing those talents in her daughter which will necessarily excite admiration; but she will also shudder at the vanity that admiration may excite," and at the new ideas it will awaken; and, startling as it may sound, the labours of a wise mother anxious for her daughter's best interests, will seem to be at variance with those of all her teachers. She will indeed rejoice at her progress, but she will rejoice with trembling; for she is fully aware that if all possible accomplishments could be bought at the price of a single virtue, of a single principle, the purchase would be infinitely dear, and she would reject the dazzling but destructive acquisition. She knows that the superstructure of the accomplishments can be alone safely erected on the broad and solid basis of Christian humility: nay more, that as the materials of which that superstructure is to be composed, are in themselves of so unstable and tottering a nature, the foundation must be deepened, and enlarged with more abundant care, otherwise the fabric will be overloaded with its own ornaments, and what was intended only to embellish the building, will prove the occasion of its fall.
To every thing there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven,
said the wise man; but he said it before the invention of baby-balls. This modern device is a sort of triple conspiracy against the innocence, the health, and the happiness of children; thus, by factitious amusements, to rob them of a relish for the simple joys, the unbought delights, which naturally belong to their blooming season, is like blotting out spring from the year. To sacrifice the true and proper enjoyments of sprightly and happy children, is to make them pay a dear and disproportionate price for their artificial pleasures. They step at once from the nursery to the ball-room; and, by a preposterous change of habits, are thinking of dressing themselves, at an age when they used to be dressing their dolls. Instead of bounding with the unrestrained freedom of little wood-nymphs over hill and dale, their cheeks flushed with health, and their hearts overflowing with happiness, these
gay
little creatures are shut up all the morning, demurely practising the
pas grave,
and transacting the serious business of acquiring a new step for the evening, with more cost of time and pains than it would have taken them to acquire twenty new ideas.
Thus they lose the amusements which naturally belong to their smiling period, and unnaturally anticipate those pleasures (such as they are) which would come in, too much of course, on their introduction into fashionable life. The true pleasures of childhood are cheap and natural; for every object teems with delight to eyes and hearts new to the enjoyment of life; nay, the hearts of healthy children abound with a general disposition to mirth and joyfulness, even without a specific object to excite it; like our first parent, in the world's first spring, when all was new, and fresh, and gay about him,
they live and move,
And feel that they are happier than they know.
Only furnish them with a few simple and harmless materials, and a little, but not too much, leisure, and they will manufacture their own pleasures with more skill, and success, and satisfaction, than they will receive from all that your money can purchase. Their bodily recreations should be such as will promote their health, quicken their activity, enliven their spirits, whet their ingenuity, and qualify them for their mental work. But, if you begin thus early to create wants, to invent gratifications, to multiply desires, to waken dormant sensibilities, to stir up hidden fires, you are studiously laying up for your children a store of premature caprice and irritability, and discontent.
While childhood preserves its native simplicity, every little change is interesting, every gratification is a luxury; a ride or a walk will be a delightful amusement to a child in her natural state; but it will be dull and tasteless to a sophisticated little creature, nursed in these forced and costly and vapid pleasures. Alas! that we should throw away this first grand opportunity of working into a practical habit the moral of this important truth, that the chief source of human discontent is to be looked for, not in our real but in our factitious wants; not in the demands of nature, but in the artificial cravings of desire!
When one sees the growing zeal to crowd the midnight ball with these pretty fairies, one would be almost tempted to fancy it was a kind of pious emulation among the mothers to cure their infants of a fondness for vain and foolish pleasures, by tiring them out by this premature familiarity with them; and that they were actuated by something of the same principle, which led the Spartans to introduce their sons to scenes of riot, that they might conceive an early disgust at vice! or possibly, that they imitated those Scythian mothers who used to plunge their new born infants into the flood, thinking none to be worth saving who could not stand this early struggle for their lives: the greater part indeed, as it might have been expected, perished; but the parents took comfort, that if many were lost, the few who escaped would be the stronger for having been thus exposed.
To behold lilliputian coquettes, projecting dresses, studying colours, assorting ribbands and feathers, their little hearts beating with hopes about partners and fears about rivals; and to see their fresh cheeks pale after the midnight supper, their aching heads and unbraced nerves, disqualifying the little languid beings for the next day's task, and to hear the grave apology,
that it is owing to the wine, the crowd, the heated room of the last night's ball;
all this, I say, would really be as ludicrous, if the mischief of the thing did not take off from the merriment of it, as any of the ridiculous and preposterous disproportions in the diverting travels of Captain Lemuel Gulliver.
Under a just impression of the evils which we are sustaining from the principles and the practices of
modern
France, we are apt to lose sight of those deep and lasting mischiefs which so long, so regularly, and so systematically, we have been importing from the same country, though in another form and under another government. In one respect, indeed, the first were the more formidable, because we embraced the ruin without suspecting it; while we defeat the malignity of the latter, by detecting the turpitude and defending ourselves against it. This is not the place to descant on that levity of manners, that contempt of the Sabbath, that fatal familiarity with loose principles, and those relaxed notions of conjugal fidelity, which have often been transplanted into this country by women of fashion, as a too common effect of a long residence in that: but it is peculiarly suitable to my subject to advert to another domestic mischief derived from the same foreign extraction: I mean, the risks that have been run, and the sacrifices which have been made, in order to furnish our young ladies with the means of acquiring the French language in the greatest possible purity. Perfection in this accomplishment has been so long established as the supreme object; so long considered as the predominant excellence to which all other excellencies must bow down, that it would be hopeless to attack a law which fashion has immutably decreed, and which has received the stamp of long prescription. We must therefore be contented with expressing a wish, that this indispensable perfection could have been attained at the expence of sacrifices less important. It is with the greater regret I animadvert on this and some other prevailing practices, as they are errors into which the wise and respectable have, through want of consideration, or rather through want of firmness to resist the tyranny of fashion, sometimes fallen. It has not been unusual when mothers of rank and reputation have been asked how they ventured to intrust their daughters to foreigners, of whose principles they know nothing, except that they were Roman Catholics, to answer,
That they had taken care to be secure on that subject, for that it had been stipulated that the question of religion should never be agitated between the teacher and the pupil.
This, it must be confessed, is a most desperate remedy; it is like starving to death to avoid being poisoned. And one cannot help trembling for the event of that education, from which religion, as far as the governess is concerned, is thus formally and systematically excluded. Surely it would not be exacting too much to suggest at least that an attention no less scrupulous should be exerted to insure the character of our children's instructor for piety and knowledge, than is thought necessary to ascertain that she has nothing
patois
in her dialect.
I would rate a correct pronunciation and an elegant phraseology at their just price, and I would not rate them low; but I would not offer up principle as a victim to sounds and accents. And the matter is now made more easy; for whatever disgrace it might once have brought on an English lady to have had it suspected from her accent that she had the misfortune, not to be born in a neighbouring country; some recent events may serve to reconcile her to the suspicion of having been bred in her own: a country, to which, (with all its faults, which are many!) the whole world is looking up with envy and admiration, as the seat of true glory and of comparative happiness: a country, in which the exile, driven out by the crimes of his own, finds a home! a country, to obtain the protection of which it was claim enough to be unfortunate; and no impediment to have been the subject of her direst foe! a country, which in this respect, humbly imitating the Father of compassion, when it offered mercy to a suppliant enemy, never conditioned for merit, nor insisted on the virtues of the miserable as a preliminary to its own bounty!
CHAP. IV.
Comparison of the mode of female education in the last age with the present.
To return, however, to the subject of general education. A young lady may excel in speaking French and Italian, may repeat a few passages from a volume of extracts; play like a professor, and sing like a syren; have her dressing-room decorated with her own drawings, tables, stands, screens, and cabinets; nay, she may dance like Sempronia
See Cataline's Conspiracy.
herself, and yet may have been very badly educated. I am far from meaning to set no value whatever on any or all of these qualifications; they are all of them elegant, and many of them properly tend to the perfecting of a polite education. These things, in their measure and degree, may be done, but there are others which should not be left undone. Many things are becoming, but "one thing is needful." Besides, as the world seems to be fully apprized of the value of whatever tends to embellish life, there is less occasion here to insist on its importance.
But, though a well bred young lady may lawfully learn most of the fashionable arts, yet it does not seem to be the true end of education to make women of fashion
dancers, singers, players, painters, actresses, sculptors, gilders, varnishers, engravers,
and
embroiderers.
Most
men
are commonly destined to some profession, and their minds are consequently turned each to its respective object. Would it not be strange if they were called out to exercise their profession, or to set up their trade, with only a little general knowledge of the trades of all other men, and without any previous definite application to their own peculiar calling? The profession of ladies, to which the bent of
their
instruction should be turned, is that of daughters, wives, mothers, and mistresses of families. They should be therefore trained with a view to these several conditions, and be furnished with a stock of ideas and principles, and qualifications ready to be applied and appropriated, as occasion may demand, to each of these respective situations: for though the arts which merely embellish life must claim admiration; yet when a man of sense comes to marry, it is a companion whom he wants, and not an artist. It is not merely a creature who can paint, and play, and dress, and dance; it is a being who can comfort and counsel him; one who can reason and reflect, and feel, and judge, and discourse, and discriminate; one who can assist him in his affairs, lighten his cares, sooth his sorrows, strengthen his principles, and educate his children.
Almost any ornamental talent is a good thing, when it is not the best thing a woman has. And the writer of this page is intimately acquainted with several ladies who, excelling most of their sex in the art of music, but excelling them also in prudence and piety, find little leisure or temptation, amidst the delights and duties of a large and lovely family, for the exercise of this talent, and regret that so much of their own youth was wasted in acquiring an art which can be turned to so little account in married life; and are now conscientiously restricting their daughters in the portion of time allotted to its acquisition.
Far be it from me to discourage the cultivation of any existing talent; but may it not be suggested to the fond believing mother, that talents, like the spirit of Owen Glendower, though conjured with ever so loud a voice,
Yet will not come when you do call for them.
That injudicious practice, therefore, cannot be too much discouraged, of endeavouring to create talents which do not exist in nature.
That their daughters shall learn every thing,
is so general a maternal maxim, that even unborn daughters, of whose expected abilities and conjectured faculties, it is presumed, no very accurate judgment can previously be formed, are yet predestined to this universality of accomplishments. This comprehensive maxim, thus almost universally brought into practice, at once weakens the general powers of the mind, by drawing off its strength into too great a variety of directions; and cuts up time into too many portions, by splitting it into such an endless multiplicity of employments. I know that I am treading on tender ground; but I cannot help thinking that the restless pains we take to cram up every little vacuity of life, by crowding one new thing upon another, rather creates a thirst for novelty than knowledge; and is but a well-disguised contrivance to keep us in after-life more effectually from conversing with ourselves. The care taken to prevent
ennui
is but a creditable plan for promoting self-ignorance. We run from one occupation to another (I speak of those arts to which little intellect is applied) with a view to lighten the pressure of time; above all to save us from our own thoughts; whereas, were we thrown a little more on our own hands, we might at last be driven, by way of something to do, to try to get acquainted with our own hearts; and though our being less absorbed by this busy trifling and frivolous hurry, might render us somewhat more sensible of the taedium of life, might not this very sensation tend to quicken our pursuit of a better? For an awful thought here suggests itself. If life be so long that we are driven to set at work every engine to pass away the tediousness of time; how shall we do to get rid of the tediousness of eternity? an eternity in which not one of these acquisitions will be of the least use. Let not then the soul be starved by feeding it on these husks, for it can be no more nourished by them than the body can be fed with ideas and principles.
Among the boasted improvements of the present age, none affords more frequent matter of peculiar exultation, than the manifest superiority in the employments of the young ladies of our time over those of the good housewives of the last century. The present are employed in learning the polite arts, or in acquiring liberal accomplishments; while the others wore out their days in adorning the mansion-house with hangings of hideous tapestry and disfiguring tent-stitch. Most chearfully do I allow to the reigning modes their boasted superiority; for certainly there is no piety in bad taste. Still, granting all the deformity of the exploded ornaments, one advantage attended them; the walls and floors were not vain of their decorations; and it is to be feared, that the little person sometimes is. The flattery bestowed on the old employments, for probably even
they
had their flatterers, furnished less aliment and less gratification to vanity, and was less likely to impair the delicacy of modesty, than the exquisite cultivation of
personal
accomplishments or personal decorations; and every mode which keeps down vanity and keeps back
self,
has at least a moral use: and while one admires the elegant fingers of a young lady, busied in working or painting her ball dress, one cannot help suspecting that her alacrity may be a little stimulated by the animating idea
how very well she shall look in it.
Might not this propensity be a little checked, and an interesting feeling combined with her industry, were the fair artist habituated to exercise her skill in adorning some one else rather than herself? For it will add no lightness to the lightest head, nor vanity to the vainest heart, to take pleasure in reflecting how exceedingly the gown she is working will become her mother. This suggestion, trifling as it may seem, of habituating young ladies to exercise their taste and devote their leisure, not to the decoration of their own persons, but to the service of those to whom they are bound by every tender tie, would not only help to repress vanity, but by thus associating the idea of industry with that of filial affection, would promote, while it gratified, some of the best affections of the heart. The Romans (and it is mortifying, on the subject of Christian education to be driven so often to refer to the superiority of Pagans) were so well aware of the importance of keeping up a sense of family fondness and attachment by the same means which promoted simple and domestic employment, that no citizen of note ever appeared in public in any garb but what was spun by his wife and daughter; and this virtuous fashion was not confined to the days of republican severity, but even in all the pomp and luxury of imperial power, Augustus preserved this simplicity of manners.
Let me be allowed to repeat, that I mean not with preposterous praise to descant on the ignorance or the prejudices of past times, nor absurdly to regret that vulgar system of education which rounded the little circle of female acquirements within the limits of the sampler and the receipt book. Yet if a preference almost exclusive was then given to what was merely useful, a preference almost exclusive also is now assigned to what is merely ornamental. And it must be owned, that if the life of a young lady, formerly, too much resembled the life of a confectioner, it now too much resembles that of an actress; the morning is all rehearsal, and the evening is all performance: and those who are trained in this regular routine, who are instructed in order to be exhibited, soon learn to feel a sort of impatience in those societies in which their kind of talents are not likely to be brought into play: the task of an auditor becomes dull to her, who has been used to be a performer. And the excessive commendation which the visitor is expected to pay for his entertainment, not only keeps alive the flame of vanity in the artist by constant fuel, but is not seldom exacted at a price which a veracity at all strict would grudge; but when a whole circle are obliged to be competitors who shall flatter most, it is not easy to be at once very sincere and very civil.
That accurate judge of the human heart, Madame de Maintenon, was so well aware of the danger resulting from some kinds of excellence, that, after the young ladies of the Court of Louis Quatorze had distinguished themselves by the performance of some dramatic pieces of Racine, when her friends told her how admirably they had played their parts; "Yes," answered this wise woman, "so admirably that they shall never play again."
And unluckily, while the age is become so knowing and so fastidious, that if a young lady does not play like a public performer, no one thinks her worth attending to, yet if she does so excel, some of the soberest of the admiring circle feel a strong alloy to their pleasure, on reflecting at what a vast expence of time this perfection must probably have been acquired.
May I venture, without being accused of pedantry, to conclude this chapter with another reference to Pagan examples? The Hebrews, Egyptians, and Greeks, believed that they could more effectually teach their youth maxims of virtue, by calling in the aid of music and poetry; these maxims, therefore, they put into verses, and these again were set to the most popular and simple tunes, which the children sang; thus was their love of goodness excited by the very instruments of their pleasure; and the senses, the taste, and the imagination, as it were, pressed into the service of religion and morals. Dare I appeal to Christian parents, if these arts are commonly used by
them,
as subsidiary to religion and to a system of morals much more worthy of every ingenious aid and association, which might tend to recommend them to the youthful mind? Dare I appeal to Christian parents, whether music, which fills up no trifling portion of their daughters' time, does not fill it without any moral end, or even specific object? whether some of the favourite songs of polished societies are not amatory, are not Anacreontic, more than quite become the modest lips of innocent youth and delicate beauty?
