CHAP. XIII. The practical uses of female knowledge.— A comparative view of both sexes.

THE chief end to be proposed in culti­vating the understandings of women, is to qualify them for the practical purposes of life. Their knowledge is not often like the learning of men, to be reproduced in some literary composition, nor ever in any learned profession; but it is to come out in conduct. A lady studies, not that she may qualify herself to become [Page 2]an orator or a pleader; not that she may learn to debate, but to act. She is to read the best books, not so much to enable her to talk of them, as to bring the improvement she derives from them to the rectification of her principles, and the formation of her habits. The great uses of study are to enable her to regu­late her own mind, and to be useful to others.

To woman therefore, whatever be her rank, I would recommend a predominance of those more sober studies, which, not having display for their object, may make her wise without vanity, happy without witnesses, and content without panegy­rists; the exercise of which will not bring celebrity, but improve usefulness. She should pursue every kind of study which will teach her to elicit truth; which will lead her to be intent upon realities; will give precision to her ideas; will make an exact mind; every study which, instead of stimulating her sensibility, will chastise it; [Page 3]which will give her definite notions; will bring the imagination under dominion; will lead her to think, to compare, to combine, to methodise: which will confer such a power of discrimination that her judgment shall learn to reject what is dazzling if it be not solid; and to prefer, not what is striking, or bright, or new, but what is just. Every kind of know­ledge which is rather fitted for home consumption than foreign exportation, is peculiarly adapted to women.

It is because the superficial mode of their education furnishes them with a false and low standard of intellectual excellence, that women have sometimes become ridi­culous by the unfounded pretensions of literary vanity: for it is not the really learned but the smatterers, who have generally brought their sex into discredit, by an absurd affectation, which has set them on despising the duties of ordinary life. There have not indeed been wanting (but the character is not common) pre­cieuses [Page 4]ridicules, who, assuming a superiority to the sober cares which ought to occupy their sex, claim a lofty and supercilious exemption from the dull and plodding drudgeries. Of this dim speck called earth! who have affected to establish an unnatural separation between talents and usefulness, instead of bearing in mind that talents are the great appointed instruments of useful­ness; who act as if knowledge were to confer on woman a kind of fantastic sovereignty, which should exonerate her from female duties; whereas it is only meant the more eminently to qualify her for the performance of them. For a woman of real sense will never forget, that while the greater part of her appro­priate duties are such as the most mode­rately gifted may fulfil with credit, (for Providence never makes that to be very difficult, which is generally necessary,) yet the most highly endowed are equally [Page 5]bound to perform them; and the humblest of these offices, performed on Christian principles, are wholesome for the minds even of the most enlightened, and tend to the casting down of those high imaginations which women of genius are too much tempted to indulge.

For instance; ladies whose natural vanity has been aggravated by a false education, may look down on oeconomy as a vulgar attainment, unworthy of the attention of an highly cultivated intellect; but this is the false estimate of a shallow mind. OEconomy, such as a woman of fortune is called on to practise, is not merely the petty detail of small daily expences, the shabby curtailments and stinted parsimony of a little mind operat­ing on little concerns; but it is the exer­cise of a sound judgment exerted in the comprehensive outline of order, of arrangement, of distribution; of regula­tions by which alone well governed so­cieties, great and small, subsist. She who [Page 6]has the best regulated mind will, other things being equal, have the best regu­lated family. As in the superintendence of the universe, wisdom is seen in its effects; and as in the visible works of Providence, that which goes on with such beautiful regularity is the result not of chance but of design; so that manage­ment which seems the most easy is com­monly the consequence of the best con­certed plan. A sound oeconomy is a sound understanding brought into action; it is calculation realised; it is the doctrine of proportion reduced to practice; it is foreseeing consequences and guarding against them; it is expecting contingencies and being prepared for them. The differ­ence is that to a narrow minded vulgar oeconomist the details are continually present; she is overwhelmed by their weight, and is perpetually bespeaking your pity for her labours and your praise for her exertions: she is afraid you will not see how much she is harassed. Little [Page 7]events, and trivial operations engross her whole soul; while a woman of sense, hav­ing provided for their probable recurrence, guards against the inconveniences, without being disconcerted by the casual obstruct­ions which they offer to her general scheme.

Superior talents however are not so common, as, by their frequency, to offer much disturbance to the general course of human affairs; and many a lady who tacitly accuses herself of neglecting her ordinary duties because she is a genius, will perhaps be found often to accuse her­self as unjustly as good St. Jerome, when he laments that he was beaten by the Angel for being too Ciceronian in his style ^*

But the truth is, women who are so puffed up with the conceit of talents as to neglect the plain duties of life, will not be found to be women of the best abilities. And here may the author be allowed the [Page 8]gratification of observing, that those women of real genius and extensive know­ledge, whose friendship have conferred honour and happiness on her own life, have been in general eminent for oeconomy, and the practice of domestic virtues.

A romantic girl with an affectation of sentiment, which her still more ignorant friends mistake for genius, (for in the empire of the blind the one-eyed are kings,) and possessing something of a natural ear, has perhaps in her childhood exhausted all the images of grief, and love, and fancy, picked up in her desultory poetical reading in an elegy on a sick linnet or a dead lap-dog; she begins thenceforward to be considered as a prodigy in her little circle; surrounded with flatterers, she has no opportunity of getting to know that her fame is derived not from her powers, but her position; and that when an im­partial critic shall have made all the necessary deductions, such as that—she is a neighbour, that she is a relation, that [Page 9]she is a female, that she is young, that she has had no advantages, that she is pretty perhaps—when her verses come to be stripped of all their extraneous append­ages, and the fair author is driven off her 'vantage-ground of partiality, sex, and favour, she will commonly sink to the level of ordinary capacities; while those quieter women, who have meekly sat down in the humbler shades of prose and prudence, by a patient perseverance in rational studies, rise afterwards much higher in the scale of intellect, and acquire a stock of sound knowledge for far better purposes. And, though it may seem a contradiction, yet it will generally be found true, that girls who take to scribbling are the least studious. They early acquire a false confidence in their own unassisted powers; it becomes more gratifying to their natural vanity to be always pouring out their minds on paper, than to be pouring into them fresh ideas from richer sources.

[Page 10]They pant for the unmerited praise of fancy and of genius, while they disdain the commendation of judgment, knowledge, and perseverance, which is within their reach. To extort admiration they are accustomed to boast of an impossible rapi­dity of composing; and while they in­sinuate how little time their performances cost them, they intend you should infer how perfect they might have made them had they condescended to the drudgery of application. But instead of extolling these effusions for their facility, it would be kind in their friends to blame them for their crudeness; and when the young pretenders are eager to prove in how short a time such a poem has been struck off; it would be well to regret that they had not either taken a longer time, or forborne from writing at all; as in the former case the work would have been less defective, and in the latter the writer would have discovered more humility and self-distrust.

[Page 11]A general capacity for knowledge, and the cultivation of the understanding at large, will always put a woman into the best state for directing her pursuits into those particular channels which her destin­ation in life may afterwards require. But she should be carefully instructed that her talents are only a means to a still higher attainment, and that she is not to rest in them as an end; that merely to exercise them as instruments for the acquisition of fame and the promoting of pleasure, is subversive of her delicacy as a woman, and contrary to the spirit of a Christian.

Study, therefore, is to be considered as the means of strengthening the mind, and of fitting it for higher duties, just as exer­cise is to be considered as an instrument for strengthening the body for the same end. And the valetudinarian who is religious in the observance of his daily rides to promote his health, and rests in that as an end, without so much as in­tending to make his improved health [Page 12]an instrument of increased usefulness, acts on the same low and selfish principle with her who reads merely for pleasure and for fame, without any design of devoting the more invigorated mind to the glory of the Giver.

But there is one human consideration which would perhaps more effectually tend to damp in an aspiring woman the ardours of literary vanity (I speak not of real genius) than any which she will derive from motives of humility, or propriety, or religion; which is, that in the judgment passed on her performances, she will have to encounter the mortifying circumstance of having her sex always taken into ac­count, and her highest exertions will probably be received with the qualified approbation, that it is really extraordinary for a woman. Men of learning, who are naturally apt to estimate works in pro­portion as they appear to be the result of art, study, and institution, are apt to con­sider even the happier performances of the [Page 13]other sex as the spontaneous productions of a fruitful but shallow soil; and to give them the same sort of prasse which we bestow on certain sallads, which often draw from us a sort of wondering com­mendation; not indeed as being worth much in themselves, but because by the lightness of the earth, and a happy knack of the gardener, these indifferent cresses spring up in a night, and therefore one is ready to wonder they are no worse.

As to men of sense they need be the less inimical to the improvement of the other sex, as they themselves will be sure to be gainers by it; the enlargement of the female understanding being the most likely means to put an end to those petty cavils and contentions for equality which female smatterers so anxiously maintain. I say smatterers, for between the first class of both sexes the question is much more rarely agitated; co-operation and not competition is indeed the clear principle we wish to see reciprocally adopted by [Page 14]those higher minds which really approxi­mate the nearest to each other. The more a woman's understanding is im­proved, the more obviously she will discern that there can be no happiness in any society where there is a perpetual struggle for power; and the more her judgment is rectified, the more accurate views will she take of the station she was born to fill, and the more readily will she accommodate herself to it; while the most vulgar and ill-informed women are ever most inclined to be tyrants, and those always struggle most vehemently for power, who would not fail to make the worst use of it when attained. Thus the weakest reasoners are always the most positive in debate; and the cause is obvious, for they are unavoid­ably driven to maintain their pretensions by violence who want arguments and reasons to prove that they are in the right.

There is this singular difference between a woman vain of her wit, and a woman [Page 15]vain of her beauty, that the beauty while she is anxiously alive to her own fame, is often indifferent enough about the beauty of other women; and provided she herself is sure of your admiration, she does not insist on your thinking that there is ano­ther handsome woman in the world: while she who is vain of her genius, more liberal at least in her vanity, is jealous for the honour of her whole sex, and contends for the equality of their pretensions, in which she feels that her own are involved. The beauty vindicates her own rights, the wit the rights of women; the beauty fights for herself, the wit for a party; and while she more moderate beauty would but be Queen for life, the wit struggles to abrogate the Salique law of intellect, and to enthrone a whole sex of Queens.

At the revival of letters in the sixteenth and the following century, the controversy [Page 16]about this equality was agitated with more warmth than wisdom; and the process was instituted and carried on, on the part of the female complainant, with an acri­mony which always raises a suspicion of the justice of any cause. The novelty of that knowledge which was then bursting out from the dawn of a long night, kindled all the ardours of the female mind, and the ladies sought zealously for a portion of that renown which the reputation of learning was beginning to bestow. Besides their own pens, they had for their advocates all those needy authors who had any thing to hope from their power, their riches, or their influence; and so giddy did some of these literary ladies become by the adula­tion of their numerous panegyrists, that through these repeated draughts of in­ebriating praise, they grew to despise the equality for which they had before con­tended, as a state below their merit and unworthy of their acceptance. They now scorned to litigate for what they already [Page 17]thought they so obviously possessed, and nothing short of the palm of superiority was at length considered as adequate to their growing claims. When court-ladies and princesses were the candidates, they could not long want champions to support their cause; by these champions female authorities were produced as if paramount to facts; quotations from these female authors were considered as proofs, and their point-blank assertions stood for solid reasons. In those parasites who offered this homage to female genius, the homage was therefore the effect neither of truth, nor of justice, nor of conviction. It arose rather out of gratitude, or it was a reciprocation of flattery; it was vanity, it was often distress, which prompted the praise; it was the want of a patroness. When a lady, and especially as it then often happened, when one who was noble or royal sat with gratifying docility at the foot of a professor's chair; when she admired the philosopher, or took upon [Page 18]her to protect the theologian whom his rivals among his own sex were tearing to pieces, what could the grateful professor or theologian do less in return than make the apotheosis of her who had had the penetration to discern his merit and the spirit to reward it? Thus in fact it was not so much her vanity as his own that he was often flattering, though she was the dupe of her more deep and designing panegyrist.