CHAP. V.
On the religious employment of time.—On the manner in which holidays are passed.— Selfishness and inconsideration considered. —Dangers arising from the world.
THERE are many well disposed parents who, while they attend to these fashionable acquirements, do not neglect to infuse religious knowledge into the minds of their daughters; and having done this are but too apt to conclude that they have fully acquitted themselves of the important duties of education. For having, as they think, sufficiently grounded them in religion, they do not scruple to allow their daughters to spend almost the whole of their time exactly like the daughters of worldly people. Now, though it be one great point gained, to have imbued their young minds with the best knowledge, the work is not therefore accomplished. "What do ye more than others?" is a question, which in a more extended sense, religious parents must be prepared to answer.
Such parents should go on to teach children the religious use of time, the duty of consecrating to God every talent, every faculty, every possession, and of devoting their whole lives to his glory.
They should be more peculiarly on their guard against a spirit of idleness, and a slovenly habitual wasting of time, because this practice, by not assuming a palpable shape of guilt, carries little alarm to the conscience. Even religious characters are in danger on this side; for not allowing themselves to follow the world in its excesses and diversions, they have consequently more time upon their hands; and instead of dedicating the time so rescued to its true purposes, they sometimes make as it were compensation to themselves for their abstinence from dangerous places of public resort, by an habitual frivolousness at home; by a superabundance of unprofitable small-talk, idle reading, and a quiet and dull frittering away of time. Their day perhaps has been more free from actual evil; but it will often be found to have been as unproductive as that of more worldly characters; and they will be found to have traded to as little purpose with their master's talents. But a Christian must take care to keep his conscience peculiarly alive to the unapparent, though formidable, perils of unprofitableness.
To these, and to all, the author would earnestly recommend to accustom their children to pass at once from serious business to active and animated recreation; they should carefully preserve them from those long and torpid intervals between both, that languid indolence and spiritless trifling, which wears out such large portions of life in both young and old. It has indeed passed into an aphorism, that activity is necessary to virtue, even among those who are not apprized that it is also indispensable to happiness. So far are many parents from being sensible of this truth, that vacations from school are not merely allowed, but appointed to pass away in wearisome sauntering and indeterminate idleness; and this by way of converting the holidays into pleasure! Nay, the idleness is specifically made over to the child's mind, as the strongest expression of the fondness of the parent! A dislike to learning is thus systematically excited by preposterously erecting indolence into a reward for application!
These and such like errors of conduct arise from the latent but very operative principle of selfishness. This principle is obviously promoted by many habits and practices seemingly of little importance; and indeed selfishness is so commonly interwoven with vanity and inconsideration, that I have not always though it necessary to mark the distinction. They are alternately cause and effect; and are produced and re-produced by reciprocal operation. Ill-judging tenderness is in fact only a concealed self-love, which cannot bear to be witness to the uneasiness which a present disappointment, or difficulty, or vexation would cause to a darling child, yet does not scruple by improper gratification to store up for it future miseries, which the child will infallibly suffer, though it may be at a distant period which the mother will not perhaps behold.
Another principle something different from this, though it may properly fall under the head of selfishness, seems to actuate some parents in their conduct towards their children: I mean, a certain slothfulness of mind, a love of ease, which imposes a voluntary blindness, and makes them not choose to see what will give them trouble to combat. From such persons we frequently hear such expressions as these: "Children will be children:"
My children I suppose are much like those of other people,
&c. Thus we may observe this dangerous and delusive principle frequently turning off with a smile from the first indications of those tempers, which from their fatal tendency ought to be very seriously taken up. I would be understood now as speaking to conscientious parents, who consider it as a duty to correct the faults of their children, but who from this indolence of mind, are extremely backward in
discovering
such faults, and not very well pleased when they are pointed out by others. Such parents will do well to take notice that whatever they consider it as a duty to
correct,
must be equally a duty to endeavour to
find out.
And this love of case is the more to be guarded against, as it not only leads parents into erroneous conduct towards their children, but is peculiarly dangerous to themselves. It is a fault frequently cherished from ignorance of its real character; for, not bearing on it the strong features of deformity which mark many other vices, but on the contrary bearing some resemblance to virtue, it is frequently mistaken for the Christian graces of patience, meekness, and forbearance, than which nothing can be more opposite; these proceeding from the Christian principle of self-denial, the other from self-indulgence.
In this connection may I be permitted to remark on the practice at the tables of many families, when the children are at home for the holidays; every delicacy is forced upon them, with the tempting remark, "that they cannot have this "or that dainty at school;" and they are indulged in irregular hours from the same motive, "because they cannot have that "indulgence at school." Thus the natural seeds of idleness, sensuality, and sloth, are at once cherished, by converting the periodical visit at home into a season of intemperance, late hours, and exemption from study; so that children are habituated, at an age when lasting associations are formed in the mind, to connect the idea of study with that of hardship, of happiness with gluttony, and of pleasure with loitering, feasting, or sleeping. Would it not be better to make them combine the delightful idea of home, with the gratification of the social affections, the fondness of maternal love, the kindness and confidence of the sweet domestic attachments,
—And all the charities
Of father, son, and brother?
I will venture to say, that those listless and vacant days, when the thoughts have no precise object; when industry has no definite pursuit; when the mind and the body have no exercise, and the ingenuity no acquisition either to anticipate or to enjoy, are the longest, the dullest, and the least happy, which children of spirit and genius ever pass. Yes! it is a few short but lively intervals of animated pleasure, snatched from between the successive labours and duties of a busy day, looked forward to with hope, enjoyed with taste, and recollected without remorse, which, both to men and to children, yield the truest to men and to children, yield the truest portions of enjoyment. O snatch your offspring from adding to the number of those objects of supreme commiseration, who seek their happiness in doing nothing! Life is but a short day; but it is a working day. Activity
may
lead to evil; but inactivity
cannot
be led to good.
Young ladies should also be accustomed to set apart a fixed portion of their time as sacred to the poor
It would be a noble employment and well becoming the tenderness of their sex, if ladies were to consider the superintendance of the poor as their immediate office. They are peculiarly fitted for it; for from their own habits of life they are more intimately acquainted with domestic wants than the other sex; and, in certain instances of sickness and suffering peculiar to themselves, they should be expected to have more sympathy; and they have obviously more leisure. There is a certain religious society, distinguished by the simplicity of their dress, manners, and language, whose poor are perhaps better taken care of than any other; and one reason may be, that they are immediately under the inspection of the women.
, whether in relieving, instructing, or working for them; and the performance of this duty must not be left to the event of contingent circumstances, or the operation of accidental impressions; but it must be established into a principle, and wrought into a habit. A specific portion of time must be allotted to it, on which no common engagement must be allowed to intrench. This will help to furnish a powerful remedy for that selfishness whose strong holds, the truth cannot be too often repeated, it is the grand business of Christian education perpetually to attack. If we were but aware how much better it makes ourselves to wish to see others better, and to assist in making them so, we should find that the good done would be of as much importance by the habit it would induce in our own minds, as by its beneficial effects on others
In addition to the instruction of the individual poor, and the superintendance of charity schools, ladies might be highly useful in assisting the parochial clergy in the adoption of that excellent plan for the instruction of the ignorant, suggested by the Bishop of Durham in his last admirable charge to his clergy. It is with pleasure the author is enabled to add that the scheme has actually been adopted with good effect in that extensive diocese.
It will be requiring of children a very small sacrifice, if you teach them merely to give that money to the poor which belongs to the parent; this sort of charity commonly subtracts little from their own pleasures, especially when what they have bestowed is immediately made up to them, as a reward for their little fit of generosity. They will on this plan, soon learn to give not only for praise but for profit. The sacrifice of an orange to a little girl, or a feather to a great one, given at the expence of their own gratification, would be a better lesson of charity on its right ground, than a considerable sum of money, to be presently replaced by the parent. And it would be habituating them early to combine two ideas which ought never to be separated, charity and self-denial.
As an antidote to selfishness as well as pride and indolence, they should also very early be taught to perform all the little offices in their power for themselves; not to be insolently calling for servants where there is no real occasion; above all, they should be accustomed to consider the domestics' hours of meals as almost sacred, and the golden rule should be practically and uniformly inforced, even on so trifling an occasion as ringing a bell, through mere wantonness, or self-love, or pride.
To check the growth of inconsiderateness, young ladies should early be taught to discharge their little debts with punctuality. They should be made sensible of the cruelty of obliging trades-people to call often for the money due to them; and of hindering and detaining those whose time is the source of their subsistence, under pretence of some frivolous engagement, which ought to be made to bend to the comfort and advantage of others. They should conscientiously allow sufficient time for the execution of their orders; and with a Christian circumspection, be careful not to drive work-people by needless hurry, into losing their rest, or breaking the Sabbath. I have known a lady give her gown to a mantua-maker on the Saturday night, to whom she would not for the world say in so many words, "You must work through the whole "of Sunday," while she was virtually compelling her to do so, by an injunction to bring the gown home finished on the Monday morning, on pain of her displeasure. To these hardships numbers are continually driven by good-natured but inconsiderate employers. As these petty exactions of inconsideration furnish also a constant aliment to selfishness, let not a desire to counteract them be considered as leading to too minute details; nothing is too frivolous for animadversion, which tends to fix a bad habit in the superior, or to wound the feelings of the dependant.
Would it not be turning those political doctrines, which are now so warmly agitating, to a truly moral account, and give the best practical answer to the popular declamations on the inequality of human conditions; were the rich carefully to instruct their children to soften that inevitable inequality by the mildness and tenderness of their behaviour to their inferiors? This dispensation of God, which excites so many murmurs, would, were it thus practically improved, tend to establish the glory of that Being who is now so often reviled for his injustice; for God himself is covertly attacked in many of the invectives against laws and governments.
This dispensation thus properly improved, would at once call into exercise the generosity, kindness, and forbearance of the superior; and the patience, resignation, and gratitude of the inferior; and thus, while we were vindicating the
ways
of Providence, we should be accomplishing his
plan,
by bringing into action those virtues of both classes which would have had little exercise had there been no disproportion in ranks. Those who are so zealously contending for the privileges of rank and power, should never lose sight of the religious duties and considerate virtues which the possession of these imposes on themselves; duties and virtues which should ever be inseparable from those privileges. As the inferior classes have little real right to complain of
laws,
in this respect let the great be watchful to give them as little cause to complain of
manners;
by carefully training up their children to supply by individual kindness those cases which laws cannot reach: by such means every lesson of politics may be converted into a lesson of piety; and a spirit of love might win over some whom a spirit of invective will only inflame.
It can never be too often repeated, that one of the great objects of education is the forming of habits. Among the instances of negligence into which even religiously disposed parents and teachers are apt to fall, one is, that they are not sufficiently attentive in finding interesting employment for the Sunday. They do not make a scruple of sometimes allowing their children to fill up the intervals of public worship with their ordinary employments and common school exercises. They are not aware that they are thus training their offspring to an early and a systematic profanation of the Sabbath by this habit; for to children their tasks are their business: to them a French or Latin exercise is as serious an occupation as the exercise of a trade or profession is to a man; and if they are allowed to think the one right
now,
they will not be brought hereafter to think that the other is wrong; for the opinions and habits fixed at this early season are not easily altered. By this oversight even the friends of religion may be contributing eventually to that abolition of the Sabbath, so devoutly wished by its enemies, as the desired preliminary to the destruction of whatever is most dear to Christians. What obstruction would it offer to the general progress of youth, if all their Sunday exercises (which, with reading, composing, transcribing, and getting by heart, might be extended to an entertaining variety) were adapted to the peculiar nature of the day. It is not meant to impose on them such rigorous study as shall convert the day they should be taught to love, into a day of burdens and hardships, or to abridge their innocent enjoyments; but it is intended merely to suggest that there should be a marked distinction in the nature of their employments and studies; for on the observance or neglect of this, as was before observed, their future notions and principles will in a good degree be formed. The gospel in rescuing the Lord's day from the rigorous bondage of the Jewish Sabbath, never lessened the obligation to keep it holy, nor meant to sanction any secular occupation.
Though the author, chiefly writing with a view to domestic instruction, has purposely avoided entering on the disputed question, whether a school or home education be best; a question which perhaps must generally be decided by the state of the individual home, and the state of the indivdual school; yet she begs leave to suggest one remark, which peculiarly belongs to a school education; namely, the general habit of converting the Sunday into a visiting day by way of gaining time; as if the appropriate instructions of the Sunday were the cheapest sacrifice which could be made to pleasure. Even in those schools, in which religion is considered as an indispensable part of instruction, this kind of instruction is almost exclusively limited to Sundays: how then are girls ever to make any progress in this most important article, if they are habituated to lose the religious advantages of the school, for the sake of having more dainties for dinner abroad? This remark cannot be supposed to apply to the visits which children make to religious parents, and indeed it only applies to those cases where the school is a conscientious school, and the visit a trifling visit.
Among other subjects which engross a good share of worldly conversation, one of the most attracting is beauty. Many ladies have often a random way of talking rapturously on the general importance of beauty, who are yet prudent enough to be very unwilling to let their own daughters find out they are handsome. Perhaps the contrary course might be safer. If the little listener were not constantly hearing that beauty is the best gift, she would not be so vain from fancying herself to be the best gifted. Be less solicitous therefore to conceal from her a secret which with all your watchfulness she will be sure to find out, without your telling; but rather seek to lower the general value of beauty in her estimation. Use your daughter in all things to a different standard from that of the world. It is not by vulgar people and servants only that she will be told of her being pretty. She will be hearing it not only from gay ladies, but from grave men; she will be hearing it from the world around her. The antidote to the present danger is not now to be searched for; it must be already operating. It must have been provided for in the foundation laid in the general principle she had been imbibing, before this particular temptation of beauty came in question. And this general principle is an habitual indifference to flattery. She must have learnt not to be intoxicated by the praise of the world. She must have learnt also to estimate things by their intrinsic worth, rather than by the world's estimation. Speak to her with particular kindness and commendation of plain but amiable girls; mention with compassion such as are handsome but ill-educated; speak casually of some who were once thought pretty, but have ceased to be good; make use of the shortness and uncertainty of beauty, as strong additional reasons for making that which is little valuable in itself, still less valuable. As it is a
new
idea which is always dangerous, you may thus break the force of this danger by allowing her an early introduction to this inevitable knowledge, which would become more interesting, and of course more perilous by every additional year: and if you can guard against that fatal error of letting her see that she is more loved on account of her beauty, her familiarity with the idea may be less than its novelty afterwards would prove.
But the great and constant danger to which young persons in the higher walks of life are exposed, is the prevailing turn and spirit of general conversation. Even the children of better families who are well instructed when at their studies, are yet at other times continually beholding the WORLD set up in the highest and most advantageous point of view. Seeing the world! knowing the world! standing well with the world! making their way in the world! is spoken of as including the whole sum and substance of human advantages. They hear their education almost exclusively alluded to with reference to the figure it will enable them to make in the world. In almost all companies, they hear all that the world admires spoken of with admiration; rank flattered, power sought, beauty idolized, money considered as the one thing needful, and as the atoning substitute for the want of all other things; profit held up as the reward of virtue, and worldly fame as the just and highest prize of lawful ambition; and after the very spirit of the world has been thus habitually infused into them all the week, one cannot expect much effect from their being coldly told now and then on Sundays, that they must not
love the world, nor the things of the world.
To tell them once in seven days that it is a sin to gratify an appetite which you have been whetting the preceding six, is to require from them a power of self-control, which our knowledge of the impetuosity of the passions should have taught us is impossible.