But it is a little unlucky for the perpe­tuity of that fame which the encomiast had made over to his patroness, in the never-dying records of his verses and orations, that in the revolution of a century or two the very names of the flattered are now almost as little known as the works of the flatterers. Their memorial is perished with them ^*: an instructive lesson, that who­ever bestows, or assumes a reputation dis­proportioned to the merit of the claimant, [Page 19]will find it as little durable as solid. For this literary warfare which engaged such troops of the second-hand authors of the age in question in such continual skirmishes, and not a few pitched battles; which pro­voked so much rancour, so many volumes, and so little wit; so much vanity and so much flattery, produced no useful or lasting effect. Those who promised themselves that their names would outlive ‘one half of round eternity,’ did not reach the end of the century in which the boast was made; and those who offered the incense, and those who greedily snuffed up its fumes, are buried in the same blank oblivion!

But when the temple of Janus seemed to have been closed, or at worst the peace was only occasionally broken by a slight and random shot from the hand of some single straggler; it appears that though open re­bellion had ceased, yet the female claim had not been renounced; it had only (if we may change the metaphor) lain in [Page 20]abeyance. The contest has recently been revived with added fury, and with multi­plied exactions; for whereas the ancient demand was merely a kind of imaginary prerogative, a speculative importance, a mere titular right, a shadowy claim to a few unreal acres of Parnassian territory; the revived contention has taken a more serious turn, and brings forward political as well as intellectual pretensions: and among the innovations of this innovating period, the imposing term of rights has been produced to sanctify the claim of our female pretenders, with a view not only to rekindle in the minds of women a pre­sumptuous vanity dishonourable to their sex, but produced with a view to excite in their hearts an impious discontent with the post which God has assigned them in this world.

But they little understand the true in­terests of woman who would lift her from the duties of her allotted station, to fill with fantastic dignity a loftier but less [Page 21]appropriate niche. Nor do they under­stand her true happiness, who seek to annihilate distinctions from which she de­rives advantages, and to attempt innova­tions which would depreciate her real value. Each sex has its proper excellencies, which would be lost were they melted down into the common character by the fusion of the new philosophy. Why should we do away distinctions which in­crease the mutual benefits and satisfactions of life? Whence, but by carefully pre­serving the original marks of difference stamped by the hand of the Creator, would be derived the superior advantage of mixed society? Have men no need to have their rough angles filed off, and their harsh­nesses and asperities smoothed and polished by assimilating with beings of more soft­ness and refinement? Are the ideas of women naturally so very judicious, are their principles so invincibly firm, are their views so perfectly correct, are their judgments so completely exact, that there [Page 22]is occasion for no additional weight, no superadded strength, no increased clear­ness, none of that enlargement of mind, none of that additional invigoration which may be derived from the aids of the stronger sex? What identity could ad­vantageously supersede an enlivening and interesting variety of character? Is it not then more wife as well as more honourable to move contentedly in the plain path which Providence has obviously marked out to the sex, and in which custom has for the most part rationally confirmed them, rather than to stray awkwardly, unbecomingly, and unsuccessfully, in a forbidden road? to be the lawful pos­sessors of a lesser domestic territory, rather than the turbulent usurpers of a wider foreign empire? to be good originals, rather than bad imitators? to be the best thing of one's own kind, rather than an inferior thing even if it were of an higher kind? to be excellent women rather than indifferent men?

[Page 23]Is the author then undervaluing her own sex?—No. It is her zeal for their true interests which leads her to oppose their imaginary rights. It is her regard for their happiness which makes her endeavour to cure them of a feverish thirst for fame. A little Christian humility is worth all the wild metaphysical discussion which has unsettled the peace of vain women, and forfeited the respect of reason­able men. And the most elaborate de­finition of her ideal rights, and the most hardy measures for attaining them, are of less value in the eyes of an amiable woman, than ‘that meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.’

Natural propensities best mark the designations of Providence as to their application. The fin was not more clearly bestowed on the fish that he should swim, nor the wing given to the bird that he should fly, than superior strength of body and a firmer texture of mind given to [Page 24]man, that he might preside in the deep and daring scenes of action and of council; in government, in arms, in science, in commerce, and in those professions which demand a higher reach, and a wider range of powers. The true value of woman is not diminished by the imputation of inferiority in these respects; the has other requisites better adapted to answer the purposes of her being, by ‘HIM who does all things well.’

Let her not then view with envy the keen satyrist, hunting vice through all the doublings and windings of the heart; the sagacious politician leading senates, and directing the fate of empires; the acute lawyer detecting the obliquities of fraud; and the skilful dramatist exposing the pretensions of folly: but let her ambi­tion be consoled by reflecting, that those who thus excel; to all that Nature bestows and books can teach, must add besides, that consummate knowledge of the world to which a delicate woman has no fair [Page 25]avenues, and which could she attain she would never be supposed to have come honestly by.

In almost all that comes under the de­scription of polite letters, in all that cap­tivates by imagery, or warms by just and affecting sentiment, women are excellent. They possess in a high degree that delicacy and quickness of perception, and that nice discernment between the beautiful and de­fective, which comes under the denomina­tion of taste. Both in composition and action they excel in details; but they do not so much generalize their ideas as men, nor do their minds seize a great subject with so large a grasp. They are acute ob­servers, and accurate judges of life and manners, as far as their own sphere of ob­servation extends; but they describe a smaller circle. A woman sees the world, as it were, from a little elevation in her own garden, whence she takes an exact survey of home scenes, but takes not in that wider range of distant prospects, which he who stands on a loftier eminence com­mands. [Page 26]Women often feel what is just more instantaneosly than they can define it. They have an intuitive penetration into character, bestowed on them by Provi­dence, like the sensitive and tender organs of some timid animals, as a kind of natural guard, to warn of the approach of danger beings who are often called to act defen­sively.

In summing up the evidence, if I may so speak, of the different powers of the sexes, one may venture, perhaps, to assert, that women have equal parts, but are in­ferior in wholeness of mind in the integral understanding: that though a superior woman may possess single faculties in equal perfection, yet there is commonly a juster proportion in the mind of a superior man: that if women have in an equal de­gree the faculty of fancy which creates images, and the faculty of memory which collects and stores ideas, they seem not to possess in an equal measure the faculty of comparing, combining, analysing, and sepa­rating these ideas; that deep and patient [Page 27]thinking which goes to the bottom of a subject; nor that power of arrangement which knows how to link a thousand con­secutive ideas in one dependent train, with­out losing sight of the original idea out of which the rest grow, and on which they all hang. The female too in her intellectual pursuits is turned aside by her characteristic tastes and feelings. Woman in the career of genius, is the Atalanta, who will risk losing the race by running out of her road to pick up the golden apple; while her male competitor, without, perhaps, possess­ing greater natural strength or swiftness, will more certainly attain his object, by being less exposed to the seductions of ex­traneous beauty, and will win the race by despising the bait ^*.

[Page 28]Here it may be justly enough retorted, that, as it is allowed the education of women is so defective, the alleged inferi­ority of their minds may be accounted for on that ground more justly than by ascrib­ing it to their natural make. And, indeed, there is so much truth in the remark, that till women shall be more reasonably edu­cated, and till be native growth of their mind shall cease to be stinted and cramped, we have no juster ground for pronouncing that their understanding has already reach­ed its highest attainable perfection, than the Chinese would have for affirming that their women have attained to the greatest possible perfection in walking, while the first care is, during their infancy, to crip­ple their feet: or rather, till the female sex are more carefully instructed, this question will always remain as undecided as to the degree of difference between the under­standings of men and women, as the ques­tion between the understandings of blacks and whites; for until Africans and Euro­peans [Page 29]are put nearer on a par in the culti­vation of their minds, the shades of distinc­tion between their native powers can never be fairly ascertained. Thus, though in what relates to the actual difference of mind in the sexes, the distinction itself seems clearly marked by the defining finger of the Creator, yet of the degree of that native difference a just estimate can never be formed till the understandings of wo­men are made the most of; till, by suffer­ing their intellectual powers to take the lead of the sensitive in their education, their minds shall be allowed to reach to that measure of perfection of which they are really susceptible, and which their Maker intended they should attain. And when we see (and who will deny that we see it frequently?) so many women nobly rising from under all the pressure of a dis­advantageous education and a defective system of society, and exhibiting the most unambiguous marks of a vigorous under­standing, a correct judgment, and a sterling piety, it reminds one of those shining lights [Page 30]which have now and then burst out through all the "darkness visible" of the Romish church, have disincumbered them­selves from the gloom of ignorance and the fetters of prejudice, and risen superior to all the errors of a corrupt theology.

But whatever characteristical distinctions may exist; whatever inferiority may be attached to woman from the slighter frame of her body, the more circumscribed pow­ers of her mind, from a less systematic edu­cation, and from the subordinate station she is called to fill in life; there is one great and leading circumstance which raises her importance, and even establishes her equality. Christianity has exalted woman to true and undisputed dignity; in Christ Jesus, as there is neither "rich nor poor," "bond nor free," so there is neither ‘male nor female.’ In the view of that immor­tality, which is brought to light by the gospel, she has no superior. Women (to borrow the idea of an excellent prelate) make up one half of the human race; equally with men redeemed by the blood [Page 31]of Christ. In this their true dignity con­sists; here their best pretentions rest, here their highest claims are allowed.

All disputes then for pre-eminence be­tween the sexes, have only for their object the precedence of a few short years, the attention of which would be better devoted to the duties of life and the interests of eternity.

And as the final hope of the female sex is equal, so are their present means, per­haps, more favourable, and their opportu­nities, often, less obstructed than those of the other sex. In their Christian course women have every superior advantage, whether we consider the natural make of their minds, their leisure for acquisition in youth, or their subsequently less exposed mode of life. Their hearts are naturally soft and flexible, open to impressions of love and gratitude; their feelings tender and lively: all these are favourable to the cultivation of a devotional spirit. Yet while we remind them of the benefits they [Page 32]derive from this frame of mind, they will do well to be on their guard lest this very softness and ductility do not lay them more open to temptation.

They have in the native constitution of their minds, as well as from the relative situations they are called to fill, a certain sense of attachment and dependence, which is peculiarly favourable to religion. They feel, perhaps, more intimately the want of a strength which is not their own. Christ­ianity brings that superinduced strength; it comes in aid of their conscious weakness, and offers the only true counterpoise to it. "Woman, be thou healed of thy infirmity," is still the heart-cheering language of a gra­cious Saviour.

Women also bring to the study of Christ­ianity fewer of those prejudices which persons of the other sex too often contract early. Men, from their classical education, acquire a strong partiality for the manners of Pagan antiquity, and the documents of Pagan philosophy; this, together with the [Page 33]impure taint caught from the loose descrip­tions of their poets, and the licentious language even of their historians, (in whom we reasonably look for more gravity,) often weakens the good impressions of young men, and at least confuses their ideas of piety, by mixing them with so much hete­rogeneous matter. Their very spirits are imbued all the week with the impure fol­lies of a depraved mythology; and it is well if even on Sundays they get to hear of the ‘true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent.’ While women, though strug­gling with the same natural corruptions, have commonly less knowledge to unknow, and no schemes to unlearn; they have not to shake off the pride of system, and to disincumber their minds from the shackles of favourite theories: they do not bring from the porch or the academy any ‘op­positions of science’ to obstruct their reception of those pure doctrines taught on the Mount; doctrines which ought to find a readier entrance into minds uninfected [Page 34]with the pride of the school of Zeno, or the libertinism of that of Epicurus.

And as women are naturally more affectionate than fastidious; they are likely both to read and to hear with a less critical spirit than men: they will not be on the watch to detect errors, so much as to ga­ther improvement; they have seldom that hardness which is acquired by dealing deeply in books of controversy, but are more inclined to works which quicken the devotional feelings, than to such as awaken a spirit of doubt and scepticism. They are less disposed to consider the composi­tions they peruse, as materials on which to ground objections and answers, than as helps to faith and rules of life. With these advantages, however, they should also bear in mind that their impressions being often less abiding, and their reason less open to conviction, by means of the strong evidences which exist in favour of the truth of Christianity, ‘they ought, therefore, to give the more earnest [Page 35]heed to the things which they have heard, lest at any time they should let them slip.’ Women are also from their domestic habits, in possession of more leisure and tranquillity for religious pursuits, as well as secured from those difficulties and temptations to which men are exposed in the tumult of a bustling world. Their lives are more uniform, less agitated by the passions, the businesses, the contentions, the shock of opinions and of interests which convulse the world.

If we have denied them the talents which might lead them to excel as lawyers, they are preserved from the peril of having their principles warped by that too indis­criminate defence of right and wrong, to which the professors of the law are ex­posed. If we should question their title to eminence as mathematicians, they are hap­pily exempt from the danger to which men devoted to that science are said to be liable; namely, that of looking for demon­stration on subjects, which, by their very [Page 36]nature, are incapable of affording it. If they are less conversant in the powers of nature, the structure of the human frame, and the knowledge of the heavenly bodies, than philosophers, physicians, and astronomers; they are, however, delivered from the error into which many of each of these have sometimes fallen, from the fatal habit of resting in second causes, in­stead of referring all to the first; instead of making ‘the heavens declare the glory of God, and proclaim his handy work;’ instead of concluding, when they observe, ‘how fearfully and wonderfully we are made, marvellous are thy works, O Lord, and that my soul knoweth right well.’

And let the weaker sex take comfort, that in their very exemptions from privi­leges, which they are sometimes disposed to envy, consist their security and their happiness. If they enjoy not the distinct­ions of public life and dignified offices, do they not escape the sin of mis-employing, and the mortification of being dismissed [Page 37]from them? If they have no voice in de­liberative assemblies, do they not avoid the responsibility attached to such privileges? Preposterous pains have been taken to excite in women an uneasy jealousy, that their talents are neither rewarded with public honours nor emoluments in life; nor with inscriptions, statues, or mauso­leums after death. It has been absurdly represented to them as a hardship; that, while they are expected to perform duties, they must yet be contented to relinquish honours, and must unjustly be compelled to renounce fame while they must labour to deserve it.

But for Christian women to act on the low views suggested to them by their ill­judging panegyrists; and to look up with a giddy head and a throbbing heart to honours and renumerations, so little suited to the wants and capacities of an immortal spirit, would be no less ridiculous than if Christian heroes should look back with [Page 38]envy on the Pagan rewards of ovations, oak garlands, parsley crowns, and laurel wreaths. The christian hope more than reconciles Christian women to these petty privations, by substituting a nobler prize for their ambition, ‘the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.’ By substituting, for that popular and fluc­tuating voice, which may cry "Hosanna" and "crucify" in a breath, that ‘favour of God which is eternal life.’

If women should lament the disadvan­tages attached to their sex, that their cha­racter is of so delicate a texture, as to be sullied by the slightest breath of calumny, and that the stain is indelible; yet are they not led by that very circumstance more instinctively to shrink from all those irregularities to which the loss of character is so inseparably attached; and, to shun with keener circumspection the most distant approach towards the confines of danger? Let them not lament it as a [Page 39]hardship, but enjoy it as a privilege, that the delicacy of their sex impels them more scrupulously to avoid the very appearance of evil, since that very necessity serves to defend their purity by a more deep in­trenchment from the evil itself.

Though it be one main object of this little work, rather to lower than to raise any desire of celebrity in the female heart; yet I would awaken it to a just sensibility to honest fame: I would call on women to reflect that our religion has not only made them heirs to a blessed immortality hereafter, but has greatly raised them in the scale of being here, by lifting them to an importance in society unknown to the most polished ages of antiquity. The re­ligion of Christ has even bestowed a degree of renown on the sex beyond any other reli­gion. Perhaps there are hardly so many vir­tuous women (for I reject the long catalogue whom their vices have transferred from oblivion to infamy) named in all the pages [Page 40]of Greek or Roman History, as are hand­ed down to eternal fame, in a few of those short chapters with which the great Apostle to the Gentiles has concluded his epistles to his converts. Of ‘devout and honor­able women,’ the sacred scriptures re­cord "not a few." Some of the most affecting scenes, the most interesting trans­actions, and the most touching convers­ations which are recorded of the Saviour of the world, passed with women. They are the first remarked as having ‘minis­tered to him of their substance.’ Theirs was the praise of not abandoning their despised Redeemer when he was led to execution, and under all the hopeless cir­cumstances of his ignominious death; they appear to have been the last attend­ing at his tomb, and the first on the morning when he arose from it. Theirs was the privilege of receiving the earliest consolations from their risen Lord; theirs was the honour of being first commission­ed [Page 41]to announce his glorious resurrection to the world. And even to furnish heroic confessors, devoted saints, and unshrink­ing martyrs to the Church of Christ, has not been the exclusive honour of the bolder sex.

CHAP. XIV. CONVERSATION.—Hints suggested on the subject.—On the tempers and dispositions to be introduced in it.—Errors to be avoided. —Vanity under various shapes the cause of those errors.

THE sexes will naturally desire to appear to each other, such as each believes the other will best like; their conversation will act reciprocally; and each sex will appear more or less rational as they per­ceive it will more or less recommend them to the other. It is therefore to be regret­ted, that many men, even of distinguished sense and learning, are too apt to consider the society of ladies, rather as a scene in which to rest their understandings, than to exercise them; and ladies, in return, are too much addicted to make their court by lending themselves to this spirit of trifling; [Page 43]they often avoid to make use of what abili­ties they have; and affect to talk below their natural and acquired powers of mind; considering it as a tacit and welcome flat­tery to the understanding of men, to re­nounce the exercise of their own.

But since their taste and principles thus mutually operate; men, by keeping up conversation to its proper standard, would not only call into exercise the powers of mind which women actually possess; but would even awaken energies which they do not know they possess; and men of sense would find their account in doing this, for their own talents would be more highly rated by companions who were better able to appreciate them. And, on the other hand, if young women found it did not often recommend them in the eyes of those whom they wish to please, to be frivolous and superficial, they would become more sedulous in correcting their own habits; and, whenever fashionable women indicate a relish for instructive conversation, [Page 44]men will not be apt to hazard what is vain or unprofitable; much less will they ever presume to bring forward what is loose or corrupt, where some signal has not been previously given, that it will be acceptable, or at least that it will be par­doned.

Ladies commonly bring into company minds already too much relaxed by petty pursuits, rather than overstrained by too intense application; the littleness of the employments in which they are usually engaged, does not so strain their minds or exhaust their spirits as to make them stand in need of that relaxation from company which severe application or overwhelming business makes requisite for studious or public men. The due consideration of this circumstance might serve to bring the sexes more nearly on a level in society; and each might meet the other half way; for that degree of lively and easy conversation which is a necessary refreshment to the learned and the busy, would not decrease [Page 45]in pleasantness by being made of so rational a cast as would yet somewhat raise the minds of women, who commonly seek so­ciety as a scene of pleasure, not as a refuge from overwhelming thought or labour.

It is a disadvantage even to those women who keep the best company, that it is un­happily almost established into a system, by the other sex, to postpone every thing like instructive discourse till the ladies are with­drawn; their retreat serving as a kind of signal for the exercise of intellect. And in the few cases in which it happens that any important discussion takes place in their presence, they are for the most part con­sidered as having little interest in serious subjects. Strong truths, whenever such happen to be addressed to them, are either diluted with flattery, or kept back in part, or softened to their taste; or if the ladies express a wish for information on any point, they are put off with a compliment, instead of a reason; and are considered [Page 46]as beings who are not expected to see and to judge of things as they really exist.

Do we then wish to see the ladies, whose opportunities leave them so incompetent, and the modesty of whose sex ought never to allow them even to be as shining as they are able;—do we wish to see them take the lead in metaphysical disquisitions? Do we wish them to plunge into the depths of theological polemics, And find no end in wand'ring mazes lost? Do we wish them to revive the animo­fities of the Bangorian controversy, or to decide the process between the Jesuits and the five propositions of Jansenius? Do we wish to enthrone them in the pro­fessor's chair, to deliver oracles, harangues, and dissertations? to weigh the merits of every new production in the scales of Quintilian, or to regulate the unities of dramatic composition by Aristotle's clock? Or, renouncing those foreign aids, do [Page 47]we desire to behold them, inflated with their original powers, labouring to strike out sparks of wit, with a restless anxiety to shine, which generally fails, and with an affectation to please, which never pleases? Diseurs de bons mots, fades caracteres!

All this be far from them!—But we do wish to see the conversation of well bred women rescued from vapid common places, from uninteresting tattle, from trite and hackneyed communications, from frivolous earnestness, from false sensibility, from a warm interest about things of no moment, and an indifference to topics the most important; from a cold vanity, from the overflowings of self love, exhibiting itself under the smiling mask of an engag­ing flattery, and from all the factitious manners of artificial intercourse. We do wish to see the time passed in polished and intelligent society, considered among the beneficial, as well as the pleasant portions of our existence, and not too frequently [Page 48]consigned over to premeditated trifling or systematic unprofitableness. Let us not, however, be misunderstood; it is not meant to prescribe that they should affect to talk on lofty subjects, so much as to suggest that they should bring good sense, simplicity, and precision into those com­mon subjects, of which, after all, both the business and the conversation of mankind is in a great measure made up.

It is too well known how much the dread of imputed pedantry keeps off any thing that verges towards learned, and the terror of imputed enthusiasm, staves off any thing that approaches to serious con­versation, so that the two topics which peculiarly distinguish us, as rational and immortal beings, are by general consent in a good degree banished from the society of rational and immortal creatures. But we might almost as consistently give up the comforts of fire because a few per­sons have been burnt, and the benefit of water because some others have been [Page 49]drowned, as relinquish the enjoyments of reasonable and the blessings of religious intercourse, because the learned world has sometimes been infested with pedants, and the religious world with fanatics.