This is not the place to animadvert on the usual misapplication of the phrase, "knowing the world," which term is commonly applied to keen, designing, selfish, ambitious men, who study mankind in order to turn it to their own account. But in the true sense of the expression, the sense which Christian parents would wish to impress on their children, to know the world, is to know its emptiness, its vanity, its futility, and its wickedness. To know it is to despise it; and in this view, an obscure Christian in a village may be said to know it better than a hoary courtier, or wily politician; for how can they be said to
know
it, who go on to love it, to value it, to be led captive by its allurements, to give their soul in exchange for its lying promises?
But while so false an estimate is often made in fashionable society of the real value of things; that is, while Christianity does
not
furnish the standard, and human opinion
does;
while the multiplying our desires is considered as a symptom of elegance, though to subdue them is made the grand criterion of religion; while moderation is beheld as indicating a poorness of spirit, though to that very poverty of spirit the highest promise of the gospel is assigned; while worldly wisdom is enjoined by worldly friends, in contradiction to that assertion,
that the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God;
while the praise of man is to be sought in opposition to that assurance, that
he fear of man worketh a snare.
While these things are so, and that they are so in a good degree who will deny? may we not venture to affirm that a Christian education though not an impossible, is yet a very difficult work?
CHAP. VI.
Filial obedience not the character of the age. —A comparison with the preceding age in this respect. —Those who cultivate the mind advised to study the nature of the soil. —Unpromising children often make strong characters. —Teachers too apt to devote their pains almost exclusively to children of parts.
AMONG the real improvements of modern times, and they are not a few, it is to be feared that the growth of filial obedience cannot be included. Who can forbear observing and regretting in a variety of instances, that not only sons but daughters have adopted something of that spirit of independence, and disdain of control, which characterise the times? And is it not obvious that domestic manners are not slightly tinctured with the hue of public principles? The
rights of man
have been discussed, till we are somewhat wearied with the discussion. To these have been opposed with more presumption than prudence
the rights of woman.
It follows according to the natural progression of human things, that the next stage of that irradiation which our enlighteners are pouring in upon us as will produce grave descants on the
rights of children.
This revolutionary spirit in families suggests the remark that among the faults with which it has been too much the fashion of recent times to load the memory of the incomparable Milton, one of the charges brought against his private character (for with his political character we have here nothing to do) has been, that he was so severe a father as to have compelled his daughters, after he was blind, to read aloud to him for his sole pleasure Greek and Latin authors of which they did not understand a word. But this is in fact nothing more than an instance of the strict domestic regulations of the age in which Milton lived; and should not be brought forward as a proof of the severity of his individual temper. Nor indeed in any case should it ever be considered as an hardship for an affectionate child to amuse an afflicted parent, though it should be attended with a heavier sacrifice of her own pleasure than in the present instance
In spite of this too prevailing spirit, numberless instances might be adduced of filial affection truly honourable to the present period. And the author records with pleasure, that she has seen amiable young ladies of high rank conducting the steps of a blind but illustrious parent, with true filial fondness; and has often contemplated in another family, the interesting attentions of daughters who were both hands and eyes to an infirm and nearly blind father. It is but justice to add, that these examples are not taken from that middle rank of life which Milton filled, but from the daughters of the highest officers in the state.
Is the author then inculcating the harsh doctrine of parental austerity? By no means. It drives the gentle spirit to artifice, and the rugged to despair. It generates deceit and cunning, the most hopeless and hateful in the whole catalogue of female failings. Ungoverned anger in the teacher, and inability to discriminate between venial errors and premeditated offence, though they may lead a timid creature to hide wrong tempers, or to conceal bad actions, will not help her to subdue the one or correct the other. Severity will drive terrified children to seek, not for reformation, but for impunity. A readiness to forgive them promotes frankness. And we should, above all things, encourage them to be frank in order to come at their faults. They have not more faults for being open, they only
discover
more.
Discipline, however, is not cruelty, and restraint is not severity. We must strengthen the feeble while we repel the bold. The cultivator of the human mind must, like the gardener, study diversities of soil. The skilful labourer knows that even where the surface is not particularly promising, there is often a rough strong ground which will amply repay the trouble of breaking it up; and we are often most taken with a soft surface, though it conceal a shallow depth, because it promises present reward and little trouble. But strong and pertinacious tempers, of which perhaps obstinacy is the leading vice, under skilful management often turn out steady and sterling characters; while from softer clay a firm and vigorous virtue is but seldom produced.
But these revolutions in character cannot be effected by mere education. Plutarch has observed that the medical science would never be brought to perfection till poisons should be converted into physic. What our late improvers in natural science have done in the medical world, by converting the most deadly ingredients into instruments of life and health, Christianity with a sort of divine Alchymy has effected in the moral world, by that transmutation which makes those passions which have been working for sin become active in the cause of religion. The violent temper of Saul of Tarsus which was "exceedingly mad" against the saints of God, did God see fit to convert into that burning zeal which enabled Paul the Apostle to labour so unremittingly for the conversion of the Gentile world. Christianity indeed does not so much give us new affections or faculties, as give a new direction to those we already have. She changes that sorrow of the world which worketh death, into
godly sorrow which worketh repentance.
She changes our anger against the persons we dislike, into hatred of their sins.
The fear of man which worketh a snare,
she transmutes into "that fear of God "which worketh salvation. That religion does not extinguish the passions but correct them, the animated expressions of the fervid Apostle confirms—
Yea, what
fearfulness;
yea, what
clearing of yourselves;
yea, what
indignation;
yea, what
fear;
yea, what
vehement desire;
yea, what
zeal;
yea, what
revenge
2 Corinthians, vii, II.
!
Thus, by some of the most troublesome passions of our nature being converted by the blessing of God on a religious education to the side of virtue, a double purpose is effected. Because, if I may be allowed to change the metaphor, it is the character of the passions never to observe a neutrality. If they are no longer rebels, they become auxiliaries; and a foe subdued is an ally obtained. And it is the effect of religion on the passions, that when she seizes the enemy's garrison, she does not destroy the works, she does not burn the arsenal and spike the cannon; but the artillery she seizes, she turns to her own use, and plants its whole force against the enemy from whom she has taken it.
But while I would deprecate harshness, I would inforce discipline; and that not merely on the ground of religion, but of happiness also. One reason not seldom brought forward by tender but mistaken mothers, as an apology for their unbounded indulgence, especially to weakly children, is, that they probably will not live to enjoy the world when grown up, and that therefore they will not abridge the little pleasure they may enjoy at present. But a slight degree of observation would prove that this is an error in judgment as well as in principle. For, omitting any considerations respecting their future welfare, and entering only into their immediate interests; it is an indisputable fact that children who know no control, whose faults encounter no contradiction, and whose humours experience constant indulgence, grow more irritable and capricious, invent wants, create desires, lose all relish for the pleasures which they know they may reckon upon; and become perhaps more miserable than even those children who labour under the more obvious and more commiserated misfortune of suffering under the tyranny of unkind parents.
An early habitual restraint is peculiarly important to the future character and happiness of women. They should when very young be inured to contradiction. Instead of hearing their bon-mots treasured up and repeated to the guests till they begin to think it dull, when they themselves are not the little heroine of the theme, they should be accustomed to receive but little praise for their vivacity or their wit, though they should receive just commendation for their patience, their industry, their humility, and other qualities which have more worth than splendour. They should be led to distrust their own judgment; they should learn not to murmur at expostulation; but should be accustomed to expect and to endure opposition. It is a lesson with which the world will not fail to furnish them; and they will not practise it the worse for having learnt it the sooner. It is of the last importance to their happiness in life that they should early acquire a submissive temper and a forbearing spirit. They must even endure to be thought wrong sometimes, when they cannot but feel they are right. And while they should be anxiously aspiring to do well, they must not expect always to obtain the praise of having done so. But while a gentle demeanor is inculcated, let them not be instructed to practise gentleness merely on the low ground of its being decorous and feminine, and pleasing, and calculated to attract human favour; but let them be carefully taught to cultivate it on the high principle of obedience to Christ; on the practical ground of labouring after conformity to HIM, who, when he proposed himself as a perfect pattern of imitation, did not say, learn of me for I am great, or wise, or mighty, but
learn of me for I am meek and lowly,
and graciously promised that the reward should accompany the practice, by encouragingly adding, "and ye shall find rest to your souls." Do not teach them humility on the ordinary ground that vanity is
unamiable,
and that no one will
love
them if they are proud; for that will only go to correct the exterior and make them soft and smiling hypocrites. But inform them that
God resisteth the proud,
while
them that are meek he shall guide in judgment, and such as are gentle them shall he teach his way.
In these, as in all other cases, an habitual attention to the
motives
should be carefully substituted in their young hearts, in the place of too much anxiety about the
event
of actions, and too much solicitude for that human praise which attaches to appearances as much as to realities; to success more than to desert.
There is a custom among teachers, which is not the more right for being common; they are apt to bestow an undue proportion of pains on children of the best capacity, as if only geniuses were worthy of attention. They should reflect that in moderate talents carefully cultivated, we are perhaps to look for the chief happiness and virtue of society. If superlative genius had been generally necessary, its existence would not have been so rare; for Omnipotence could have made those talents common which we now consider as extraordinary. Besides, while we are conscientiously instructing children of moderate capacity, it is a comfort to reflect that if no labour will raise them to a high degree in the scale of intellectual excellence, yet they may be led on to perfection in that road in which
a way-faring man though simple shall not err.
And when a mother feels disposed to repine that her family is not likely to exhibit a groupe of future wits and growing beauties, let her console herself by looking abroad into the world, where she will quickly perceive that the monopoly of happiness is not engrossed by beauty, nor that of virtue by genius.
A girl who has docility will seldom be found to want understanding sufficient for all the purposes of a useful, a happy, and a pious life. And it is as wrong for parents to set out with too sanguine a dependance on the figure their children are to make in life, as it is unreasonable to be discouraged at every disappointment. Want of success is so far from furnishing a motive for relaxing their energy, that it is a reason for redoubling it. Let them suspect their own plans, and reform them; let them distrust their own principles, and correct them. The generality of parents do too little; some do much and miss their reward, because they look not to any strength beyond their own: after much is done, much will remain undone; for the entire regulation of the heart and affections is not the work of education alone, but the operation of divine grace. Will it be accounted enthusiasm to suggest
that the fervent effectual prayer of a righteous
parent
availeth much?
and perhaps the reason why so many anxious mothers fail of success is, because they repose with confidence in their own skill and labour, without looking to HIM without whose blessing they do but labour in vain.
On the other hand, is it not to be feared that some pious parents have fallen into an error of an opposite kind? From a full conviction that human endeavours are vain, and that it is God alone who can change the heart, they are earnest in their prayers, but not so earnest in their endeavours. Such parents should be reminded, that if they do not add their exertions to their prayers, their children are not likely to be more benefited than the children of those who do not add their prayers to their exertions. What God has joined let not man presume to separate. It
is
the work of God, we readily acknowledge, to implant religion in the heart, and to maintain it there as a ruling principle of conduct. And is it not the same God which causes the corn to grow? Are not our natural lives constantly preserved by his power? Who will deny that in Him we live and move and have our being? But how are these works of God carried on? By
means
which he has appointed. By the labour of the husbandman the corn is made to grow. By food the body is sustained: and by religious instruction God is pleased to work upon the human heart. As far as
we
see of the ways of God, all his works are carried on by
means.
It becomes therefore our duty to use the means and trust in God; to remember that God will not work without the means; and that the means can effect nothing without his blessing.
Paul may plant and Apollos water, but it is God must give the increase
. But to what does he give the increase? To the
exertions
of Paul and Apollos. It is never said that because God only can give the increase, that Paul and Apollos may spare their labour.
It is one grand object to give the young probationer just and sober views of the world on which she is about to enter. Instead of making her bosom bound at the near prospect of emancipation from her instructors; instead of teaching her young heart to dance with premature flutterings as the critical winter draws near in which
she is to come out;
instead of raising a tumult in her busy imagination at the approach of her first
grown up ball;
endeavour to convince her that the world will not turn out to be that scene of unvarying and never-ending delights which she has perhaps been led to expect, not only from the sanguine temper and warm spirits natural to youth, but from the value she has seen put on those showy accomplishments which have too probably been fitting her for her exhibition in life. Teach her that this world is not a stage for the display of superficial talents, but for the strict and sober exercife of fortitude, temperance, meekness, faith, diligence, and self-denial; of her due performance of which Christian graces, Angels will be spectators, and God the judge. Teach her that human life is not a splendid romance, spangled over with brilliant adventures, and enriched with extraordinary occurrences, and diversified with wonderful incidents; lead her not to expect that life will abound with scenes which will call shining qualities and great powers into perpetual action; and for which if she acquit herself well she will be rewarded with proportionate fame and certain commendation. But apprize her that human life is a true history, many passages of which will be dull, obscure, and uninteresting; some perhaps tragical; but that whatever gay incidents and pleasing scenes may be interspersed in the progress of the piece, yet finally
one event happeneth to all;
to all there is one awful and infallible catastrophe. Apprize her that the estimation which mankind forms of merit is not always just, nor its praise exactly proportioned to desert; that the world weighs actions in far different scales from
the balance of the sanctuary,
and estimates worth by a far different standard from that of the gospel; apprize her that while her best intentions may be sometimes calumniated, and her best actions misrepresented, she will be liable to receive commendation on occasions wherein her conscience will tell her she has not deserved it.
Do not however give her a gloomy and discouraging picture of the world, but rather seek to give her a just and sober view of the part she will have to act in it. And humble the impetuosity of hope, and cool the ardour of expectation, by explaining to her that this part, even in her best estate, will probably consist in a succession of petty trials, and a round of quiet duties which, however well performed, though they will make little or no figure in the book of Fame, will prove of vast importance to her in that day when
another
book is opened, and the judgment is set, and every one will be judged according to the deeds done in the body, whether they be good or bad.
Say not that these just and sober views will cruelly wither her young hopes, and deaden the innocent satisfactions of life. It is not true. There is, happily, an active spring in the mind of youth which bounds with fresh vigour, and uninjured elasticity, from any such temporary depression. It is not meant that you should darken her prospect, so much as that you should enlighten her understanding to contemplate it. And though her feelings, tastes, and passions, will all be against you, if you set before her a faithful delineation of life, yet it will be something to get her judgment on your side. It is no unkind office to assist the short view of youth with the aids of long-sighted experience, to enable them to discover spots in the brightness of that life which dazzles them in prospect, though it is probable they will after all choose to believe their own eyes rather than the offered glass.
CHAP. VII.
On female study, and initiation into knowledge.—Error of cultivating the imagination to the neglect of the judgment.—Books of reasoning recommended.
As this little work by no means assumes the character of a general scheme of education, the author has purposely avoided expatiating largely on any kind of instruction; but so far as it is connected, either immediately or remotely, with objects of a moral or religious nature. Of course she has been so far from thinking it necessary to enter into the enumeration of those books which are useful in general instruction, that she has forborne to mention any. With such books the rising generation is far more copiously and ably furnished than any preceding period has been; and out of an excellent variety the judicious instructor can hardly fail to make such a selection as shall be beneficial to the pupil.