As in the momentous times in which we live, it is next to impossible to pass an evening in company, but the talk will so inevitably revert to politics, that, without any premeditated design, every one present shall infallibly get to know to which side the other inclines; why, in the far higher concern of eternal things, should we so carefully shun every offered opportunity of bearing even a casual testimony to the part we espouse in religion? Why, while we make it a sort of point of conscience to leave no doubt on the mind of a stranger, whether we adopt the party of Pitt or Fox, shall we chuse to leave it very problematical whether we belong to God or Baal? Why, in religion, as well as in politics, should we not act like people who, having their all at stake, cannot forbear now and then [Page 50]adverting for a moment to the object of their grand concern, and dropping, at least, an incidental intimation of the side to which they belong?

Even the news of the day, in such an eventful period as the present, may lend frequent occasions to a woman of prin­ciple, to declare, without parade, her faith in a moral Governor of the world; her trust in a particular Providence; her belief in the Divine Omnipotence; her confi­dence in the power of God, in educing good from evil, in his employing wicked nations, not as favourites but instruments; her persuasion that present success is no proof of the divine favour; in short, some intimation that she is not ashamed to de­clare that her mind is under the influence of Christian faith and principle. A general concurrence in exhibiting this spirit of decided faith and holy trust, would incon­ceivably discourage that pert infidelity which is ever on the watch to produce itself; and, as we have already observed, if [Page 51]women, who derive authority from their rank or talents, did but reflect how their sentiments are repeated and their authority quoted, they would be so on their guard, that general society might become a scene of general improvement, and the young, who are looking for models on which to fashion themselves, would be ashamed of exhibiting any thing like levity or scepticism.

Let it be understood, that it is not meant to intimate that serious subjects should make up the bulk of conversation; this, as it is impossible, would also often be improper. It is not intended to suggest that they should be studiously introduced, or affectedly prolonged; but only that they should not be systematically shunned, nor the brand of fanaticism be fixed on the person who, with whatever propriety, hazards the intro­duction of them. It is evident, however, that this general dread of serious topics arises a good deal from an ignorance of the true nature of religion; people avoid [Page 52]it on the principle expressed by the vulgar phrase of the danger of playing with edge tools. They conceive of it as something which involves controversy, and dispute, and mischief; something of an inflammatory nature, which is to stir up ill humours; as of a sort of party business which sets friends at variance. So much is this notion adopted, that I have seen two works announced of considerable merit, in which it was stipulated as an attraction, that religion, as being likely to excite anger and party distinctions, should be excluded. Such is the worldly idea of the spirit of that religion, whose precise object it was to bring ‘peace and good will to men!’

Women too little live or converse up to their understandings; and however we have deprecated affectation or pedantry, let it be remembered, that both in reading and conversing the understanding gains more by stretching, than stooping. If by ex­erting itself it may not attain to all it de­sires, [Page 53]yet it will be sure to gain something. The mind, by always applying itself to ob­jects below its level, contracts and shrinks itself to the size, and lowers itself to the level, of the object about which it is con­versant: while the mind which is active expands and raises itself, grows larger by exercise, abler by diffusion, and richer by communication.

But the taste of general society is not favourable to improvement. The serious­ness with which the most frivolous subjects are agitated, and the levity with which the most serious are dispatched, bear a pretty exact proportion to each other. Society too is a sort of magic lanthorn; the scene is perpetually shifting. In this in­cessant change, the evanescent fashion of the existing minute, which, while in many it leads to the cultivation of real know­ledge, has also sometimes led even the gay and idle to the affectation of mixing a sprinkling of science with the mass of dissi­pation. The ambition of appearing to be [Page 54]well informed breaks out even in those triflers who will not spare time from their pleasurable pursuits sufficient for acquiring that knowledge, of which, however, the re­ception is so desirable. A little smattering of philosophy often dignifies the pursuits of their day, without rescuing them from the vanities of the night. A course of lectures (that admirable assistant for en­lightening the understanding) is not seldom resorted to as a means to substitute the appearance of knowledge for the fatigue of application; but where this valuable help is attended merely like any other public exhibition, and is not furthered by correspondent reading at home, it often serves to set off the reality of ignorance with the affectation of skill. But instead of producing in conversation a few reigning scientific terms, with a familiarity and readiness, which Amaze the unlearn'd, and make the learned smile, would it not be more modest even for those who are better informed, to avoid [Page 55]the common use of technical terms when­ever the idea can be conveyed without them? For it argues no real ability to know the names of tools; the ability lies in knowing their use: and while it is in the thing, and not in the term, that real know­ledge consists, the charge of pedantry is attached to the use of the term, which would not attach to the knowledge of the science.

In the faculty of speaking well, ladies have such a happy promptitude of turning their slender advantages to account, that there are many who, though they have never been taught a rule of syntax, yet, by a quick facility in profiting from the best books and the best company, hardly ever violate one; and who often possess an elegant and perspicuous arrangement of style, without having studied any of the laws of composition. Every kind of knowledge which appears to be the result of observation, reflection, and natural taste sits gracefully on women. Yet on the [Page 56]other hand it sometimes happens, that ladies of no contemptible natural parts are too ready to produce, not only pedan­tic expressions, but crude notions; and still oftner to bring forward obvious and hackneyed remarks, which float on the very surface of a subject, with the imposing air of recent invention, and all the vanity of conscious discovery. This is because their acquirements have not been woven into their minds by early instruction; what knowledge they have gotten stands out as it were above the very surface of their minds, like the appliquée of the embroiderer, instead of having been interwoven with the growth of the piece, so as to have be­come a part of the stuff. They did not, like men, acquire what they know while the texture was forming. Perhaps no better preventive could be devised for this literary vanity, than early instruct­ion: that woman would be less likely to be vain of her knowledge who did not remember the time when she was ignorant. [Page 57]Knowledge that is burnt in, if I may so speak, is seldom obtrusive.

Their reading also has probably consisted much in abridgments from larger works, as was observed in a former chapter; this makes a readier talker, but a shallower thinker, than books of more bulk. By these scanty sketches their critical spirit has been excited, while their critical pow­ers have not been formed. For in those crippled mutilations they have seen no­thing of that just proportion of parts, that skilful arrangement of the plan, and that artful distribution of the subject, which, while they prove the master hand of the writer, serve also to form the taste of the reader, far more than a dis-jointed skeleton, or a beautiful feature or two can do. The instruction of women is also too much drawn from the scanty and penurious sources of short writings of the essay kind: this, when it comprises the best part of a person's reading, makes smatterers and spoils scholars; for though it supplies [Page 58]ready talk, yet it does not make a full mind; it does not furnish a store house of materials to stock the understand­ing, neither does it accustom the mind to any trains of reflection: for the subjects, besides being each succinctly, and, on ac­count of this brevity, superficially treated, are distinct and disconnected; they form no concatenation of ideas, nor any depend­ent series of deduction. Yet on this plea­sant but desultory reading, the mind which has not been trained to severer ex­ercise, loves to repose itself in a sort of creditable indolence, instead of stretching its powers in the wholesome labour of con­fecutive investigation ^*.

I am not discouraging study at a late period of life, or even slender knowledge; [Page 59]information is good at whatever period and in whatever degree it be acquired. But in such cases it should be at­tended with peculiar humility; and the new possessor should bear in mind, that what is fresh to her has been long known to others; and she should be aware of ad­vancing as novel that which is common, and obtruding as rare that which every body possesses. Some ladies are eager to exhibit proofs of their reading, though at the expence of their judgment, and will in­troduce in conversation quotations quite irrelevant to the matter in hand, because they happen to recur to their recollection, or were, perhaps, found in the book they have just been reading. Inappropriate quotations or strained analogy may shew reading, but they do not shew taste. That just and happy allusion which knows by a word how to awaken a corresponding image, or to excite in the mind of the hearer the idea which fills the mind of the speaker, shews less pedantry and more [Page 60]taste than bare citations; and a mind imbued with elegant knowledge will in­evitably betray the opulence of its re­sources, even on topics which do not relate to science or literature. Well informed persons will easily be discovered to have read the best books, though they are not always detailing catalogues of authors. True taste will detect the infusion which true modesty will not display; and even common subjects passing through a cultivated understanding, borrow a flavour of its richness. A power of apt selection is more valuable than any power of general retention; and an appo­site remark, which shoots strait to the point, demands higher powers of mind than an hundred simple acts of mere memory: for the business of the memory is only to store up materials which the understanding is to mix and work up with its native faculties, and which the judgment is to bring out and apply. But young women, who have more vivacity than sense, and more vanity than vivacity, often risk the charge of ab­surdity [Page 61]to escape that of ignorance, and will even compare two authors who are totally unlike rather than miss the occasion to shew that they have read both.

Among the arts to spoil conversation, some ladies possess that of suddenly divert­ing it from the channel in which it was beneficially flowing, because some word used by the person who was speaking has accidentally struck out a new train of thinking in their own minds, and not be­cause the idea expressed has struck out a fresh idea, which sort of collision is in­deed the way of eliciting the true fire. Young ladies, whose sprightliness has not been disciplined by a correct education, are sometimes willing to purchase the praise of being lively at the risk of being thought rash or vain. They now and then consider how things may be prettily said, rather than how they may be prudently or seasonably spoken; and hazard being thought wrong for the chance of being reckoned pleasant. [Page 62]The flowers of rhetoric captivate them more than the justest deductions of reason; and to repel an argument they arm themselves with a metaphor. Those also who do not aim so high as eloquence, are often surprised that you refuse to accept of a pre­judice instead of a reason; they are apt to take up with a probability in place of a demonstration, and cheaply put you off with an assertion when you are requiring a proof. The same mode of education ren­ders them also impatient of opposition; and if they happen to possess beauty, and to be vain of it, they may be tempted to con­sider that as an additional proof of their being in the right. In this case, they will not ask the conviction of your judgment to the force of their argument, so much as to the authority of their charms; for they prefer a sacrifice to a convert, and submission to their will flatters them more than proselytism to their ‘pleaded reason.’

[Page 63]The same turn of mind, strengthened by the same cause, (a neglected educa­tion,) leads lively women often to pro­nounce on a question without examining it: on any given point they seldomet doubt than men; not because they are more clear-sighted, but because they have not been accustomed to look into a sub­ject long enough to discover its depths and its intricacies; and, not discerning its difficulties, they conclude that it has none. Is it a contradiction to say, that they seem at once to be quick-sighted and short-sighted? What they see at all, they com­monly see at once; a little difficulty dis­courages them; and, having caught a hasty glimpse of a subject, they rush to this conclusion, that either there is no more to be seen, or that what is behind will not pay them for the trouble of searching. They pursue their object eagerly, but not regularly; rapidly, but not pertinaciously; for they want that obstinate patience of investigation which [Page 64]grows stouter by repulse. What they have not attained, they do not believe exists; what they cannot seize at once, they persuade themselves is not worth having.

Is a subject of moment started in com­pany? While the more sagacious are de­liberating on its difficulties, and viewing it under all its aspects, in order to form a competent judgment what to say, you will often find the most superficial woman present determine the matter without hesitation. Not seeing the perplexities in which the question is involved, she won­ders at the want of penetration in him whose very penetration keeps him silent. She secretly despises the dull perception and slow decision of him who is patiently untying the knot which she fancies she ex­hibits more dexterity by cutting. By this shallow sprightliness, the person whose opinion was best worth having is dis­couraged from delivering it, and an im­portant subject is dismissed without dis­cussion [Page 65]inconsequent flippancy, and voluble rashness. It is this abundance of florid talk, from superficial matter, which has brought on so many of the sex the charge of inverting the Apostle's precept, and being swift to speak, slow to hear.

For if the great Roman Orator could observe, that silence was so important a part of conversation, that ‘there was not only an art but an eloquence in it,’ how peculiarly does the remark apply to the modesty of youthful females! But the silence of listless ignorance, and the silence of sparkling intelligence, are two things almost as obviously distinct, as the wisdom and the folly of the tongue. And an in­violable and marked attention may shew, that a woman is pleased with a subject, and an illuminated countenance may prove that she understands it, amost as unequi­vocally as language itself could do; and this, with a modest question, is in many cases as large a share of the conversation as is decorous for feminine delicacy to take. It [Page 66]is also as flattering an encouragement as men of sense require, for pursuing such topics in their presence, which they would do, did they oftener gain by it the attention which it is natural to wish to excite.

Yet do we not sometimes see an impa­tience to be heard (nor is it a feminine failing only) which good breeding can scarcely subdue? And even when these incorrigible talkers are compelled to be silent, is it not evident that they are not listening to what is said, but are only thinking of what they themselves shall say when they can seize the first lucky interval for which they are so narrowly watching?

But conversation must not be con­sidered as a stage for the display of our talents, so much as a field for the exercise and improvement of our virtues; as a means for promoting the glory of our Creator and the good and happiness of our fellow creatures. Well bred and intelli­gent Christians are not, when they join in society, to consider themselves as entering [Page 67]the lists like intellectual prize-fighters, in order to exhibit their own vigour and dexterity, to discomfit their adversary, and to bear away the palm of victory. Truth and not triumph should be the object; and there are few occasions in life, in which we are more unremittingly called upon to watch ourselves narrowly, and to resist the assaults of various temptations, than in conversation. Vanity, jealousy, envy, misrepresentation, resentment, disdain, le­vity, impatience, insincerity, will in turn solicit to be gratified. Constantly to strug­gle against the desire of being thought more wise, more witty, and more knowing, than those with whom we associate, demands the incessant exertion of that Christian vigilance which the generality are so far from suspecting, ought to be brought into exercise in the intercourse of common society; that cheerful conversa­tion is rather considered as an exemption and release from watchfulness, than as an additional obligation to it.

[Page 68]But society, as was observed before, is not a stage on which to throw down our gauntlet, and prove our own prowess by the number of falls we give to our adver­sary; so far from it, that good breeding as well as Christianity, considers as an indispensable requisite for conversation, the disposition to bring forward to notice any talent in others, which their own modesty, or conscious inferiority, would lead them to keep back. To do this with effect requires a penetration exer­cised to discern merit, and a generous candour which delights in drawing it out. There are few who cannot converse tole­rably on some one topic; what that is, we should try to find out, and introduce that topic, though to the suppression of any one on which we ourselves are supposed to excel: and however superior we may be in other respects to the persons in question, we may, perhaps, in that parti­cular point, improve by them; and if we do not gain information, we shall at least [Page 69]gain a wholesome exercise to our humility and self-denial; we shall be restraining our own impetuousity; we shall be giving confidence to a doubting, or cheerfulness to a depressed spirit. And to place a just remark, hazarded by the diffident in the most advantageous point of view; to call the attention of the inattentive to the ob­servation of one, who, though of much worth, is perhaps of little note; these are requisites for conversation, less brilliant, but far more valuable, than the power of exciting bursts of laughter by the brightest wit, or of extorting admiration by the most poignant sallies.

For wit is of all the qualities of the female mind that which requires the severest castigation; yet the temperate ex­ercise of this fascinating quality throws an additional lustre round the character of an amiable woman; for to manage with discreet modesty a dangerous talent, con­fers a higher praise than can be claimed by those in whom the absence of the talent [Page 70]takes away the temptation to misemploy it. But to women, wit is a peculiarly perilous possession, which nothing short of the sobermindedness of Christianity can keep in order. Intemperate wit craves admiration as its natural aliment; it lives on flattery as its daily bread. The pro­fessed wit is a hungry beggar that subsists on the extorted alms of perpetual panegy­ric; and, like the vulture in the Grecian fable, its appetite increases by indulgence. Simple truth and sober approbation be­come tasteless and insipid to the palate, daily vitiated by the delicious poignancies of exaggerated commendation.

But if it be true that some women are too apt to affect brilliancy and display in their own discourse, and to undervalue the more humble pretensions of less showy characters; it must be confessed also, that some of more ordinary abilities are now and then guilty of the opposite error, and foolishly affect to value themselves on not making use of the understanding they [Page 71]really possess. They exhibit no small satisfac­tion in ridiculing women of high intellectual endowments, while they exclaim with much affected humility, and much real envy, that ‘they are thankful they are not geniuses.’ Now, though one is glad to hear gratitude expressed on any occasion, yet the want of sense is really no such great mercy to be thankful for; and it would indicate a better spirit, were they to pray to be enabled to make a right use of the moderate understanding they possess, than to expose with a too visible pleasure the imaginary or real defects of their more shining acquaintance. Women of the brightest faculties should not only "bear those faculties meekly," but consider it as no derogation, cheerfully to fulfil those humbler duties which make up the business of common life, always taking into the account the higher respon­sibility attached to higher gifts. While women of lower attainments should exert to the utmost such abilities as Providence [Page 72]has assigned them; and while they should not deride excellencies which are above their reach, they should not despond at an inferiority which did not depend on themselves; nor, because God has denied them ten talents, should they forget that they are equally responsible for the one he has allotted them, but set about devoting that one with humble diligence to the glory of the Giver.

Vanity, however, is not the monopoly of talents; let not a young lady, there­fore, fancy that she is humble, merely because she is not ingenious. Humility is not the exclusive privilege of dulness. Folly is as conceited as wit, and ignorance many a time outstrips knowledge in the race of vanity. Equally earnest competi­tions in conversation spring from causes less worthy to excite them than wit and genius. Vanity insinuates itself into the female heart under a variety of unsuspect­ed forms, and seizes on many a little pass which was not thought worth guarding.

[Page 73]Who has not seen a restless emotion agitate the features of an anxious matron, while peace and fame hung trembling in doubtful suspence on the success of a soup or a sauce, on which sentence was about to be pronounced by some consummate critic, as could have been excited by any competition for literary renown, or any struggle for contested wit?

There is another species of vanity in some women which disguises itself under the thin veil of an affected humility; they will accuse themselves of some fault from which they are remarkably exempt, and lament the want of some talent which they are rather notorious for possessing. This is not only a clumsy trap for praise, but there is a disingenuous intention, by renouncing a quality they eminently pos­sess, to gain credit for others in which they are really deficient. All affectation involves a species of deceit. The Apostle when he enjoins, ‘not to think of our­selves more highly than we ought,’ [Page 74]does not exhort us to think falsely of our­selves, but to think "soberly;" and it is worth observing that in this injunction he does not use the word speak, but think, inferring possibly, that it would be safer not to speak of ourselves at all; for it is so far from being an unequivocal proof of our humility to talk even of our defects, that while we make self the subject, in whatever way, self-love contrives to be gratified, and will even be content that our faults should be talked of, rather than that we should not be talked of at all. Some are also attacked with such proud fits of humility, that while they are ready to accuse themselves of almost every sin in the lump, they yet take fire at the imputation of the slightest individual fault; and instantly enter upon their own vindication as warmly as if you, and not themselves, had brought forward the charge. The truth is, they ventured to condemn themselves, in the full confidence that you would contradict them; the last [Page 75]thing they intended was that you should believe them, and they are never so much piqued, and disappointed as when they are taken at their word.

Of the various shapes and undefined forms into which vanity branches out in conversation there is no end. Out of a restless desire to please, grows the spurious desire to astonish: from vanity as much as from credulity, arises that strong love of the marvellous, with which the conver­sation of the ill-educated abounds. Hence that fondness for dealing in narratives hardly within the compass of possibility. Here vanity has many shades of gratifica­tion; those shades will be stronger or weaker, whether the relater have been an eye witness of the wonder she recounts; or whether she claim only the second hand renown of its having happened to her friend, or the still remoter celebrity of its having been witnessed only by her friend's friend: but even though that friend only knew the man, who remembered the [Page 76]woman, who actually beheld the thing which is now causing admiration in the company, still self, though in a fainter degree, is brought into notice, and the relater contrives in some circuitous way to be connected with the wonder.

To correct this propensity ‘to elevate and surprise ^*’ it would be well in mixed society to abstain altogether from hazard­ing stories, which though they may not be absolutely false, yet lying without the verge of probability, are apt to impeach the credit of the narrator; in whom the very consciousness that she is not believed, excites an increased eagerness to depart still farther from the soberness of truth, and induces a habit of vehement assevera­tion, which is too often called in to help out a questionable point ^†

[Page 77]There is another shape, and a very de­formed shape it is, in which loquacious vanity shews itself; I mean, the betraying of confi­dence. Though the act be treacherous, yet the fault, in the first instance, is not treachery, but vanity. It does not so often spring from the mischievous desire of divulging a secret, as from the pride of having been trusted with it. It is the secret inclination of mixing self with whatever is important. The secret is of little value, if the reveal­ing it did not serve to intimate our con­nexion with it: the pleasure of its having been deposited with us would be nothing, if others may not know it has been so deposted.—When we continue to see the variety of serious evils it involves, shall we [Page 78]persist in asserting that vanity is a slender mischief?

There is one offence committed in con­versation of much too serious a nature to be overlooked, or to be animadverted on without sorrow and indignation: I mean, the habitual and thoughtless prophaneness of those who are repeatedly invoking their Maker's name on occasions the most trivial. It is offensive in all its variety of aspects;—it is very pernicious in its effects; —it is a growing evil;—those who are most guilty of it, are from habit hardly conscious when they do it; are not aware of the sin; and for both these reasons, without the admonitions of faith­ful friendship, little likely to discontinue it; —it it utterly INEXCUSABLE;—it has none of the palliatives of temptation which other vices plead, and in that respect stands distinguished from all others both in its nature and degree of guilt.—Like many other sins, however, it is at once cause and effect; it proceeds from want of [Page 79]love and reverence to the best of Beings, and causes that want both in themselves and others. Yet with all those aggrava­tions, there is, perhaps, hardly any sin so frequently committed, so seldom repented of, and so little guarded against. On the score of impropriety too, it is additionally offensive, as being utterly repugnant to female delicacy, which often affects to be shocked at swearing in a man. Now this species of profaneness is not only swearing, but, perhaps, swearing of the worst sort; as it is a direct breach of an express com­mand, and offends against the very letter of that law which says in so many words, THOU SHALT NOT TAKE THE NAME OF THE LORD THY GOD IN VAIN. It offends against delicacy and good breeding; for those who commit it, little think of the pain they are inflicting on the sober mind, which is deeply wounded when it hears the holy name it loves dishonoured; and it is as contrary to good breeding to give pain, as it is to true piety to be profane.