But while due praise ought not to be withheld from the improved methods of communicating the elements of general knowledge; yet is there not some danger that our very advantages may lead us into error, by causing us to repose so confidently on the multiplied helps which facilitate the entrance into learning, as to render our pupils superficial through the very facility of acquirement? Where so much is done for them, may they not be led to do too little for themselves? May there not be a moral disadvantage in possessing them with the notion that learning may be acquired without diligence and labour? Sound education never
can
be made a "primrose path of dalliance." Do what we will we cannot
cheat
children into learning or
play
them into knowledge, according to the smoothness of the modern creed. There is no idle way to any acquisitions which really deserve the name. And as Euclid, in order to repress the impetuous vanity of greatness, told his Sovereign that there was no royal way to geometry, so the fond mother may be assured that there is no short cut to any other kind of learning. The tree of knowledge, as a punishment perhaps, for its having been at first unfairly tasted, cannot now be climbed without difficulty; and this very circumstance serves afterwards to furnish not only literary pleasures, but moral advantages: for the knowledge which is acquired by unwearied assiduity is lasting in the possession, and sweet to the possessor; both perhaps in proportion to the cost and labour of the acquisition. And though an able teacher ought to endeavour, by improving the communicating faculty in himself, (for many know what they cannot teach,) to soften every difficulty; yet in spite of the kindness and ability with which he will smooth every obstruction, it is probably, among the wise institutions of Providence, that great difficulties should still remain. For education is but an initiation into that life of trial to which we are introduced on our entrance into this world. It is the first breaking-in to that state of toil and labour to which we are born; and in this view of the subject the acquisition of learning may be converted to higher uses than such as are purely literary.
Will it not be ascribed to a captious singularity if I venture to remark that real knowledge and real piety, though they have gained in many instances, have suffered in others from that profusion of little, amusing, sentimental books with which the youthful library overflows? Abundance has its dangers as well as scarcity. In the first place may not the multiplicity of these alluring little works increase the natural reluctance to those more dry and uninteresting studies, of which after all, the rudiments of every part of learning
must
consist? And, secondly, is there not some danger (though there are many honourable exceptions) that some of those engaging narratives may serve to infuse into the youthful heart a sort of spurious goodness, a confidence of virtue? And that the benevolent actions with the recital of which they abound, when they are not made to flow from any source but feeling, may tend to inspire self-complacency, a self-gratulation, a "stand by, for I am holier than "thou?" May they not help to infuse a love of popularity and an anxiety for praise, in the place of that simple and unostentatious rule of doing whatever good we do,
because it is the will of God?
The universal substitution of this principle would tend to purify the worldly morality of many a popular little story. And there are few dangers which good parents will more carefully guard against than that of giving their children a mere political piety; that sort of religion which just goes to make people more respectable, and to stand well with the world
An ingenious (and in many respects useful) French Treatise on Education, has too much encouraged this political piety; by sometimes considering religion as a thing of human convention; as a thing creditable rather than commanded; by erecting the doctrine of expediency in the place of Christian simplicity; and wearing away the spirit of truth, by the substitution of occasional deceit, equivocation, subterfuge, and mental reservation.
.
There is a certain precocity of mind which is much helped on by these superficial modes of instruction; for frivolous reading will produce its correspondent effect, in much less time than books of solid instruction; the imagination being liable to be worked upon, and the feelings to be set a going, much faster than the understanding can be opened and the judgment enlightened. A talent for conversation should be the result of education, not its precursor; it is a golden fruit when suffered to ripen gradually on the tree of knowledge; but if forced in the hot-bed of a circulating library, it will turn out worthless and vapid in proportion as it was artificial and premature. Girls who have been accustomed to devour frivolous books, will converse and write with a far greater appearance of skill as to style and sentiment at twelve or fourteen years old, than those of a more advanced age who are under the discipline of severer studies; but the former having early attained to that low standard which had been held out to them, became stationary; while the latter, quietly progressive, are passing through just gradations to a higher strain of mind; and those who early begin with talking and writing like women, commonly end with thinking and acting like children.
The swarms of
Abridgments, Beauties,
aud
Compendiums,
which form too confiderable a part of a young lady's library, may be confidered in many instances as an infallible receipt for making a superficial mind. The
names
of the renowned characters in history thus become familiar in the mouths of those who can neither attach to the idea of the person, the series of his actions, nor the peculiarities of his character. A few fine passages from the poets (passages perhaps which derived their chief beauty from their position and connection) are huddled together by some extract-maker, whose brief and disconnected patches of broken and discordant materials, while they inflame young readers with the vanity of reciting, neither fill the mind nor form the taste: and it is not difficult to trace back to their shallow sources the hackney'd quotations of certain
accomplished
young ladies, who will be frequently found not to have come legitimately by any thing they know: I mean, not to have drawn it from its true spring, the original works of the author from which some
beauty-monger
has severed it. Human inconsistency in this, as in other cases, wants to combine two irreconcileable things; it strives to unite the reputation of knowledge with the pleasures of idleness, forgetting that nothing that is valuable can be obtained without sacrifices, and that if we would purchase knowledge we must pay for it the fair and lawful price of time and industry.
This remark is by no means of general application; there are many valuable works which from their bulk would be almost inaccessible to a great number of readers, and a considerable part of which may not be generally useful. Even in the best written books there is often superfluous matter; authors are apt to get enamoured of their subject, and to dwell too long on it: every person cannot find time to read a longer work on any subject, and yet it may be well for them to know something on almost every subject; those therefore, who abridge voluminous works judiciously, render service to the community. But there seems, if I may venture the remark, to be a mistake in the
use
of abridgments. They are put systematically into the hands of youth, who have, or ought to have leisure for the works at large; while abridgments seem more immediately calculated for persons in more advanced life, who wish to recal something they had forgotten; who want to restore old ideas rather than acquire new ones; or they are useful for persons immersed in the business of the world who have little leisure for voluminous reading. They are excellent to refresh the mind, but not competent to form it.
Perhaps there is some analogy between the mental and bodily conformation of women. The instructor therefore should imitate the physician. If the latter prescribe bracing medicines for a body of which delicacy is the disease, the former would do well to prohibit relaxing reading for a mind which is already of too soft a texture, and should strengthen its feeble tone by invigorating reading.
By softness, I cannot be supposed to mean imbecility of understanding, but natural softness of heart, with that indolence of spirit which is fostered by indulging in seducing books and in the general habits of fashionable life.
I mean not here to recommend books which are immediately religious, but such as exercise the reasoning faculties, teach the mind to get acquainted with its own nature, and to stir up its own powers. Let not a timid young lady start if I should venture to recommend to her, after a proper course of preparation, to swallow and digest such strong meat, as Watts's or Duncan's little book of Logic, some parts of Mr. Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, and Bishop Butler's Analogy. Where there is leisure, and capacity, and an able counsellor, works of this nature might be profitably substituted in the place of so much English Sentiment, French Philosophy, Italian Poetry, and fantastic German imagery and magic wonders. While such enervating or absurd books sadly disqualify the reader for solid pursuit or vigorous thinking, the studies here recommended would act upon the constitution of the mind as a kind of alterative, and, if I may be allowed the expression, would help to brace the intellectual stamina.
This is however by no means intended to exclude works of taste and imagination, which must always make the ornamental part, and of course a very considerable part of female studies. It is only suggested that they should not form them entirely. For what is called dry tough reading, independent of the knowledge it conveys, is useful as an habit and wholesome as an exercise. Serious study serves to harden the mind for more trying conflicts; it lifts the reader from sensation to intellect; it abstracts her from the world and its vanities; it fixes a wandering spirit, and fortifies a weak one; it divorces her from matter; it corrects that spirit of trifling which she naturally contracts from the frivolous turn of female conversation, and the petty nature of female employments; it concentrates her attention, assists her in a habit of excluding trivial thoughts, and thus even helps to qualify her for religious pursuits. Yes; I repeat it, there is to woman a Christian use to be made of sober studies; while books of an opposite cast, however unexceptionable they may be sometimes found in point of expression; however free from evil in its more gross and palpable shapes, yet by their very nature and constitution they excite a spirit of relaxation, by exhibiting scenes and ideas which soften the mind; they impair its general powers of resistance, and at best feed habits of improper indulgence, and nonrish a vain and visionary indolence, which lays the mind open to error and the heart to seduction.
Women are little accustomed to close reasoning on any subject; still less do they inure their minds to consider particular parts of a subject; they are not habituated to turn a truth round and view it in all its varied aspects and positions; and this perhaps is one cause (as will be observed in another
Chapter on Conversation.
place) of the too great confidence they are disposed to place in their opinions. Though their imagination is already too lively, and their judgment naturally incorrect; in educating them we go on to stimulate the imagination, while we neglect the regulation of the judgment. They already want ballast, and we make their education consist in continually crowding more sail than they can carry. Their intellectual powers being so little strengthened by exercise, makes every little business appear a hardship to them: whereas ferious study would be useful, were it only that it leads the mind to the habit of conquering difficulties. But it is peculiarly hard to turn at once from the indolent repose of light reading, from the concerns of mere animal life, the objects of sense, or the frivolousness of chit chat; it is peculiarly hard, I say, to a mind so softened, to rescue itself from the dominion of self-indulgence, to resume its powers, to call home its scattered strength, to shut out every foreign intrusion, to force back a spring so unnaturally bent, and to devote itself to religious reading, reflection, or self-examination: whereas to an intellect accustomed to think at all the difficulty of thinking seriously is obviously lessened.
Far be it from me to desire to make scholastic ladies or female dialecticians; but there is little fear that the kind of books here recommended, if thoroughly studied, and not superficially skimmed, will make them pedants or induce conceit; for by shewing them the possible powers of the human mind, you will bring them to see the littleness of their own, and to get acquainted with the mind and to regulate it, does not seem the way to puff it up. But let her who is disposed to be elated with her literary acquisitions, check her vanity by calling to mind the just remark of Swift,
that after all her boasted acquirements, a woman will, generally speaking, be found to possess less of what is called learning than a common school-boy.
Neither is there any fear that this sort of reading will convert ladies into authors. The direct contrary effect will be likely to be produced by the perusal of writers who throw the generality of readers at such an unapproachable distance. Who are those ever multiplying authors, that with unparalleled fecundity are overstocking the world with their quick succeeding progeny? They are novel writers; the easiness of whose productions is at once the cause of their own fruitfulness, and of the almost infinitely numerous race of imitators to whom they give birth. Such is the frightful facility of this species of composition, that every raw girl while she reads, is tempted to fancy that she can also write. And as Alexander, on perusing the Iliad, found by congenial sympathy the image of Achilles in his own ardent soul, and felt himself the hero he was studying; and as Corregio, on first beholding a picture which exhibited the perfection of the Graphic art, prophetically felt all his own future greatness, and cried out in rapture, "And I too am a painter!" so a thorough paced novel reading Miss, at the close of every tissue of hackney'd adventures, feels within herself the stirring impulse of corresponding genius, and triumphantly exclaims,
And I too am an author!—
The glutted imagination soon overflows with the redundance of cheap sentiment and plentiful incident, and by a sort of arithmetical proportion, is enabled by the perusal of any three novels to produce a fourth; till every fresh production, like the progeny of Banquo, is followed by
Another, and another, and another
It is surely not necessary to state, that no disrespect can be here intended to those females of real genius and correct character, some of whose justly admired writings in this kind, are accurate histories of life and manners, and striking delineations of character. It is not
their
fault if their works have been attended with the consequences which usually attend good originals, that of giving birth to a multitude of miserable imitations.
Is a lady, however destitute of talents, education, or knowledge of the world, whose studies have been completed by a circulating library, in any distress of mind? the writing a novel suggests itself as the best soother of her sorrows! Does she labour under any depression of circumstances? writing a novel occurs as the readiest receipt for mending them! And she solaces herself with the conviction that the subscription which has been given to her importunity or her necessities, has been given to her genius. And this confidence instantly levies a fresh contribution for a succeeding work. Capacity and cultivation are so little taken into the account, that writing a book seems to be now considered as the only sure resource which the idle and the illiterate have always in their power.
May I be indulged in a short digression to remark, though rather out of its place, that the corruption occasioned by these books has spread so wide, and descended so low, that not only among milleners, mantua-makers, and other trades where numbers work together, the labour of one girl is frequently sacrificed that she may be spared to read those mischievous books to the others; but the Author has been assured by clergymen, who have witnessed the fact, that they are procured and greedily read in the wards of our Hospitals! an awful hint, that those who teach the poor to read, should not only take care to furnish them with principles which will lead them to abhor corrupt books, but should also furnish them with such books as shall strengthen and confirm their principles
The above facts furnish no argument on the side of those who would keep the poor in ignorance. Those who cannot
read
can
hear,
and are likely to hear to worse purpose than those who have been better taught. And that ignorance furnishes no security for integrity either in morals or politics, the late revolts in more than one country, remarkable for the ignorance of the poor, fully illustrates. It is earnestly hoped that the above facts may tend to impress ladies with the importance of superintending the instruction of the poor, and of making it an indispensable part of their charity to give them moral and religious books.
. And let every Christian remember, that there is no other way of entering truly into the spirit of that divine prayer, which petitions that the name of God may be "hallowed," that
his kingdom (of grace) may come,
and that
his will may be done on earth as it is in heaven,
than by each individual contributing according to his measure to accomplish the work for which he prays; for to pray that these great objects may be promoted, without contributing to their promotion, is a palpable inconsistency.
CHAP. VIII.
On the religious and moral use of history and geography.
BUT while every sort of useful knowledge should be carefully imparted to young persons, it should be imparted not merely for its own sake, but also for the sake of its subserviency to higher things. All human learning should be taught not as an end but a means; and in this view even a lesson of history or geography may be converted into a lesson of religion. In the study of history, the instructor will accustom the pupil not merely to store her memory with facts and anecdotes, and to ascertain dates and epochas; but she will accustom her also to trace effects to their causes, to examine the secret springs of action, and to observe the operation of the passions. It is only meant to notice here some few of the moral benefits which may be derived from a judicious perusal of history; and from among other points of instruction, I select the following:
The study of history may serve to give a clearer insight into the corruption of human nature:
It may show the
plan
of Providence in the direction of events, and in the use of unworthy instruments:
It may assist in the
vindication
of Providence, in the common failure of virtue and the success of vice:
It may lead to a distrust of our own judgment:
It may contribute to our improvement in self-knowledge.
But to prove to the pupil the important doctrine of human corruption from the study of history, will require a truly Christian commentator; for, from the low standard of right established by the generality of historians, who erect so many persons into good characters who fall short of the true idea of Christian virtue, the unassisted reader will be liable to form very imperfect views of what is real goodness; and will conclude, as his author sometimes does, that the true idea of human nature is to be taken from the medium between his best and his worst characters; without acquiring a just notion of that prevalence of evil, which, in spite of those few brighter luminaries that here and there just serve to gild the gloom of history, tends abundantly to establish the doctrine. It will indeed be continually establishing itself by those who, in perusing the history of mankind, carefully mark the progress of sin, from the first timid irruption of an evil thought, to the fearless accomplishment of the abhorred crime in which that thought has ended: from the indignant question
Is thy servant a dog that he should do this great thing
2 Kings, viii. 13.
?
to the perpetration of that very enormity of which he could not endure the slightest suggestion.
The religious reader of general history will observe the controlling hand of Providence in the direction of events, and in turning the most unworthy actions and instruments to the accomplishment of his own purposes. She will mark infinite Wisdom directing what appears to be casual occurrences, to the completion of his own plan. She will point out how causes seemingly the most unconnected, events seemingly the most unpromising, circumstances seemingly the most incongruous, are all working together for some final good. She will mark how national as well as individual crimes are often overruled to some hidden purpose far different from the intention of the actors: how Omnipotence can and often does, bring about the best purposes by the worst instruments: how the bloody and unjust conqueror is but "the rod of HIS wrath," to punish or to purify his offending children: how "the fury of the oppressor," and the sufferings of the oppressed, will one day vindicate HIS righteous dealings. She will unfold to the less enlightened reader how infinite Wisdom often mocks the insignificance of human greatness, and the shallowness of human ability, by setting aside instruments the most powerful, while He works by agents comparatively contemptible. But she will carefully guard this doctrine of Divine Providence thus working out his own purposes through the sins of his creatures, and by the instrumentality of the wicked, by calling to mind, that while the offender is but a tool in the hands of the great artificer,
yet woe be to him by whom the offence cometh.
She will explain how all the mutations and revolutions in states which appear to us so unaccountable, and how those operations of Providence which seem to us so entangled and complicated, all move harmoniously and in perfect order: That there is not an event but has its commission; not a misfortune which breaks its allotted rank; not a trial which moves out of its appointed track. While calamities and crimes seem to fly in casual confusion, all is commanded or permitted; all is under the control of a wisdom which cannot err, of a goodness which cannot do wrong.
To explain my meaning by a few instances. When the spirit of the youthful reader rises in honest indignation at that hypocritical piety which divorced an unoffending Queen to make way for the lawful crime of our eighth Henry's marriage with Ann Boleyn; and when that indignation is increased by the more open profligacy which brought about the execution of the latter; the instructor will not lose so fair an occasion for unfolding how in the councils of the Most High the crimes of the king were overruled to the happiness of the country; and how, to this inauspicious marriage, from which the heroic Elizabeth sprung, the Protestant religion owed its firm stability.
She will explain to her, how even the conquests of ambition, after having deluged a land with blood, and involved the perpetrator in guilt, and the innocent victim in ruin, may yet be made the instruments of opening to future generations the way to commerce, to civilization, to Christianity. She may remind her, as they are following Caesar in his invasion of Britain, that whereas the conqueror fancied he was only gratifying his own inordinate ambition, extending the flight of the Roman Eagle, immortalizing his own name, and proving that "this world was made for Caesar;" he was in reality becoming the effectual though unconscious instrument of leading a land of barbarians to civilization and to science; and was in fact preparing an island of Pagans to embrace the religion of Christ. She will inform her, that when the above-named victorious nation had made Judea a Roman province, and the Jews had become their tributaries, the Romans did not know, nor did the indignant Jews suspect, that this circumstance was confirming an event the most important the world ever saw.
For when
Augustus sent forth a decree that all the world should be taxed;
he thought he was only enlarging his own imperial power, whereas he was acting in unconscious subservience to the decree of a higher Sovereign, and was helping to ascertain by a public act the exact period of Christ's birth, and furnishing a record of his extraction from that family from which it was predicted he should spring. Herod's atrocious murder of the innocents has added an additional circumstance for the confirmation of
our
faith; nay, the treachery of Judas, and the injustice of Pilate, were the human instruments employed for the salvation of the world.
The youth that is not armed with Christian principles, will be tempted to mutiny not only against the justice, but the very existence of a superintending Providence, in contemplating those frequent instances which occur in history of the ill success of the more virtuous cause, and the prosperity of the wicked. He will see with astonishment that it is Rome which triumphs, while Carthage, which had clearly the better cause, falls. Now and then indeed a Cicero prevails, and a Cataline is subdued: but often, it is Caesar successful against the somewhat juster pretensions of Pompey, and against the still clearer cause of Cato. It is Octavius who triumphs, and it is over Brutus that he triumphs! It is Tiberius that is enthroned, while Germanicus falls!
Thus his faith in a righteous Providence at first view is staggered, and he is ready to say, Surely it is not God that governs the earth! But on a fuller confideration (and here the suggestions of a Christian instructor are peculiarly wanted,) there will appear great wisdom in this very confusion of vice and virtue; for it is calculated to send one's thoughts forward to a world of retribution, the principle of retribution being so imperfectly established in this. It is indeed so far common for virtue to have the advantage here, in point of happiness at least, though not of glory, that the course of Providence is still calculated to prove that God is on the side of virtue; but still, virtue is so often unsuccessful, that clearly the God of virtue, in order that his work may be perfect, must have in reserve a world of retribution. This confused state of things therefore is just that state which is most of all calculated to confirm the deeply considerate mind in the belief of a future state: for if all were even here, or very nearly so, should we not say
Justice is already sarisfied, and there
needs
no other world?
On the other hand, if vice always triumphed, should we not then be ready to argue in favour of vice rather than virtue, and to
wish
for no other world?
It seems so very important to ground young persons in the belief that they will not inevitably meet in this world with reward and success according to their merit, but to habituate them to expect even the most virtuous attempts to be often, though not always disappointed, that I am in danger of tautology on this point. This fact is precisely what history teaches. The truth should be plainly told to the young reader; and the antidote to that evil, which mistaken and worldly people would expect to arise from divulging this discouraging doctrine, is
faith.
The importance of faith therefore, and the necessity of it to real, unbending, and persevering virtue, is surely made plain by profane history itself. For the same thing which happens to states and kings, happens to private life and to individuals.
Distrust and diffidence in our own judgment seems to be also an important instruction to be learnt from history. How contrary to all expectation do the events therein recorded commonly turn out? and yet we proceed to fortell this and that event from the appearances of things under our own observation, with the same arrogant certainty as if we had never been warned by the monitory annals of mankind.
There is scarcely one great event in history which does not, in the issue, produce effects upon which human foresight could never have calculated. The success of Augustus against his country produced peace in many distant provinces, who thus ceased to be harassed and tormented by this oppressive republic. Could this effect have been foreseen, it might have sobered the despair of Cato, and checked the vehemence of Brutus. In politics, in short in every thing, except in morals and religion, all is, to a considerable degree, uncertain. This reasoning is not meant to shew that Cato ought not to have
fought,
but that he ought not to have
desponded
even after the last battle; and certainly, even upon his own principles, ought not to have killed himself. It would be departing too much from my object to apply this argument against those who were driven to unreasonable distrust and despair by the late successes of a neighbouring nation.
But all knowledge will be comparatively of little value, if we neglect selfknowledge; and of self-knowledge history and biography may be made successful vehicles. It will be to little purpose that our pupils become accurate critics on the characters of others, while they remain ignorant of themselves; for while to those who exercise a habit of self-application a book of profane history may be made an instrument of improvement in this difficult science; so without this habit the Bible itself may, in this view, be read with little profit.
It will be to no purpose that the reader weeps over the fortitude of the Christian hero, or the constancy of the martyr, if she do not bear in mind that she herself is called to endure her own common trials with something of the same temper: if she do not bear in mind that, to control irregular humours, and to submit to the daily vexations of life, will require, though in a lower degree, the exertion of the same principle, and supplication for the aid of the same spirit which sustained the Christian hero in the trying conflicts of life, or the martyr in his agony at the stake.
May I be permitted to suggest a few instances, by way of specimen, how both sacred and common history may tend to promote self-knowledge? And let me again remind the warm admirer of suffering piety under extraordinay trials, that if she now fails in the petty occasions to which she is actually called out, she would not be likely to have stood in those more trying occasions which excite her admiration.
While she is applauding the self-denying saint who renounced his ease, or chose to embrace death, rather than violate his duty, let her ask herself if she has never refused to submit to the paltry inconvenience of giving up her company, or even altering her dinner-hour on a Sunday, by which trifling sacrifice her family might have been enabled to attend the public worship in the afternoon.
While she reads with horror that Belshazzar was rioting with his thousand nobles at the very moment when the Persian army was bursting through the brazen gates of Babylon; is she very sure that she herself, in an almost equally imminent moment of public danger, has not been nightly indulging in every species of dissipation?
When she is deploring the inconsistency of the human heart while she contrasts Mark Anthony's bravery and contempt of ease at one period, with his licentious indulgences at another; or while she laments over the intrepid soul of Caesar, whom she had been following in his painful marches, or admiring in his contempt of death, dissolved in dissolute pleasures with the ensnaring Queen of Egypt; let her examine whether she herself has never, though in a much lower degree, evinced something of the same inconsistency? whether she who lives perhaps an orderly, sober, and reasonable life, during her summer residence in the country, does not plunge with little scruple in the winter into all the most extravagant pleasures of the capital? whether she never carries about with her an accommodating kind of religion, which can be made to bend to places and seasons, to climates and customs; which takes its tincture from the fashion without, and not its habits from the principle within?
While she is admiring the generosity of Alexander in giving away kingdoms and provinces, let her, in order to ascertain whether she could imitate this magnanimity, take heed if she herself is daily seizing all the little occasions of doing good, which every day presents to the affluent?
Her
call is not to sacrifice a province; but does she sacrifice an opera ticket? She who is not doing all the good she can under existing circumstances, would not do all she foresees she should, in imaginary ones, were her power enlarged to the extent of her wishes.
While she is inveighing with patriotic indignation, that in a neighbouring metropolis thirty theatres were open every night in time of war and public calamity, is she very clear, that in a metropolis which contains only three, she was not almost constantly at one of them, in time of war and public calamity also? For though in a national view it may make a wide difference whether there be three theatres or thirty, yet, as the same person can only go to one of them at once, it makes but little difference as to the quantum of dissipation in the individual. She who rejoices at successful virtue in a history, or at the prosperity of a person whose interests do not interfere with her own, may exercise her self-knowledge, by examining whether she rejoices equally at the happiness of every one about her; and let her remember she does not rejoice at it in the true sense, if she does not labour to promote it. She who glows with rapture at a virtuous character in history, should ask her own heart, whether she is equally ready to do justice to the fine qualities of her acquaintance, though she may not particularly love them; and whether she takes unfeigned pleasure in the superior talents, virtues, fame, and fortune of those whom she professes to love, though she is eclipsed by them?
In like manner, in the study of geography and natural history, the attention should be habitually turned to the goodness of Providence, who commonly adapts the various productions of climates to the peculiar wants of the respective inhabitants. To illustrate my meaning by one or two instances out of a thousand. The reader may be led to admire the considerate goodness of Providence in having caused the spiry fir, whose slender foliage does not obstruct the beams of the sun, to grow in the dreary regions of the North, whose shivering inhabitants could spare none of its scanty rays; while in the torrid zone, the palm tree, the plantane, and the banana, spread their umbrella leaves to break the almost intolerable fervors of a vertical sun. How the camel, who is the sole carrier of all the merchandise of Turkey, Persia, Egypt, Arabia, and Barbary, who is obliged to transport his incredible burthens through countries in which pasture is so rare, can subsist twenty-four hours without food, and can travel, loaded, many days without water, through dry and dusty deserts, which supply none; and all this, not from the habit, but from the conformation of the animal: for Naturalists make this conformity of powers to climates a rule of judgment in ascertaining the native countries of animals, and always determine it to be that to which their powers and properties are most appropriate.
Thus the writers of natural history are perhaps unintentionally magnifying the operations of Providence, when they insist that animals do not modify and give way to the influence of other climates; but here they too commonly stop; and here the pious instructor will come in, in aid of their deficiency: for Philosophers too seldom trace up causes, and wonders, and blessings to their Author. And it is peculiarly to be regretted that such a writer as Buffon, who, though not famous for his accuracy, possessed such diversified powers of description, that he had the talent of making the dryest subjects interesting; together with such a liveliness of delineation, that his characters of animals are drawn with a spirit and variety rather to be looked for in an historian of men than of beasts: it is to be regretted that this writer is absolutely inadmissible into the library of a young lady, both on account of his immodesty and his impiety; and if, in wishing to exclude him, it may be thought wrong to have given him so much commendation, it is only meant to show that the author is not led to reprobate his principles from insensibility to his talents
Goldsmith's History of animated Nature has many references to a divine Author. It is to be wished that some judicious person would publish a new edition of this work, purified from the indelicate and offensive parts.
CHAP. IX.
On the use of definitions, and the moral benefits of accuracy in language.
PERSONS having been accustomed from their cradles to learn words before they knew the ideas for which they stand, usually continue to do so all their lives, never taking the pains to settle in their minds the determined ideas which belong to them. This want of a precise signification in their words, when they come to reason,
especially in moral matters,
is the cause of very obscure and uncertain notions. They use these undetermined words confidently, without much troubling their heads about a certain fixed meaning, whereby, besides the ease of it, they obtain this advantage, that as in such discourse they are seldom in the right, so they are as seldom to be convinced that they are in the wrong, it being just the same to go about to draw those persons out of their mistakes, who have no settled notions, as to dispossess a vagrant of his habitation who has no settled abode.—The chief end of language being to be understood, words serve not for that end when they do not excite in the hearer the same idea which they stand for in the mind of the speaker
Locke.
I have chosen to shelter myself under the broad sanction of the great Author here quoted, with a view to apply this rule in philology to a moral purpose; for it applies to the veracity of conversation as much as to its correctness; and as strongly recommends unequivocal and simple truth, as accurate and just expression. Scarcely any one perhaps has an adequate conception how much clear and correct expressions pressions favour the elucidation of truth; and the side of truth is obviously the side of morals; it is in fact one and the same cause; and it is of course the same cause with that of true religion also.
It is therefore no worthless part of education to study the precise meaning of words, and the appropriate signification of language. To this end I know no better method than to accustom young persons very early to define common words and things; for, as definition seems to lie at the root of correctness, to be accustomed to define English words in English, would improve the understanding more than barely to know what those words are called in French or Italian. Or rather one use of learning other languages is, because definition is often involved in etymology; that is, since many English words take their derivation from foreign languages, they cannot be so accurately understood without some knowledge of those languages: but precision of any kind too seldom finds its way into the education of women.
It is perhaps going out of my province to observe, that it might be well if young
men
also, before they entered on the world, were to be furnished with correct definitions of certain words, the use of which is rather ambiguous. For instance; they should be provided with a good definition of the word
honour
in the fashionable sense, shewing what vices it includes and what virtues it does not include: the term
good company,
which even the courtly Petronius of our days has defined as sometimes including not a few immoral and disreputable characters:
religion,
which in the various senses assigned it by the world, sometimes means superstition, sometimes fanaticism, and sometimes a mere disposition to attend on any kind of form of worship: the word
goodness,
which is made to mean every thing that is not notoriously bad; and sometimes even that too, if what is notoriously bad be accompanied panied by good humour, pleasing manners, and a little alms-giving. By these means they would go forth armed against many of the false opinions which through the abuse or ambiguous meaning of words pass so current in the world.
But to return to the youthful part of that sex which is the more immediate object of this little work. With correct definition they should also be taught to study the shades of words, and this not merely with a view to accuracy of expression, but to moral truth.
It may be thought ridiculous to assert, that morals have any connection with the purity of language, or that the precision of truth may be violated through defect of critical exactness in the three degrees of comparison: yet how frequently do we hear from the dealers in superlatives, of "most admirable," super-excellent, and "quite perfect" people, who, to plain persons, not bred in the school of exaggeration, would appear mere common characters, not rising above the level of mediocrity! By this negligence in the just application of words, we shall be as much misled by these trope and figure ladies, when they degrade as when they panegyrize; for to a plain and sober judgment, a tradesman may not be
the most good-for-nothing fellow that ever existed,
merely because it was impossible for him to execute in an hour an order which required a week; a lady may not be
the most hideous fright the world ever saw,
though the make of her gown may have been obsolete for a month; nor may one's young friend's father be
a monster of cruelty,
though he may be a quiet gentleman who does not choose to live at watering places, but likes to have his daughter stay at home with him in the country.
But of all the parts of speech the interjection is the most abundantly in use with the hyperbolical fair ones. Would it could be added that these emphatical expletives (if I may make use of a contradictory term) were not sometimes tinctured with profanenss! Though I am persuaded that idle habit is more at the bottom of this deep offence than intended impiety, yet there is scarcely any error of youthful talk which wants severer castigation. And an habit of exclamation should be rejected by polished people as vulgar, even if it were not abhorred as profane.
The conversation of young females is also in danger of being overloaded with epithers. As in the warm season of youth hardly any thing is seen in the true point of vision, so hardly any thing is named in naked simplicity; and the very sensibility of the feelings is partly a cause of the extravagance of the expression. But here as in other points the sacred writers, particularly of the New Testament, present us with the purest models; and its natural and unlaboured style of expression is perhaps not the meanest evidence of the truth of the gospel. There is throughout the whole narratives, no overcharged character, no elaborate description, nothing studiously emphatical, as if truth of itself were weak, and wanted to be helped out. There is little panegyric, and less invective; none but on great, and awful, and justifiable occasions. The authors record their own faults with the same honesty as if they were the faults of other men, and the faults of other men with as little amplification as if they were their own. There is perhaps no book in which adjectives are so sparingly used. A modest statement of the fact, with no colouring and little comment, is the example held out to us for correcting the exuberances of passion and of language, by that divine volume which furnishes us with the still more important rule of faith and standard of practice. Nor is the truth lowered by feebleness; for with all this plainness there is so much force that a few simple touches and artless strokes of scripture characters convey a stronger outline of the person delineated, than is sometimes given by the most elaborate portrait of more artificial historians.