[Page 80]I would endeavour to give some faint idea of the grossness of this offence, by an analogy (Oh! how inadequate!) with which the feeling heart, even though not seasoned with religion, may be touched. To such I would earnestly say:—Suppose you had some beloved friend, —to put the case still more strongly, a departed friend —a revered parent, perhaps, —whose image never occurs without awaking in your bosom sentiments of tender love and gratitude; how would you feel if you heard this honoured name bandied about with unfeeling familiarity, and indecent levity; or at best, thrust into every pause of speech as a vulgar expletive? Does not your affectionate heart recoil at the thought? And yet the hallowed name of your truest Benefactor, your heavenly Father, your best friend, who gives you all you enjoy, those very friends in whom you so much delight, those very organs with which you dishonour him, is treated with an irreverence, a contempt, a wanton­ness, [Page 81]with which you cannot bear the mention of treating a human friend. HIS name is impiously, is unfeelingly, is un­gratefully singled out as the object of decided irreverence, of systematic con­tempt, of thoughtless levity. It is used indiscriminately to express anger, joy, grief, surprise, impatience; and what is almost still more unpardonable than all, it is wantonly used as a mere unmeaning expletive, which, being excited by no emotion, can have nothing to recommend it, unless it be the pleasure of the sin.

Among the deep, but less obvious mischiefs of conversation, misrepresentation must not be overlooked. Self-love is continually at work, to give to all we say a bias in our own favour; the counter­action of this fault should be set about in the earliest stages of education. If young persons have not been discouraged in the natural, but evil propensity, to relate every dispute they have had with others to their own advantage; if they [Page 82]have not been trained to the duty of doing justice even to those with whom they are at variance; if they have not been led to aim at a complete impartiality in their little narratives; and, instructed never to take advantage of the absence of the other party, in order to make the story lean to their own side more than the truth will admit; how shall we in advanced life look for correct habits, for unpre­judiced representations, for fidelity, ac­curacy, and unbiassed justice?

Yet, how often in society, otherwise respectable, are we pained with narrations in which prejudice warps, and self-love blinds! How often do we see, that with­holding part of a truth answers the worst ends of a falsehood! How often regret the unfair turn given to a business, by placing a sentiment in one point of view, which the speaker had used in another! the letter of truth preserved where its spirit is violated! A superstitious exactness scrupulously maintained in the underparts [Page 83]of a detail, in order to impress such an idea of integrity, as shall gain credit when the leading principle is designedly mis­stated! nay, a new character given to a fact by a different look, tone or emphasis, which alters it as much as words could have done! the false impression conveyed of a sermon, when we do not like the preacher, or when through him we wish to make religion itself ridiculous! the avoiding of literal untruths, while the mis­chief is better effected by the unfair quota­tion of a passage divested of its context! the bringing together detached portions of a subject and making those parts ludi­crous when connected, which were perfect in their distinct position! the insidious use made of a sentiment by representing it as the opinion of him, who had only brought it forward in order to expose it! the relating opinions which had merely been put hypothetically, as the avowed principles of him we would discredit! that subtle falsehood which is so made [Page 84]to incorporate with a certain quantity of truth, that the most skilful moral chemist cannot analyse or separate them! for a misrepresenter knows that a successful lie must have a certain infusion of truth, or it will not go down. All that indefinable ambiguity and equivocation; all that pru­dent deceit, which is rather implied than expressed; those more delicate artifices of the school of Loyala and of Chesterfield, which allow us when we dare not deny a truth, yet so to disguise and discolour it, that the truth we relate shall not resemble the truth we heard! These and all the thousand shades of simulation and dissimu­lation will be carefully guarded against in the conversation of vigilant Christians.

Again, it is surprising to mark the com­mon deviations from strict veracity which spring, not from enmity to truth, not from intentional deceit, not from malevolence or envy, or the least design to injure, but from mere levity, habitual inattention, and a current notion that it is not worth [Page 85]while to be correct in small things. But here the doctrine of habits comes in with great force, and in that view no error is small. The cure of this disease in its more inveterate stages being next to im­possible, its prevention ought to be one of the earliest objects of education. ^*

The grievous fault of gross and obvious detraction which infects conversation, has been so heavily and so justly condemned by divines and moralists, that the subject is exhausted. But there is an error of an opposite complexion, which we have be­fore noticed, and against which the pecu­liar temper of the times requires, that young ladies of a better cast should be guarded. From the narrowness of their own sphere of observation, they are some­times addicted to accuse of uncharitable­ness, that distinguishing judgment which, resulting from a sound penetration and a zeal for truth, forbids persons of a very [Page 86]correct principle to be indiscriminately prodigal of commendation without in­quiry, and of praise without distinction. There is an affectation of candour, which is almost as mischievous as calumny itself; nay, if it be less injurious in its individual application, it is, perhaps, more alarming in its general principle, as it lays waste the strong fences which separate good from evil. They know (though they sometimes calumniate) that calumny is wrong but they have not been told that flattery is wrong also; and youth being apt to fancy that the direct contrary to wrong must necessarily be right, are apt to be driven into extremes. The dread of being only suspected of one fault makes them actually guilty of the other; and to avoid the charge of envy they plunge into insincerity. In this they are actuated by an unsound judgment or an unfound principle. But the standard of truth and of justice must neither be elevated nor depressed, in order to accom­modate [Page 87]it to existing circumstances. Good natured young people often speak favour­ably of unworthy, or extravagantly of com­mon characters, from one of these motives; either their own views of excellence are low, or they speak respectully of the un­deserving, to purchase for themselves the reputation of tenderness and generosity; or they lavish unsparing praise on almost all alike, in the usurious hope of buying back universal commendation in return; or in these captivating characters in which the simple and masculine language of truth is sacrificed to the jargon of affect­ed softness; and in which smooth and pliant manners are substituted for intrinsic worth, the inexperienced are too apt to suppose virtues, and to forgive vices. But they should carefully guard against the error of making manner the criterion of merit, and of giving unlimited credit to strangers for possessing every perfection, only because they bring into company the engaging exterior of alluring gentleness. [Page 88]They should also remember that it is an easy, but not an honest way of obtaining the praise of candour to get into the soft and popular habit of saying of all their acquaintance, when speaking of them, that they are so good! True Christian candour conceals faults, but it does not invent virtues. It tenderly forbears to expose the evil which may belong to a character, but it dares not ascribe to it the good which does not exist. To correct this propensity to insincerity, it would be well to bear in mind, that while every good action, come from what source it may, and every good quality, be it found in whomsoever it will, deserves its fair proportion of distinct and willing com­mendation; yet no character is GOOD in the true sense of the word which is not RELIGIOUS.

In fine—to recapitulate what has been said, with some additional hints.—Study to promote both intellectual and moral improvement in conversation; labour to [Page 89]bring into it a disposition to bear with others, and to be watchful over yourself; Keep out of sight any prominent talent of your own, which, if indulged, might discourage or oppress the feeble-minded. If you know any one present to possess any particular weakness or infirmity, never exercise your wit by maliciously inventing occasions which may lead her to expose or betray it; but give as favourable a turn as you can to the follies which appear, and kindly help her to keep the rest out of sight. Never gratify your own humour, by hazarding what you suspect may wound any one present in their persons, connexions, professions, or religious opinions; and do not forget to examine whether the laugh your wit has raised be never bought at this expence. Give credit to those, who without your kindness will get none; do not talk at any one whom you dare not talk to, unless from motives in which the golden rule will bear you out. Seek neither to [Page 90]shine nor to triumph, and if your seek to please, take care that it be in order to convert the influence you may gain by pleasing to the good of others. Cultivate true politeness, for it grows out of true principle, and is consistent with the Gospel of Christ; but avoid those feigned atten­tions which are not stimulated by good will, and those stated professions of fond­ness which are not dictated by esteem. Remember that the praise of being thought amiable by strangers, may be bought too dear, if it be bought at the expence of truth and simplicity: remem­ber that Simplicity is the first charm in manner, as Truth is in mind; and could Truth make herself visible, she would ap­pear invested in Simplicity.

Remember also, that true good nature is the soul, of which politeness is only the garb. It is not that artifical quality which is taken up by many when they go into society, in order to charm those whom it is not their particular business [Page 91]to please; and is laid down when they return home to those to whom to appear amiable is a real duty. It is not that fascinating but deceitful softness, which, after having acted over a hundred scenes of the most lively sympathy and tender interest with every slight acquaintance; after having exhausted every phrase of feeling, for the trivial sicknesses or petty sorrows of multitudes who are scarcely known, leaves it doubtful whether a grain of real feeling or genuine sympathy be reserved for the dearest connexions; and which dismisses a woman to her immediate friends with little affection, and to her own family with little attachment.

True good nature, that which alone deserves the name, is not a holiday orna­ment, but an every-day habit. It does not consist in servile complaisance, or dishonest flattery, or affected sympathy, or unqualified assent, or unwarrantable compliance, or eternal smiles. Before it can be allowed to rank with the virtues, [Page 92]it must be wrought up from a disposition into a principle, from a humour into a habit. It must be the result of an equal and well-governed mind, not the start of casual gaiety, the trick of designing vanity, or the whim of capricious fondness. It is compounded of kindness, forbearance, for­giveness, and self-denial; ‘it seeketh not its own,’ but must be capable of making continual sacrifices of its own tastes, hu­mours, and self-love; but among the sacrisices it makes, it must never include its integrity. Politeness on the one hand, and insensibility on the other, assume its name and wear its honours; but they assume the honours of a triumph, without the merit of a victory; for politeness sub­dues nothing, and insensibility has nothing to subdue. Good nature of the true cast, and under the foregoing regulations, is above all price in the common intercourse of domestic society; for an ordinary quality which is constantly brought into action, by the perpetually recurring [Page 93]though minute events of daily life, is of higher value than more brilliant qualities which are more seldom called into use. And indeed, Christianity has given that new turn to the character of all the virtues, that perhaps it is the best test of the excellence of many that they have little brilliancy in them. The Christian Religion has degraded some splendid qua­lities from the rank they held, and elevated those which were obscure into distinction.

CHAP. XV. On the danger of an ill-directed Sensibility.

IN considering the human character with a view to improve it, it is prudent to en­deavour to discover the natural bent of the mind, and having found it, to apply your force to that side on which the warp lies, that you may lessen by counteraction the defect which you might be otherwise pro­moting, by applying your aid in a contrary direction. But the misfortune is, people who mean better than they judge, are apt to possess themselves of a set of general rules, good in themselves, perhaps, and originally gleaned from experience and ob­servation on the nature of human things, but not applicable in all cases. These rules they keep by them as nostrums of universal efficacy, which they therefore [Page 95]often use in cases to which they do not apply. For to make any remedy effectual it is not enough to know the medicine, you must study the constitution also; for if there be not a congruity between the two, you may be injuring one patient by the means which are requisite to raise and restore another whose temperament is of a contrary description.

It is of importance in forming the female character that those on whom this task de­volves, should possess so much penetration as accurately to discern its degree of sen­sibility, and so much judgment as to ac­commodate the treatment to the individual character. By constantly stimulating and extolling feelings naturally quick, those feelings will be rendered too acute and irritable. On the other hand a calm and equable temper will become obtuse by the total want of excitement; the former treatment converts the feelings into a source of error, agitation, and cala­mity, the latter starves their native energy, [Page 96]deadens the affections, and produces a cold, dull, selfish spirit; for the human mind is an instrument which will lose its sweet­ness if strained too high, and will be deprived of its tone and strength if not sufficiently raised.

It is cruel to chill the precious sensibility of an ingenuous soul, by treating with supercilious coldness, and unfeeling ridi­cule, every indication of a warm, tender, disinterested, and enthusiastic spirit, as if it exhibited symptoms of a deficiency in understanding or prudence. How many are apt to intimate, with a smile of mingled pity and contempt, that when such a one knows the world, that is, in other words, when she shall be grown cunning, selfish, and suspicious, she will be ashamed of her present glow of honest warmth, and of her lovely susceptibility of heart. May she never know the world, if the knowledge of it must be acquired at such an expence! but to sensible hearts, every indication of genuine feeling will be [Page 97]dear, for they will know that it is this temper which, by the guidance of the Divine Spirit, will make her one day become more enamoured of the beauty of holiness; which, with the co-operation of principle, and under its direction, will render her the lively agent of Providence in diminishing the misery that is in the world; into which misery this temper will give her a quicker intuition than colder characters possess. It is this temper which, when it is touched and purified by a "live coal from the altar ^*," will give her a keener taste for the spirit of religion, and a quicker zeal in discharg­ing its duties. But let it be remembered likewise, that as there is no quality in the female character which will be so likely to endanger the peace and to expose the virtue of the possessor; so there is none which requires to have its luxuriances more carefully watched, and its wild shoots more closely looped.

[Page 98]For young women of naturally warm affections, in whom those affections have not been carefully disciplined, are in danger of incurring an unnatural irrita­bility; and while their happiness falls a victim to the excess of uncontrolled feelings, they are liable at the same time to indulge a vanity of all others the most preposterous, that of being vain of their defects. They have heard sensibility highly commended, without having heard any thing of those bounds and fences which were intended to confine its ex­cesses, or without having been imbued with that principle which would have given it a beneficial direction; and, con­scious that they possess the quality itself in the extreme, and not conscious that they want all that makes that quality safe and delightful, they plunge headlong into those miseries from which they conceitedly imagine, that not principle but cold­ness has preserved the more sober-minded and well instructed of their sex.

[Page 99]But as it would be foreign to the present design to expatiate on those sad effects of ungoverned passion which terminate in criminal excesses, it is only intended here to hazard a few remarks on those lighter shades of the same defect, which injure the comfort without injuring the character, and impair the happiness of life without incurring any very censurable degree of guilt or discredit. Let it, how­ever, be incidentally remarked, and let it be carefully remembered, that if no women have risen so high in the scale of moral excellence as those whose natural warmth has been conscientiously governed by its true guide, and directed to its true end; so none have furnished such deplorable instances of extreme depravity as those who, through the ignorance or the deriliction of principle, have been abandoned by the excess of this very temper to the violence of ungoverned passions and uncon­trolled inclinations. And, perhaps, if we were to inquire into the remote cause [Page 100]of some of the blackest crimes which stain the annals of mankind, profligacy, mur­der, and especially suicide, we might trace them back to this original principle, an ungoverned Sensibility.

Notwithstanding all the fine theories in prose and verse to which this topic has given birth, it will be found that very exquisite sensibility contributes so little to happiness, and may yet be made to contri­bute so much to usefulness, that it may, perhaps, be considered as bestowed for an exercise to the possessor's own virtue, and as a keen inftrument with which he may better work for the good of others.

Women of this cast of mind are less careful to avoid the charge of unbounded extremes, than to escape at all events the imputation of insensibility. They are little alarmed at the danger of exceeding, though terrified at the suspicion of coming short of what they take to be the extreme point of feeling. They will even rosolve to [Page 101]prove the warmth of their sensibility, though at the expence of their judgment, and sometimes also of their justice. Even when they earnestly desire to be and to do right, they are apt to employ the wrong instrument to accomplish the right end. They employ the passions to do the work of the judgment; forgetting, or not knowing, that the passions were not given us to be used in the search and discovery of truth, which is the office of a cooler and more discriminating faculty; but that they were given to animate us to warmer zeal in the pursuit and practice of truth, when the judgment shall have pointed out what is truth.

Through this natural warmth, which they have been justly told is so pleasing, but which, perhaps, they have not been told will be continually exposing them to peril and to suffering, their joys and sor­rows are excessive. Of this extreme irri­tability, as was before remarked, the ill­educated learn to boast as if it were an [Page 102]indication of superiority of soul, instead of labouring to restrain it as the excess of a temper which ceases to be interesting when it is no longer under the control of the governing faculty. It is mis­fortune enough to be born more liable to suffer and to sin, from this conform­ation of mind; it is too much to allow its unrestrained indulgence; it is still worse to be proud of so misleading a quality.

Flippancy, impetuosity, resentment, and violence of spirit, grow out of this dis­position, which will be rather promoted than corrected, by the system of education on which we have been animadverting; in which system, emotions are too early and too much excited, and tastes and feel­ings are considered as too exclusively making up the whole of the female cha­racter; in which the judgment is little exercised, the reasoning powers are seldom brought into action, and self-knowledge and self-denial scarcely included.

[Page 103]The propensity of mind which we are considering, if unchecked, lays its possessors open to unjust prepossessions, and exposes them to all the danger of unfounded at­tachments. In early youth, not only love, but friendship, at first sight, grows out of an ill-directed sensibility; and in after­life, women under the powerful influ­ence of this temper, conscious that they have much to be borne with, are too readily inclined to select for their confiden­tial connections, flexible and flattering companions, who will indulge and per­haps admire their faults, rather than firm and honest friends, who will reprove and would assist in curing them. We may adopt it as a general maxim, that an obliging, weak, yielding, complaisant friend, full of small attentions, with little religion, little judgment, and much natural acqui­escence and civility, is a most dangerous, though generally a too much desired confidante: she soothes the indolence, and gratifies the vanity of her friend, by re­conciling [Page 104]conciling her to her own faults, while she neither keeps the understanding nor the virtues of that friend in exercise. These obsequious qualities are the "soft green ^*" on which the soul loves to repose itself. But it is not a refreshing or a wholesome repose: we should not select, for the sake of present ease, a soothing flatterer, who will lull us into a pleasing oblivion of our failings, but a friend, who, valuing our soul's health above our immediate comfort, will rouse us from torpid indulgence to animation, vigilance, and virtue.

An ill-directed sensibility leads a wo­man to be injudicious and eccentric in her charities also; she will be in danger of proportioning her bounty to the im­mediate effect which the distressed object produces on her senses: and she will be more liberal to a small distress which presents itself to her own eyes, than to the more pressing wants and better claims [Page 105]of those miseries of which she only hears the relation. There is a sort of stage effect which some people require for their charities; and she will be apt too to desire, that the object of her compassion shall have something interesting and amiable in it, such as shall furnish pleasing images and lively pictures to her imagination, and engaging subjects for description; forgetting, that in her charities, as well as in every thing else, she is to be a ‘fol­lower of Him who pleased not himself;’ forgetting, that the most coarse and dis­gusting object is as much the representa­tive of Him, who said, ‘Inasmuch as ye do it to one of the least of these, ye do it unto me,’ as the most interesting: nay, the more uninviting and repulsive cases may be better tests of the principle on which we relieve, than those which abound more in pathos and interest, as we can have less suspicion of our motive in the one case than in the other: but, while we ought to neglect neither of these supposed [Page 106]cases, yet the less our feelings are caught by pleasing circumstances, the less dan­ger we shall be in of indulging self-com­placency, and the more likely we shall be to do what we do for the sake of Him who has promised, that no deeds but what are performed on that principle, ‘shall be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.’

But through the want of that govern­ing principle which should direct her sensibility, a tender hearted woman, whose hand, if she be actually surrounded with scenes and circumstances to call it into action, is Open as day to melting charity, yet her feelings being acted upon solely by local circumstances and present events, only remove her into another scene, distant from the wants she has been relieving; place her in the lap of indulgence, so surrounded with ease and pleasure, so im­mersed in the softness of life, that distress [Page 107]no longer finds any access to her presence, but through the faint and unaffecting medium of a distant representation: thus removed from the sight and sound of that misery which, when present, so ten­derly affected her, she is apt to forget that misery exists; and as she hears but little, and sees nothing of want and sorrow, she is ready to fancy that the world is grown happier than it was: in the meantime, with a quiet conscience and a thoughtless vanity, she has been lavishing on superflui­ties that money which she would cheer­fully have given to a charitable case, had she not forgotten that any such were in existence, because Pleasure had blocked up the avenues through which misery used to find its way to her heart; and now, when again such a case forces itself into her presence, she laments with real sincerity that the money is gone which should have relieved it.

In the meantime, perhaps, other women of less natural sympathy, but [Page 108]whose sympathies are under better regula­tion, or who act from a principle which requires little stimulus, have, by a constant course of self-denial, by a constant atten­tion in refusing themselves unnecessary indulgencies, and by guarding against that dissolving PLEASURE which melts down the firmest vittue that allows itself to bask in its beams, have been quietly furnishing a regular provision for miseries, which their knowledge of the state of the world tells them are every where to be found, and which their obedience to the will of God tells them it is their duty to find out and to relieve; and for the general expectation to be called upon to relieve which, the conscientiously chari­table will always be prepared.

On such a mind as we have been de­scribing, Novelty also will operate with peculiar force, and in nothing more than in this article of charity. Old established institutions, whose continued existence must depend on the continued bounty of [Page 109]that affluence to which they owed their origin, will be sometimes neglected, as presenting no variety to the imagination, as having by their uniformity ceased to be interesting; and having of course ceased to excite those springs of mere sensitive feeling which set the charity agoing, and which are no longer capable of awakening those sudden emotions of tenderness and gusts of pity, which newer forms of distress are necessary to excite afresh. As age comes on, that charity which has been the effect of mere feeling, having been often disappointed in its high expectations of the gratitude and subsequent merit of those it has relieved, grows cold and rigid; and by withdrawing its bounty, because some of its objects have been un­deserving, it gives clear proof that what it bestowed was for its own gratification; and now finding that self-complacency at an end, it bestows no longer. Probably too the cause of so much disappointment may have been the ill choice of the objects [Page 110]which feeling has led them to make. The summer showers of mere sensibility soon dry up, while the living spring of Christian charity flows alike in all seasons.

The impatience, levity, and fickleness, of which women have been somewhat too generally accused, are perhaps not a little strengthened by the littleness and fri­volousness of female pursuits. The sort of education they commonly receive, teaches girls to set a great price on small things. Besides this, they do not always learn to keep a very correct scale of degrees for the value of the objects of their ad­miration and attachment; but by a kind of unconscious idolatry, they rather make a merit of loving supremely things and persons which ought to be loved with moderation and in a subordinate degree the one to the other. Unluckily, they consider moderation as so necessarily indi­cating a cold heart and narrow soul, and they look upon a state of indifference with so much horror, that either to love or hate [Page 111]with energy is supposed by them to proceed from a higher state of mind than is possessed by more steady and equable cha­racters. Whereas it is in fact the criterion of a warm but well directed sensibility, that while it is capable of loving with energy, it must be enabled by the judg­ment which governs it, to suit and adjust its degree of interest to the nature and excellence of the object about which it is interested; for unreasonable prepos­session, disproportionate attachment, and capricious or precarious fondness, is not sensibility.