If it be objected to this remark that many parts of the sacred writings abound in a lofty, figurative, and even hyperbolical style; this objection applies chiefly to the writings of the Old Testament, and to the prophetical and poetical parts of that. But this metaphorical and florid style is distinct from the inaccurate and overstrained expression we have been censuring; for that only is inaccuracy which leads to a false and inadequate conception in the reader or hearer. The lofty style of the Eastern, and of other heroic poetry does not so mislead; for the metaphor is understood to be a metaphor, and the imagery is understood to be ornamental. The style of the scriptures of the Old Testament, are not it is true plain in oppofition to figurative, nor simple in opposition to florid; but it is plain and simple in the best sense; it raises no false idea; it gives an exact impression of the thing it means to convey; and its very tropes and figures, though bold, are never unnatural or affected. Even when it exaggerates, it does not misrepresent; if it be hyperbolical, it is so either in compliance with the genius of oriental language, or in compliance with contemporary customs, or because the subject is one which will be most forcibly impressed by a bold figure. The loftiness of the expression deducts nothing from the truth of the circumstance, and animates the reader without misleading him.
CHAP. X.
On religion.—The necessity and duty of early instruction shown by analogy with human learning.
IT has been the fashion of our late innovators in philosophy, who have written some of the most brilliant and popular treatises on education, to decry the practice of early instilling religious knowledge into the minds of children: it has been alleged that it is of the utmost importance to the cause of truth that the mind of man should be kept free from prepossessions; and in particular, that every one should be left to form such judgment on religious subjects as may seem best to his own reason in maturer years.
This sentiment has received some countenance from those, who have wished on the fairest principle, to encourage free inquiry in religion; but it has been pushed to the blameable excess here censured, chiefly by the new philosophers; who, while they profess only an ingenuous zeal for truth, are in fact slily endeavouring to destroy Christianity itself, by discountenancing, under the plausible pretence of free inquiry, all attention whatever to the religious education of our youth.
It is undoubtedly our duty, while we are instilling principles into the tender mind, to take peculiar care that those principles be sound and just; that the religion we teach be the religion of the Bible, and not the inventions of human error or superstition: that the principles we infuse into others, be such as we ourselves have well scrutinized, and not the result of our credulity or bigotry; nor the mere hereditary, unexamined prejudices of our own undiscerning childhood. It may also be granted that it is the duty of every parent to inform the youth, that when his faculties shall have so unfolded themselves as to enable him to examine for himself those principles which the parent is now instilling, it will be his duty so to examine them.
But after making these concessions, I would most seriously insist that there are certain leading and fundamental truths; that there are certain sentiments on the fide of Christianity, as well as of virtue and benevolence, in favour of which every child
ought
to be prepossessed; and may it not be also added, that to expect to keep the mind void of all prepossession, even upon any subject, appears to be altogether a vain and impracticable attempt?
Let it be observed here that we are not combating the infidel; that we are not producing evidences and arguments in
favour
of Christianity, or trying to win over the assent of the reader to that which he disputes; but that we are taking it for granted, not only that Christianity is true, but that we are addressing those who believe it to be true. Assuming therefore that there are religious principles which are true, and which ought to be communicated in the most effectual manner, the next question which arises seems to be, at what age and in what manner these ought to be inculcated? That it ought to be an early period we have both the example and the command of Christ; for he himself attended his parents in their annual public devotions at Jerusalem during his own infancy; and afterwards in his public ministration encouragingly said,
Suffer
little
children to come unto me.
But here conceding for the sake of argument what yet cannot be conceded, that some good reasons
may
be brought in favour of delay; allowing that such impressions as are communicated early, may not be very deep; allowing them even to become totally effaced by the subsequent corruptions of the heart and of the world; still I would illustrate the importance of early infusing religious knowledge, by an allusion drawn from the power of early habit in human learning. Put the case, for instance, of a person who was early initiated in the rudiments of classical studies. Suppose him after quitting school to have fallen, either by a course of idleness or of vulgar pursuits, into a total neglect of study. Should this person at any future period happen to be called to some profession, which should oblige him, as we say, to rub up his Greek and Latin; his memory still retaining the unobliterated, though faint traces of his early pursuits, he will be able to recover his neglected learning with less difficulty than he could now begin to learn; for he is not again obliged to fet out with studying the simple elements; they come back on being pursued; they are found on being fearched for; the decayed images assume shape and strength; he has in his mind first principles to which to recur; the rules of grammar which he has allowed himself to violate, he has not however forgotten; he will recal neglected ideas, he will resume slighted habits far more easily than he could now begin to acquire new ones. I appeal to Clergymen who are called to attend the dying beds of such as have been bred in gross and stupid ignorance of religion, for the justness of this comparison. Do they not find that these unhappy people have no ideas in common with them? that they possess no intelligible medium by which to make themselves understood? that the persons to whom they are addressing themselves have no first principles to which they can be referred? that they are ignorant not only of the science, but the language of Christianity?
But at worst, whatever be the event to the child, though in general we are encouraged, from the tenor of Scripture and the course of experience, to hope that that event would be favourable, is it nothing for the parent to have acquitted himself of this prime duty? And will not the parent who so acquits himself, with better reason and more lively hope; supplicate the Father of mercies for the reclaiming of a prodigal, who has wandered out of that right path in which he had set him forward, than for the conversion of a neglected creature to whose feet the Gospel had never been offered as a light? And how different will be the dying reflections of that parent whose earnest endeavours have been defeated by the subsequent and voluntary perversion of his child, from his who will reasonably aggravate his pangs by transferring the fins of his neglected child to the number of his own transgressions.
And to such well-intentioned but ill-judging parents, as really wish their children to be hereafter pious, but erroneously withhold instruction till the more advanced period prescribed by the great master of splendid paradoxes
Roussean.
shall arrive; who can assure them that while they are withholding the good seed, the great and ever vigilant enemy, who assiduously seizes hold on every opportunity which
we
neglect, may not be stocking the fallow ground with tares? Nay, who in this fluctuating scene of things can be assured, even if this were not certainly to be the case, that to them the promised period ever shall arrive at all? Who shall ascertain to them that their now neglected child shall certainly live to receive the delayed instruction? Who can assure them that they themselves will live to communicate it?
It is almost needless to observe that parents who are indifferent about religion, much more those who treat it with scorn, are not likely to be anxious on this subject; it is therefore the attention of
religious
parents which is here chiesly called upon; and the more so as there seems, on this point, an unaccountable negligence in many of these, whether it arise from indolence, false principles, or whatever other motive.
But independent of knowledge, it is something, nay, let philosophers say what they will, it is much, to give youth
prepossessions
in favour of religion, to secure their
prejudices
on its side before you turn them adrift into the world; a world in which, before they can be completely armed with arguments and reasons, they will be assailed by numbers whose prepossessions and prejudices, far more than
their
arguments and reasons, attach them to the other side. Why should not the Christian youth furnish himself in a good cause with the same natural armour which the enemies of religion wear in a bad one? Surely to set out with sentiments in favour of the religion of our country, is no more an error or a weakness, than to grow up with a fondness for our country itself. Nay, if the love of our country be judged a fair principle, surely a Christian, who is "a citizen of no mean city," may lawfully have
his
attachments too. If patriotism be an honest prejudice, Christianity is not a servile one. Nay, let us teach the youth to hug his prejudices rather than to acquire that versatile and accommodating citizenship of the world, by which he may be an Infidel in Paris, a Papist at Rome, and a Mussulman at Cairo.
Let me not be supposed so to elevate politics, or so to depress religion, as to make any comparison of the value of the one with the other, when I observe, that between the true British patriot and the true Christian, there will be this common resemblance: the more deeply each of them inquires, the more will he be confirmed in his respective attachment, the one to his country, the other to his religion. I speak with reverence of the immeasurable distance; but the more the one presses on the firm arch of our constitution, and the other on that of Christianity, the stronger he will find them both. Each challenges scrutiny; each has nothing to dread but from shallow politicians and shallow philosophers; in each intimate knowledge justifies prepossession; in each investigation confirms attachment.
If we divide the human being into three component parts, the bodily, the intellectual, and the spiritual, is it not reasonable that a portion of care and attention be assigned to each in some degree adequate to its importance. Should I venture to say a
due
portion, a portion adapted to the real comparative value of each, would not that condemn in one word the whole system of modern education? Yet the rational and intellectual part is avowedly more valuable than the bodily, while the spiritual and immortal part exceeds even the intellectual still more than that surpasses what is corporeal. Is it then acting according to the common rules of proportion? Is it acting on the principles of distributive justice? Is it acting with that good sense and right judgment with which the ordinary business of this world is usually transacted, to give the larger proportion of time and care to that which is worth the least? Is it fair that what relates to the body and the organs of the body, I mean those accomplishments which address themselves to the eye and the ear, should occupy almost the whole thoughts; that the intellectual part should be robbed of its due proportion, and that the spiritual part should have almost no proportion at all? Is not this preparing your children for an awful disappointment in the tremendous day when they shall be stripped of that body which has been made almost the sole object of their attention, and shall feel themselves left in possession of nothing but that spiritual part, which in education was scarcely taken into the account of their existence?
Surely it should be thought a reasonable compromise (and I am in fact undervaluing the object for the importance of which I plead) to suggest, that at least two thirds of that time which is now usurped by externals, should be restored to the rightful owners, the understanding and the heart; and that the acquisition of religious knowledge in early youth, should at least be
no less
an object of sedulous attention than the cultivation of human learning or of outward embellishments. It is also reasonable to suggest, that we should in Christianity, as in arts, sciences, or languages, begin with the beginning, set out with the simple elements, and thus "go on unto perfection."
Why in teaching to draw do you begin with strait lines and curves, till by gentle steps the knowledge of outline and proportion be attained, and your picture be completed; never losing sight however of lines and curves? Why in music do you set out with the simple notes, and pursue the acquisition through all its progress, still in every stage recurring to the notes? Why in the science of numbers do you invent the simplest methods of conveying just ideas of computation, still recurring to the tables which involve the fundamental rules? Why in the science of quantity do men introduce the pupil at first to the plainest diagrams, and clear up one difficulty before they allow another to appear? Why in teaching languages to the youth, do you sedulously infuse into his mind the rudiments of syntax? Why in parsing is he led to refer every word to its part of speech, to resolve every sentence into its elements, to reduce every term to its original, and from the first case of nouns, and the first tense of verbs, to explain their formations, changes, and dependencies, till the principles of language become so grounded, that by continually recurring to the rules, the speaking and writing correctly are fixed into a habit? Why all this, but because you uniformly wish him to be grounded in each of his acquirements? Why, but because you are persuaded that a slight and slovenly, and superficial, and irregular way of instruction will never train him to excellence in any thing?
Do young persons then become musicians, and painters, and linguists, and mathematicians, by early study and regular labour; and shall they become Christians by accident? or rather, is not this acting on that very principle of Dogberry, at which you probably have often laughed? Is it not supposing, that religion, like "reading and writing, comes by Nature?" Shall all those accomplishments
which perish in the using,
be so assiduously, so systematically taught? Shall all these habits be so carefully formed, so persisted in, as to be interwoven with our very make, so as to become as it were a part of ourselves, and shall that knowledge which is to make us "wise unto salvation," be picked up at random, cursorily, or perhaps not picked up at all? Shall that difficult divine science which requires
line upon line, and precept upon precept,
here a little and there a little; which parents even under a darker dispensation, were required
to teach their children
diligently,
and to talk of it when they sat down in their house, and when they walked by the way, and when they lay down, and when they rose up;
shall this knowledge be by Christian parents deferred, or taught slightly; or be superseded by things of little comparative worth?
Shall the lively period of youth, the soft and impressible season when lasting habits are formed, when the seal cuts deep into the yielding wax, and the impression is more likely to be clear and strong? Shall this warm and favourable season be suffered to slide by, without being turned to the great purpose for which not only youth, but life, and breath, and being were bestowed? Shall not that
faith without which it is impossible to please God;
shall not that
holiness without which no man can see the Lord;
shall not that knowledge which is the foundation of faith and practice; shall not that charity without which all knowledge is vain, be impressed, be inculcated, be inforced, as early, as constantly, as fundamentally, with the same earnest pushing on to continual progress, with the same constant reference to first principles, as are used in the case of those arts which merely adorn human life? Shall we not seize the happy period when the memory is strong, the mind and all its powers vigorous and active, the imaginatson busy and all alive, the heart flexible, the temper ductile, the conscience tender, curiosity awake, fear powerful, hope eager, love ardent; for inculcating that knowledge, and impressing those principles which are to form the character, and fix the destination for eternity?
Or, if I may be allowed to address another and a still more dilatory class, who are for procrastinating all concern about religion till we are driven to it by actual distress, like the sailor who said
he thought it was always time enough to begin to pray when the storm began.
Of these I would ask, shall we, with an unaccountable deliberation, defer our anxiety about religion till the man and woman are become so immersed in the cares of life, or so entangled in its pleasures, that they will have little heart or spirit to embrace a new principle? a principle whose precise object it will be to condemn that very life into which they have already embarked; nay, to condemn almost all that they have been doing and thinking ever since they began to act or think? Shall we, I say, begin now? or shall we suffer those instructions, to receive which, requires all the concentrated powers of a strong and healthy mind, to be put off till the day of excruciating pain, till the period of debility and stupefaction? Shall we wait for that season, as if it were the most favourable for religious acquisitions, when the senses shall have been palled by excessive gratification, when the eye shall be tired with seeing, and the ear with hearing? Shall we, when the whole man is breaking up by disease or decay, expect that the dim apprehension will discern a new science, or the obtuse feelings delight themselves with a new pleasure? a pleasure too, not only incompatible with many of the hitherto indulged pleasures, but one which carries with it a strong intimation that those pleasures terminate in the death of the soul.
But, not to lose sight of the important analogy on which we have already dwelt so much; how preposterous would it seem to you to hear any one propose to an illiterate dying man, to set about learning even the plainest and easiest rudiments of any new art; to study the musical notes; to conjugate an auxiliary verb; to learn, not the first problem in Euclid, but even the numeration table; and yet you do not think it absurd to postpone religious instruction, on principles, which, if admitted at all, must terminate either in ignorance or in your proposing too late to a dying man to begin to learn the totally unknown scheme of Christianity. You do not think it impossible that he should be brought to listen to the
voice of this charmer,
when he can no longer listen to
the voice of singing men and singing women.
You do not think it unreasonable that immortal beings should delay to devote their days to Heaven, till they have "no pleasure in them" themselves. You will not bring them to offer up the first fruits of their lips, and hearts, and lives, to their Maker, because you persuade yourselves that he, who has called himself a "jealous God," may however be contented hereafter with the wretched sacrifice of decayed appetites, and the leavings of almost extinguished affections.
For one cannot believe that there is scarcely any one, except he be a decided infidel, who does not consider religion as at least a good reversionary thing; as an object which ought always to occupy a little remote corner of his map of life; the study of which, though it is always to be postponed, is however not to be finally rejected; which though it cannot conveniently come in to his present scheme of life, it is intended some how or other to take up before death. This awful deception arises, partly from the bulk which the objects of time and sense acquire in our eyes by their nearness; while the invisible realities of eternity are but faintly discerned by a feeble faith, through a dim and distant medium; and partly from a totally false idea of the nature of Christianity, from a fatal fancy that we can repent at any future period, and that as amendment will always be in our own power, it will be time enough to think of reforming our life, when we should only think of closing it.
But depend upon it that a heart long hardened, I do not mean by gross vices merely, but by a fondness for the world, by an habitual and excessive indulgence in the pleasures of sense, is by no means in a favourable state to admit the light of divine truth, or to receive the impressions of divine grace. God indeed sometimes shows us by an act of his sovereignty, that this wonderful change, the conversion of a sinner's heart, may be produced without the intervention of human means, to show that the work is HIS. But as this is not the way in which the Almighty usually deals with his creatures, it would be nearly as preposterous for men to act on this presumption, as it would be to take no means for the preservation of our lives, because Jesus Christ raised Lazarus from the dead.
CHAP. XI.
On the manner of instructing young persons in Religion.—General remarks on the genius of Christianity.
I WOULD now with great deference address those respectable characters who are really concerned about the best interests of their children; those to whom Christianity is indeed an important consideration, but whose habits of life have hindered them from giving it its due degree in the scale of education.
Begin then with considering that religion is a part, and the most prominent part, in your system of instruction. Do not communicate its principles in a random desultory way; nor scantily stint this business to only such scraps and remnants of time as may be casually picked up from the gleanings of other acquirements.
Will you bring to God for a sacrifice that which costs you nothing?
Let the best part of the day, which with most people is the earliest part, be steadily and invariably dedicated to this work by your children, before they are tired with their other studies, while the intellect is clear, the spirits light, and the attention unfatigued.
Confine not your instructions to mere verbal rituals and dry systems; but instruct them in a way which shall interest their feelings; by lively images, and by a warm practical application of what they read to their own hearts and circumstances. There seems to be no good reason that while every other thing is to be made amusing, religion alone must be dry and uninviting. Do not fancy that a thing is good merely because it is dull. Why should not the most entertaining powers of the mind be supremely consecrated to that subject which is most worthy of their full exercise? The misfortune is, that religious learning is too often rather considered as an act of the memory than of the heart and feelings; and that children are turned over to the dry work of getting by rote as a task that which they should get from example and animated conversation. Teach them rather, as their Blessed Saviour taught, by interesting parables, which while they corrected the heart, left some exercise for the ingenuity in their solution, and for the feelings in their application. Teach, as HE taught, by seizing on surrounding objects, passing events, local circumstances, peculiar characters, apt allusions, just analogy, appropriate illustration. Call in all creation, animate and inanimate, to your aid, and accustom your young audience to
Find tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
Do, according to your measure of ability, what the Holy Spirit which indited the Scriptures has done, always take the sensibility of the learner into your account of the faculties which are to be worked upon. "For the doctrines of the Bible," as the profound and enlightened Bacon observes,
are not proposed to us in a naked logical form, but arrayed in the most beautiful and striking colours which creation affords.
By those illustrations used by Him
who knew what was in man,
and therefore best knew how to address him, it was, that the unlettered audiences of Christ and his Apostles were enabled both to comprehend and to relish doctrines, which would not readily have made their way to their understandings, had they not first touched their hearts; and which would have found access to neither the one nor the other, had they been delivered in dry, scholastic disquisitions. Now those audiences not being learned, may be supposed to have been nearly in the state of children, as to their receptive faculties, and to have required nearly the same sort of instruction; that is, they were more capable of being affected with what was simple, and touching, and lively, than what was elaborate, abstruse, and unaffecting. Heaven and earth were made to furnish their contributions when man was to make him wise unto salvation. If that be the purest eloquence which most persuades, then no eloquence is so powersul as that of Scripture: and an intelligent Christian teacher will be admonished by the mode of Scripture itself, how to communicate its truths with life and spirit;
while he is musing the fire burns:
that fire which will preserve him from an insipid and freezing mode of instruction. He will moreover, like his great master, always carefully keep up a quick sense of the personal interest the pupil has in every religious instruction which is impressed upon him. He will teach as Paul prayed,
with the spirit and with the understanding also;
and in imitating this great model he will necessarily avoid the opposite faults of two different sorts of instructors; for while some of our divines of the higher class have been too apt to preach as if mankind had only intellect, and the lower and more popular sort as if they had only passions, do you borrow what is good from both, and address your pupils as beings compounded of both understanding and affections
The zeal and diligence with which the Bishop of London's weekly lectures have been attended by persons of all ranks and descriptions, but more especially by that class to whom this little work is addressed, is a very promising circumstance for the age. And while one considers with pleasure the advantages peculiarly to be derived by the young from so interesting and animated an exposition of the gospels, one is further led to rejoice at the countenance given by such high authority to the revival of that excellent, but too much neglected practice of lectures.
Fancy not that the Bible is too difficult and intricate to be presented in its own naked form, and that it puzzles and bewilders the youthful understanding. In all needful and indispenbsale points of knowledge the darkness of Scripture, as a great Christian philosopher
Mr. Boyle.
has observed,
is but a partial darkness, like that of Egypt, which benighted only the enemies of God while it left his children in clear day.
And if it be really the appropriate character of Scripture, as it tells us itself that it is,
to enlighten the eyes of the blind,
and
to make wise the simple,
then is it as well calculated for the youthful and uninformed as for any other class; and as it was never expected that the greater part of Christians should be learned, so is learning no
essential
qualification for a common Christian; for which reason Scripture truths are expressed with that clear and simple evidence adapted to the kind of assent which they require. He who could bring an unprejudiced heart and an unperverted will would bring to the Scriptures the best qualification for understanding and receiving them. And though they contain things which the pupil cannot comprehend, (as what ancient poet, historian, or orator does not,) the teacher may address to him the words which Christ addressed to Peter,
What I do, thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter.
Young people who have been taught religion in a dry and superficial way, who have had all its drudgeries and none of its pleasures, will probably have acquired so little relish for it, as to consider the continued prosecution of their religious studies as a badge of their tutelage, as a mark that they are still under subjection; and will look forward with impatience to the hour of their emancipation from the lectures on Christianity. They will long for the period when its lessons shall cease to be delivered; will conclude that, having once attained such an age, and arrived at the required proficiency, the object will be accomplished and the labour at an end. But let not
your
children
so learn Christ.
Apprize them that no specific day will ever arrive on which they shall say, I
have
attained; but inform them, that every acquisition must be followed up; knowledge must be increased; prejudices subdued; good habits rooted; evil ones eradicated; dispositions strengthened; principles confirmed; till, going on from strength to strength, they come
to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.
But though serious instruction will not only be uninteresting but irksome if conveyed to youth in a mere didactic way, yet if their affections are suitably engaged, their hearts, so far from necessarily revolting, as some insist they will, often receive the most solemn truths with alacrity. It is the manner which revolts them, and not the thing.
As it is notorious that men of wit and imagination have been the most formidable enemies to Christianity; while men, in whom those talents have been consecrated to God, have been some of her most useful champions, take particular care to press that ardent and ever active power, the
imagination,
into the service of religion; this bright and busy faculty will be leading its possessor into perpetual peril, and is an enemy of peculiar potency till it come to be employed in the cause of God. It is a lion, which though worldly prudence indeed may
chain
so as to prevent outward mischief, yet the malignity remains within; but when sanctified by Christianity, the imagination is a lion
tamed;
you have all the benefit of its strength and its activity, divested of its mischief. God never bestowed that noble but restless faculty, without intending it to be an instrument of his own glory; though it has been too often set up in rebellion against him; because, in its youthful stirrings, while all alive to evil it has not been seized upon to fight for its rightful Sovereign, but was early enlisted with little opposition under the banners of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Religion is the only subject in which, under the guidance of an holy and sober-minded prudence, this discursive faculty can safely stretch its powers and expand its energies. But let it be remembered that it must be a sound and genuine Christianity which can alone so chastise and regulate the imagination, as to restrain it from those errors and excesses into which a false, a mistaken, an irregular religion, has too often plunged its injudicious and ill-instructed professor. To secure the imagination therefore on the safe side, and, if I may change the metaphor, to put it under the direction of its true pilot in the stormy voyage of life, is like engaging those potent elements, the wind and tide, in your favour.
In your communications with young people, take care to convince them that as religion is not a business to be laid aside with the lesson, so neither is it a single branch of duty; some detached thing, which like an art or a language is to be practised separately, and to have its distinct periods and modes of operation. But let them understand, that common acts, by the spirit in which they are to be performed, are to be made acts of religion: that Christianity may be considered as having something of that influence over the conduct which external grace has over the manners; for as it is not the performance of some particular act which denominates any one to be graceful, grace being a spirit diffused through the whole system which animates every sentiment, and informs every action; as she who has true personal grace has it uniformly, and is not sometimes awkward and sometimes elegant; does not sometimes lay it down and sometimes take it up; so religion is not an occasional act, but an indwelling principle, an inwrought habit, a pervading and informing spirit, from which indeed every act derives all its life, and energy, and beauty.
Give them clear views of the broad discrimination between practical religion and worldly morality. Show them that no good qualities are genuine but such as flow from the religion of Christ. Let them learn that the virtues which the better sort of people, who yet are destitute of true Christianity, inculcate and practise, resemble those virtues which have the love of God for their motive, just as counterfeit coin resembles sterling gold; they may have, it is true, certain points of resemblance with the others; they may be bright and shining; they have perhaps the image and the superscription, but they ever want the true distinguishing properties; they want sterling value, purity, and weight. They may indeed pass current in the traffic of this world, but when brought to the touchstone they will be found full of alloy; when weighed in the balance of the sanctuary, "they will be found wanting;" they will not stand that final trial which is to separate the precious from the vile; they will not
abide the day of
his
coming who is like a refiner's fire.
One error into which even some good people are apt to fall, is that of endeavouring to deceive young minds by temporising expedients. In order to allure them to become religious they exhibit false, or faint, or inadequate views of Christianity; and while they represent it as it really is, as a life of superior happiness and advantage, they conceal its difficulties, and like the Jesuitical Chinese missionaries, extenuate, or sink, or deny, such parts of it as are least alluring. But besides that, the project fails with them as it did with the Jesuits, all fraud is bad; and a pious fraud is a contradiction in terms which ought to be buried in the rubbish of papal desolation.
Instead of representing to the young Christian that it may be possible by a prudent ingenuity at once to pursue, with equal ardour and success, worldly fame and eternal glory, would it not be more honest to tell him fairly and unambiguously that there are two distinct roads, between which there is a broad boundary line? that there are two irreconcileable interests; that he must forsake the one if he would cleave to the other? that there are two sorts of characters at eternal variance? that nothing short of absolute decision can make a confirmed Christian? Point out the different sort of promises annexed to these different sorts of characters. Confess in the language of Christ how the man of the world often obtains (and it is the natural course of human things) the recompence he sedulously seeks.
Verily I say unto you they have their reward.
Explain the beatitudes on the other hand, and unfold what kind of specific reward is there individually promised to its concomitant virtue. Show your pupil that to that "poverty of spirit" to which the kingdom of heaven is promised, it would be inconsistent to expect that the recompence of human commendation should be also attached: that to that "purity of heart" to which the beatific vision is promised, it would be unreasonable to suppose you can unite the praise of licentious wits, or the admiration of a catch club. These will be bestowed on their appropriate and corresponding merits. Do not inlist them under false colours. Different sorts of rewards are attached to different sorts of services; and while you truly assert that religious ways are
ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace,
take care that you do not lead them to depend too exclusively on worldly happiness and earthly peace, for these make no part of the covenant; they may be superadded, but they were never stipulated in the contract.
But if, in order to attract the young to a religious course, you disingenuously conceal its difficulties, while you are enlarging upon its pleasures, you will tempt them to distrust the truth of Scripture itself. For what will they think, not only of a few detached texts, but of the general cast and colour of the Gospel when contrasted with your representation of it? What notion will they conceive of "the strait gate" and "narrow way?" of the amputation of a "right hand?" of the excision of a "right eye?" of the other strong metaphors by which the Christian warfare is shadowed out? of "crucifying the "flesh?" of "mortifying the old man?" of "dying unto sin?" of "overcoming "the world?" Do you not think their meek and compassionate Saviour who died for your children loved them as well as you love them? And if this were his language, ought it not to be yours? It is the language of true love; of that love with which a merciful God loved the world, when he spared not his own Son. Do not then try to conceal from them, that the life of a Christian is necessarily opposite to the life of the world; and do not seek, by a vain attempt at accommodation, to reconcile that difference which Christ himself has pronounced to be irreconcileable.
May it not be partly owing to the want of a due introduction to the knowledge of the real nature and spirit of religion, that so many young Christians, who set out in a fair and flourishing way, decline and wither when they come to perceive the requisitions of experimental Christianity? requisitions which they had not suspected of making any part of the plan.
People are no more to be cheated into religion than into learning. The same spirit which influences your oath in a court of justice should influence your discourse in that court of equity—your family. Your children should be told the truth, the children should be told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It is unnecessary to add, that it must be done gradually and discreetly. Accustom them to reason by analogy. Explain to them that great
worldly
attainments are never made without great sacrifices; that the merchant cannot become rich without industry; the statesman eminent without labour; the scholar learned without study; the hero renowned without danger: would it not then, on human principles, be unreasonable to think that the Christian alone should obtain a triumph without a warfare? the highest prize with the lowest exertions? an eternal crown without a present cross? and that heaven is the only reward which the idle may reckon upon? No: though salvation "be the
gift
of God," yet it must be
"worked out."
Convince your young friends, however, that in this case the difficulty bears no proportion to the prize; though in one respect the point of resemblance fail, and that most advantageously for the Christian; for while, even by the most probable means, which are the union of talents with diligence, no human prosperity can be insured to the worldly candidate; while the most successful adventurer may fail by the fault of another; while the best concerted project of the statesman may be crushed; the bravest hero lose the battle; the brightest genius fail of getting bread; and while, moreover, the pleasure arising from success in these may be no sooner tasted than it is poisoned by a more prosperous rival; the persevering Christian is safe and certain of attaining
his
object; no misfortunes can defeat
his
hope; no competition can endanger
his
success; for though another gain he will not lose. Nay, the success of another, so far from diminishing his gain, is an addition to it; the more he diffuses, the richer he grows; and that mortal hour which cuts off for ever the hopes of worldly men, crowns and consummates his.
Beware at the same time of setting up any act of self-denial or mortification as the
procuring
cause of salvation. This would be a presumptuous project to
purchase
that eternal life which is declared to be the "free
gift
of God." This would be to send your children not to the gospel to learn their Christianity, but to the Monks and Ascetics of the middle ages; it would be sending them to Peter the Hermit, and the holy fathers of the Desert, and not to Peter the Apostle and his Divine Master. Mortification is not the price; it is nothing more than the discipline of a foul of which sin is the disease, the diet prescribed by the great physician. Without this guard the young devout Christian would be led to fancy that abstinence, pilgrimage, and penance might be adopted as the cheap substitute for the subdued desire and the obedient will; and would be almost in as much danger on the one hand of self-righteousness arising from austerities and mortification, as she would be on the other from self-gratification in the indulgences of the world. And while you carefully impress on her the necessity of living a life of strict obedience if she would please God, do not neglect to remind her also that a complete renunciation of her own performances as a ground of merit,
purchasing
the favour of God by their own intrinsic worth, is included in that obedience.
Though it be impossible here to enumerate all those Christian virtues which should be impressed in the progress of a Christian education, yet in this connection I cannot forbear mentioning one which more immediately grows out of the subject; and to remark that the principle which should be the invariable concomitant of all instruction, and especially of religious instruction, is humility. As this temper is inculcated in every page of the Gospel; as it is deducible from every precept and every action of Christ; that is a sufficient intimation that it should be made to grow out of every study, that it should be grafted on every acquisition. It is the turning point, the leading principle indicative of the very genius of Christianity. This chastising quality should therefore be constantly made in education to operate as the only counteraction of that
knowledge which puffeth up.