Excessive but unintentional flattery is another fault into which a strong sensi­bility is in danger of leading its possessor. A tender heart and a warm imagination conspire to throw a sort of radiance round the object of their love, till they are dazzled by a brightness of their own creating. The worldly and fashionable borrow the warm language of sensibility without having the same warm feeling; [Page 112]and young ladies get such a habit of saying, and especially of writing, such over obliging and flattering things to each other, that this mutual politeness, aided by the self-love so natural to us all, and by an unwillingness to search into our own hearts, keeps up the illusion, and we get a habit of taking our character from the good we hear of ourselves, which others do not very well know, rather than from the evil we feel in ourselves, and which we therefore ought to be thoroughly ac­quainted with.

Ungoverned sensibility is apt to give a wrong direction to its anxieties; and its affection often falls short of the true end of friendship. If the object of its regard happen to be sick, what inquiries! what prescriptions! what an accumulation is made of cases in which the remedy its fondness suggests has been successful! What an unaffected tenderness for the perishing body! Yet is this sensibility equally alive to the immortal interests of [Page 113]the sufferer? Is it not silent and at ease when it contemplates the dearest friend persisting in opinions essentially dangerous; in practices unquestionably wrong? Does it not view all this, not only without a a generous ardor to point out the peril and rescue the friend; but if that friend be supposed to be dying, does it not even make it the criterion of kindness to let her die undeceived? What a want of true sensibility, to feel for the pain, but not for the danger of those we love! Now see what sort of sensibility the Bible teaches! ‘Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart, but thou shalt in any wise rebuke him, and shalt not suffer sin upon him ^*’ But let that tenderness which shrinks from the idea of exposing what it loves to a mo­mentary pang, figure to itself the bare possibility that the object of its own fond affection may not be the object of the [Page 114]Divine favour! Let it shrink from the bare conjecture that ‘the familiar friend with whom it has taken sweet counsel,’ is going down to the gates of death un­warned, unrepenting, unprepared!

But mere human sensibility goes a shorter way to work. Not being able to give its friend the pain of hearing her faults or of knowing her danger, it works itself up into the quieting delusion that no danger exists, at least not for the objects of its own affection; it gratifies itself by inventing a salvation so com­prehensive as shall take in all itself loves with all their faults; it creates to its own fond heart an ideal and exaggerated divine mercy, which shall pardon and receive all in whom itself has an interest, whether they be good or whether they be evil.

In regard to its application to religious purposes, it is a test that sensibility has received its true direction when it is su­premely turned to the love of God: for to possess an overflowing fondness for our [Page 115]fellow-creatures and fellow sinners, and to be cold and insensible to the Essence of goodness and perfection, is an incon­sistency to which the feeling heart is awfully liable. God has himself the first claim to the sensibility he bestowed. ‘He first loved us:’ this is a natural cause of love. ‘He loved us while we were sinners:’ this is a supernatural cause. He continues to love us though we neglect his favours, and slight his mercies: this would wear out any earthly kindness. He forgives us, not petty neglects, not occasional slights; but grievous sins, re­peated offences, broken vows, and un­requited love. What human friendship performs offices so calculated to touch the soul of sensibility?

Those young women in whom feeling is indulged to the exclusion of reason and examination, are peculiarly liable to be the dupes of prejudice, rash decisions, and false judgment. The understanding hav­ing but little power over the will, their [Page 116]affections are not well poized, and their minds are kept in a state ready to be acted upon by the fluctuations of alternate impulses; by sudden and varying im­pressions; by casual and contradictory circumstances; and by emotions excited by every accident. Instead of being guided by the broad views of general truth, and having one fixed principle, they are driven on by the impetuosity of the moment. And this impetuosity blinds the judgment as much as it misleads the conduct; so that, for want of a habit of cool investigation and inquiry, they meet every event with­out any previously formed opinion or rule of action. And as they do not accustom themselves to appreciate the real value of things, their attention is as likely to be led away by the under parts of a subject, as to seize on the leading feature. The same eagerness of mind which hinders the operation of the discriminating fa­culties, leads also to the error of deter­mining on the rectitude of an action by its [Page 117]success, and to that of making the event of an undertaking decide on its justice or propriety: it also leads to that super­ficial and erroneous way of judging which fastens on exceptions, if they make in one's own favour, as grounds of reasoning, while they lead us to overlook received and general rules which tend to establish a doctrine contrary to their wishes.

Open hearted, indiscreet girls, often pick up a few strong notions which are as false in themselves as they are popular among the class in question: such as, ‘that warm friends must make warm enemies;’—that ‘the generous love and hate with all their hearts;’—that ‘a reformed rake makes the best husband;’ —that ‘there is no medium in marriage, but that it is a state of exquisite happi­ness, or exquisite misery;’ with many other doctrines of equal currency and equal soundness. These they consider as axioms, and adopt as rules of life. From the two first of these oracular sayings girls [Page 118]are in no small danger of becoming unjust through the very warmth of their hearts: for they will get a habit of making their estimate of the good or ill qualities of others, merely in proportion to the greater or less degree of kindness which they themselves have received from them. Their estimation of general character is thus formed on insulated and partial grounds; on the accidental circumstance of personal predilection or personal pique. Kindness to themselves or their friends involves all possible excellence; neglect includes all imaginable defects. Friendship and grati­tude can and should go a great way; but as they cannot convert vice into virtue, so they ought never to convert truth into falsehood. And it may be the more necessary to be upon our guard in this instance, because the very idea of gratitude may mislead us, by converting injustice into the semblance of a virtue. Warm expressions therefore should be limited to the conveying a sense of our own [Page 119]individual obligations which are real, rather than employed to give an impression of general excellence in the person who has obliged us, which may be imaginary. A good man is still good though it may not have fallen in his way to oblige or serve us; nay, though he may have neglected or even unintentionally hurt us; and sin is still sin though committed by the person in the world we best love, and to whom we are most obliged.

We come next to that fatal and most indelicate, nay gross maxim, that a re­formed rake makes the best husband; an aphorism to which the principles and the happiness of so many young women have been sacrificed. It goes upon the pre­posterous supposition, not only that effects do not follow causes, but that they oppose them; on the supposition, that habitual vice creates rectitude of character, and that sin produces happiness: thus flatly contradicting what the moral government of God uniformly exhibits in the course of [Page 120]human events, and what revelation so evidently and universally teaches.

For it should be observed, that the reformation is generally, if not always supposed to be brought about by the all­conquering force of female charms. Let but a profligate young man have a point to carry by winning the affections of a vain and thoughtless girl; he will begin his attack upon her heart by undermining her religious principles, and artfully removing every impediment which might have ob­structed her receiving the addresses of a man without character. And while he will lead her, not to hear named with­out ridicule that change of heart which Scripture teaches and experience proves the power of Divine grace can work on a vicious character; while he will teach her to sneer at a change which he would treat with contempt, as a really miraculous conversion; yet he will not scruple to swear that the power of her beauty has worked an instantaneous and equally com­plete [Page 121]revolution in his own loose prac­tice.

But supposing it possible that his re­formation were genuine, it would even then by no means involve the truth of her proposition, that past libertinism in­sures future felicity; yet many a weak girl, confirmed in this palatable doctrine, by examples she has frequently admired of these surprising reformations, so con­veniently effected in the last scene of most of our comedies, has not scrupled to risk her earthly and eternal happiness with a man, who is not ashamed to ascribe to the influence of her beauty that power of changing the heart which he impiously denies to Omnipotence itself.

As to the last of these practical apho­risms, ‘that there is no medium in marriage, but that it is a state of exqui­site happiness or exquisite misery;’ this, though not equally sinful, is equally de­lusive: for marriage is only one certain modification of human life, and human [Page 122]life is not commonly in itself a state of exquisite extremes; but is usually that mixed and moderate state, so naturally dreaded by those who set out with fancy­ing this world a state of rapture, and so naturally expected by those who know it to be a state of probation and discipline. Marriage, therefore, is only one condition, and often the best condition, of that im­perfect state of being which, though seldom very exquisite, is often very toler­able; and which may yield much comfort to those who do not look for constant transport. But unfortunately, those who find themselves disappointed of the un­ceasing raptures they had anticipated in marriage, disdaining to sit down with so poor a provision as comfort, and scorning the acceptance of that moderate lot which Providence commonly bestows, with a view to check despondency and to repress presumption; give themselves up to the other alternative; and, by abandoning their hearts to discontent, make to them­selves [Page 123]that misery with which their fervid imaginations had filled the opposite scale.

The truth is, these young ladies are very apt to pick up their opinions, less from the divines than the poets; and the poets, though it must be confessed they are some of the best embellishers of life, are not quite the safest conducters through it: as in travelling through a wilderness, though we avail ourselves of the harmony of singing birds, to render the grove delightful, yet we never think of following them as guides, to conduct us through its labyrinths.

Those women, in whom the natural defects of temper have been strengthened by an education which fosters their faults, are very dextrous in availing them­selves of a hint, when it favours a ruling inclination, soothes vanity, indulges in­dolence, or gratifies their love of power. They have heard so often from their favourite sentimental authors, and their more flattering male friends, ‘that when [Page 124]nature denied them strength, she gave them facinating graces in compensation; that their strength consists in their weakness;’ and that ‘they are en­dowed with arts of persuasion which supply the absence of force, and the place of reason;’ that they learn, in time, to pride themselves on that very weakness, and to become vain of their imperfections; till at length they begin to claim for their defects, not only pardon, but admiration. Hence they get to cherish a species of feeling which, if not checked, terminates in excessive selfishness; they learn to produce their inability to bear contradiction as a proof of their tender­ness; and to indulge in that sort of irri­tability, in all that relates to themselves, which inevitably leads to the utter ex­clusion of all interest in the sufferings of others. Instead of exercising their sen­sibility in the wholesome duty of relieving distress and visiting scenes of sorrow, that sensibility itself is pleaded as a reason for [Page 125]their not being able to endure sights of woe, and for shunning the distress it should be exerted in removing. That exquisite sense of feeling which God im­planted in the heart as a stimulus to quicken us in relieving the miseries of others, is thus introverted, and learns to consider self not as the agent, but the object of compassion. Tenderness is made an excuse for being hard-hearted; and instead of drying the weeping eyes of others, this false delicacy reserves its own selfish tears for the more elegant and less expensive sorrows of the melting novel or the pathetic tragedy.

When feeling stimulates only to self-indulgence; when the more exquisite affections of sympathy and pity evaporate in sentiment, instead of flowing out in active charity, exerting itself in all the various shapes of assistance, protection, or consolation for every species of distress; it is an evidence that the feeling is of a [Page 126]spurious kind; and instead of being nou­rished as an amiable tenderness, it should be subdued as a fond and base self-love.

That idleness, to whose cruel inroads many women of fortune are unhappily exposed, from not having been trained to consider wholesome occupation, vigorous exertion, and systematic employment as making part of the indispensable duties of life, lays them open to a thousand evils of this kind, from which the useful and the busy are exempted: and, perhaps, it would not be easy to find a more pitiable object than a woman with a great deal of time and a great deal of money on her hands, who, never having been