Youth should be taught that as humility is the discriminating characteristic of our religion, that therefore a proud Christian, a haughty disciple of a crucified Master, furnishes perhaps a stronger opposition in terms than the whole compass of language can exhibit. Humility being the appropriate grace of Christianity, is what makes Christian and Pagan virtues
essentially
different. The virtues of the Romans, for instance, were obviously founded in pride; as a proof of this, they had not even a word in their copions language to express humility, but what was used in a bad sense, and conveyed the idea of meanness or vileness. Christianity so stands on its own single ground, is so far from assimilating itself to the spirit of other religions, that, unlike the Roman Emperor, who though he would not become a Christian, yet ordered that the image of Christ should be set up in the Pantheon with those of the heathen gods, and be worshipped in common with them, Christianity not only rejects all such partnerships with other religions, but it pulls down their images, defaces their temples, founds its own existence on the ruins of spurious religions and spurious virtues, and will be every thing when it is admitted to be any thing.
Will it be going too much out of the way to observe, that Christian Britain retaliates upon Pagan Rome? For if the former used humility in a bad sense, has not the latter learnt to use pride in a good one? May we without impertinence venture to remark, that, in the deliberations of as honourable and upright political assemblies as ever adorned, or, under Providence, dence, upheld a country; in orations which leave us nothing to envy in Attic or Roman eloquence in their best days; it were to be wished that we did not borrow from Rome an epithet which suited the genius of her religion, as much as it militates against that of ours? The panegyrist of the battle of Marathon, of Plataea, or of Zama, might with propriety speak of a "proud day," or a "proud event," or a "proud success." But surely the Christian encomiasts of the battle of the Nile may, from their abundance, select an epithet better appropriated to such a victory—a victory which, by preserving Europe, has perhaps preserved that religion which sets its foot on the very neck of pride, and in which the conqueror himself, even in the first ardors of triumph, forgot not to ascirbe the victory to ALMIGHTY GOD. Let us leave to the enemy both the term and the thing; arrogant words being the only weapons in which we must ever veil to their decided superiority.
Above all things then you should beware that your pupils do not take up with a vague, general, and undefined religion; but look to it that their Christianity be really the religion of Christ. Instead of slurring over the doctrines of the cross, as disreputable appendages to our religion, which are to be got over as well as we can, but which are never to be dwelt upon, take care to make these your fundamental articles. Do not explain away these doctrines, and by some elegant periphrasis
hint
at a Saviour, instead of making him the foundation stone of your religion. Do not convey primary, and plain, and awful, and indispensable truths elliptically, I mean as something that is to be understood without being expressed; nor study fashionable circumlocutions to avoid names and things on which our salvation hangs, in order to prevent your discourse from being offensive. Persons who are thus instructed in religion with more good breeding than seriousness and simplicity, imbibe a distaste for plain scriptural language; and the Scriptures themselves are so little in use with a certain fashionable class of readers, that when the doctrines and language of the Bible occasionally occur in other authors, they present a sort of novelty and peculiarity which offend; and such readers as disuse the Bible are apt to call that precise and puritanical, which is in fact sound and scriptural. Nay, it has several times happened to the author to hear persons of sense and learning ridicule insulated sentiments and expressions that have fallen in their way, which they would have treated with decent respect had they known them to be, as they really were, texts of Scripture. This observation is made with a view to enforce the importance of early communicating religious knowledge, and of infusing an early taste for Scripture phraseology.
The persons in question are apt to acquire a kind of Pagan Christianity, which just enables them to hear with complacency of the "Deity," of a "first cause," and of "conscience." Nay, some may even go so far as to talk of
the Founder of our religion,
of the "Author of Christianity," in general terms, as they would talk of the prophet of Arabia, or the lawgiver of China, of Athens, or of the Jews. But their refined ears revolt not a little at the unadorned name of Christ; and even the naked and unqualified term of our Saviour, or Redeemer, carries with it a queerish, inelegant, not to say a suspicious sound. They will express a serious disapprobation of what is wrong under the moral term of
vice,
or the forensic term of
crime;
but they are apt to think that the Scripture term of
sin
has something fanatical in it: and, while they discover a great respect for morality, they do not much relish holiness which is indeed the specific morality of a Christian. They will speak readily of a man's reforming, or leaving off a vicious habit, or growing more correct in some individual practice; but the expression of a total change of heart, they would stigmatize as the very shibboleth of a sect, though it is the language of a Liturgy they affect to admire, and of a gospel which they profess to receive.
CHAP. XII.
Hints suggested for furnishing young persons with a scheme of prayer.
THOSE who are aware of the inestimable value of prayer themselves, will naturally be anxious not only that this duty should be earnestly inculcated on their children, but that they should be taught it in the best manner; and
such
parents need little persuasion or council on the subject. Yet children of decent and orderly (I will not say of strictly religious) families are often so superficially instructed in this important business, that it is not unusual when they are asked what prayers they use, to answer,
the Lord's Prayer and the
Creed.
And even some who are better taught, are not always made to understand with sufficient clearness the specific distinction between the two; that the one is the confession of their
faith,
and the other the model for their
supplications.
By this confused and indistinct beginning, they set out with a perplexity in their ideas, which is not always completely disentangled in more advanced life.
An intelligent mother will seize the first occasion which the child's opening understanding shall allow, for making a little course of lectures on the Lord's Prayer, taking every division or short sentence separately; for each furnishes valuable materials for a distinct lecture. The child should be led gradually through every part of this divine composition; she should be taught to break it into all the regular divisions, into which indeed it so naturally resolves itself. She should be made to comprehend one by one each of its short but weighty sentences, to amplify and spread them out for the purpose of better understanding them, not in their most extensive, but in their most simple and obvious meaning. For in those condensed and substantial expressions, every word is an ingot and will bear beating out; so that the teacher's difficulty will not so much be what she shall say as what she shall suppress; so abundant is the expository matter which this succinct pattern suggests.
When the child has a pretty good conception of the meaning of each division, she should then be made to observe the connection, relation, and dependence of the several parts of this prayer one upon another; for there is great method and connection in it. We pray that the "kingdom of God may come," as the best means to "hallow his name;" and that by us, the obedient subjects of this kingdom, "his will may be done." A judicious interpreter will observe how logically and consequently one clause grows out of another, though she will use neither the word logical nor consequence: for all explanations should be made in the most plain and familiar terms, it being words, and not things, which commonly perplex children, if, as it sometimes happens, the teacher, though not wanting sense, want perspicuity and simplicity.
The young person, from being made a complete mistress of this short composition, (which as it is to be her guide and model through life, too much pains cannot be bestowed on it,) will have a clearer conception, not only of its individual contents, but of prayer in general, than many ever attain though their memory has been perhaps loaded with long and unexplained forms, which they have been accustomed to swallow in the lump without scrutiny. Prayer should not be so swallowed. It is a regular prescription, which should stand analysis and examination: it is not a charm, the successful operation of which depends on your blindly taking it, without knowing what is in it, and in which the good you receive is promoted by your ignorance.
I would have it understood that by these little comments, I do not mean that the child should be put to learn dry, and to her unintelligible expositions; and here I must remark in general, that the teacher is sometimes apt to relieve herself at the child's expence, by loading the
memory
of a little creature on occasions in which far other faculties should be put in exercise. The child herself should be made to furnish a good part of the commentary by her answers; in which answers she will be much assisted by the judgment the teacher uses in her manner of questioning. And the youthful understanding, when its powers are properly set at work, will soon strengthen by exercise so as to furnish reasonable if not very correct answers.
Written forms of prayer are not only useful and proper, but indispensably necessary. But I will hazard the remark, that if children are thrown
exclusively
on the best forms, if they are made to commit them to memory like a copy of verses, and to repeat them in a dry, customary way, they will produce little effect on their minds. They will not understand what they repeat, if we do not early open to them the important
scheme
of prayer. Without such an elementary introduction to this duty, they will afterwards be either ignorant or enthusiasts, or both. We should give them
knowledge
before we can expect them to make much progress in
piety,
and as a due preparative to it: Christian instruction in this resembling the sun, who, in the course of his communications, gives light before he gives heat. And to excite a spirit of devotion without infusing that knowledge out of which it is to grow, is practically reviving the popish maxim, that Ignorance is the mother of Devotion, and virtually adopting the popish rule, of praying in an unknown tongue.
Children, let me again observe, will not attend to their prayers if they do not understand them; and they will not understand them, if they are not taught to analyse, to dissect them, to know their component parts, and to methodise them.
It is not enough to teach them to consider prayer under the general idea that it is an application to God for what they want, and an acknowledgment for what they have. This, though true in the gross, is not sufficiently precise and correct. They should learn to define and to arrange all the different parts of prayer. And as a preparative to prayer itself, they should be impressed with as clear an idea as the nature of the subject admits, of
HIM with whom they have to do.
His omnipresence is perhaps of all his attributes, that of which we may make the first practical use. Every head of prayer is founded on some great scriptural truths, which truths the little analysis here suggested will materially assist to fix in their minds.
On the knowledge that "God is," that he is an infinitely holy Being, and that
he is the rewarder of all them that diligently seek him,
will be grounded the first part of prayer, which is
adoration.
The creature devoting itself to the Creator, or
self-dedication,
next presents itself. And if they are first taught that important truth, that as needy creatures they want help, which may be done by some easy analogy, they will easily be led to understand how naturally
petition
forms a most considerable branch of prayer: and divine grace being among the things for which they are to petition, this naturally suggests to the mind the doctrine of the influences of the spirit. And when to this is added the conviction, which will be readily worked into an ingenuous mind, that as offending creatures they want pardon, the necessity of
confession
will easily be made intelligible to them. But they should be brought to understand that it must not be such a general and vague confession as awakens no sense of personal humiliation, as excites no recollection of their own more peculiar and individual faults. But it must be a confession founded on self-knowledge, which is itself to arise out of the practice of self-examination; for want of this sort of discriminating habit, a well-meaning but ill-instructed girl may catch herself confessing the sins of some other person, and omitting those which are more especially her own. On the gladness of heart natural to youth, it will be less difficult to impress the delightful duty of
thanksgiving,
which forms so considerable a branch of prayer. In this they should be habituated to recapitulate not only their general, but to enumerate their peculiar, daily, and incidental mercies, in the same specific manner as they should have been taught to detail their
wants
in the petitionary, and their
faults
in the confessional part. The same warmth of feeling which will more readily dispose them to express their gratitude to God in thanksgiving, will also lead them more gladly to express their love to their parents and friends, by adopting another indispensable, and to an affectionate heart, pleasing part of prayer, which is
intercession.
When they have been made, by a plain and perspicuous mode of instruction, fully to understand the different nature of all these; and when they clearly comprehend that
adoration, self-dedication, confession, petition, thanksgiving,
and
intercession,
are distinct heads, which must not be involved in each other, you may exemplify the rules by pointing out to them these successive branches in any well written form. And they will easily discern, that ascription of glory to that God to whom we owe so much, and on whom we so entirely depend, is the conclusion into which a Christian's prayer will resolve itself. It is hardly needful to remind the teacher that our truly Scriptural Liturgy invariably furnishes the example of presenting
every
request in the name of the great Mediator. In the Liturgy too they will meet with the best exemplifications of prayers, exhibiting separate specimens of each of the distinct heads we have been suggesting.
But in order that the minds of young persons may, without labour or difficulty, be gradually brought into such a state of preparation as to be benefited by such a little course of lectures as we have recommended; they should, from the time when they were first able to read, have been employing themselves at their leisure hours, in laying in a store of provision for their present demands. And here the memory may be employed to good purpose; for being the first faculty which is ripened, and which is indeed perfected when the others are only beginning to unfold themselves, this is an intimation of Providence that it should be the first seized on for the best uses. It should therefore be devoted to lay in a stock of the more easy and devotional parts of Scripture. The Psalms alone are an inexhaustible store-house of rich materials.
This will be so far from spoiling the cheerfulness, or impeding the pleasures of childhood, that the author knows a little girl who, before she was seven years old, had learnt the whole Psalter through a second time; and that without any diminution of uncommon gaiety of spirits, or any interference with the elegant acquirements suited to her station.
Children whose minds have been early well furnished from these, will be competent at nine or ten years old to produce from them, and to select with no contemptible judgment, suitable examples of all the parts of prayer; and will be able to extract and appropriate texts under each respective head, so as to exhibit, without help, complete specimens of every part of prayer. By confining them entirely to the sense, and nearly to the words of Scripture, they will be preserved from enthusiasm, from irregularity and conceit. By being obliged continually to apply for themselves, they will get a habit in all their difficulties, of
searching the Scriptures,
which may be useful to them on future and more trying occasions. But I would
confine
them to the Bible; for were they allowed with equal freedom to ransack other books with a view to get helps to embellish their little compositions, or rather compilations, they might be tempted to pass off for their own what they pick up from others, which might tend at once to make them both vain and deceitful. This is a temptation to which they are too much laid open when they get commended for any pilfered passage with which they adorn their little themes and letters. But in the present instance there is no danger of any similar deception, for there is such a sacred signature stamped on every Scripture phrase, that the owner's name can never be defaced or torn off from the goods, either by fraud or violence.
It would be well, if in those Psalms which children were first directed to get by heart, an eye were had to this their future application; and that they were employed, but without any intimation of your subsequent design, in learning such as may be best turned to this account. In the 139th the first great truth to be imprinted on the young heart, as was before observed, is unfolded with such a mixture of majestic grandeur, and such an interesting variety of intimate and local circumstances, as is likely to seize on the quick and lively feelings of youth. The awful idea that that Being whom she is taught to reverence, is not only
in general
"acquainted with all her ways," but that
he is about her path, and about her bed,
bestows such a sense of real and present existence on
him
of whom she is apt to conceive as having his distant habitation only in Heaven, as will help her to realize the sense of his actual presence.
The 103d Psalm will open to the mind rich and abundant sources of expression for gratitude and thanksgiving, and it includes spiritual as well as temporal favours. It illustrates the mercies of God by familiar and domestic images, of such peculiar tenderness and endearment, as are calculated to strike upon every chord of filial fondness in the heart of an affectionate child. The 51st supplies an infinite variety of matter in whatever relates to confession of sin, or to supplication for the aids of the spirit. The 23d abounds with captivating expressions of the protecting goodness of their heavenly Father, conveyed by pastoral imagery of uncommon sweetness: in short the greater part of these beautiful compositions overflow with materials for every head of prayer.
The child who, while she was engaged in learning these Scriptures, was not aware that there was any specific object to be answered by it, will afterwards feel an unexpected pleasure arising from the application of her petty labours, when she is called to draw out from her little treasury of knowledge the stores she has been collecting; and will be pleased to find that without any fresh application to study, for she is now obliged to exercise a higher faculty than memory, she has lying ready in her mind, the materials with which she is now called upon to work. Her judgment must be set about selecting one or two, or more texts which shall contain the substance of every specific head of prayer before noticed; and it will be a farther exercise to her understanding to concatenate the detached parts into one regular whole, occasionally varying the arrangement as she likes; that is, changing the order, sometimes beginning with invocation, sometimes with confession; sometimes dwelling longer on one part, sometimes on another. As the hardships of a religious Sunday are often so pathetically pleaded, as making one of the heavy burdens of religion; and as the friends of religion are so often called upon to mitigate its rigours, might not such an exercise as has been here suggested help to vary its occupations?
The habits of the pupil being thus early formed, her memory, attention, and intellect being bent in a right direction, and the exercise invariably maintained, may one not reasonably hope that her
affections
also, through divine grace, may become interested in the work, till she will be enabled
to pray with the spirit and with the understanding also?
She will now be qualified to use a well-composed form with seriousness and advantage; for she will now use it not mechanically, but rationally. That which before appeared to her a mere mass of good words, will now appear a significant composition, exhibiting variety, and order, and beauty; and she will have the farther advantage of being enabled by her improved judgment to distinguish and select for her own purpose such as are more judicious and more scriptural.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME.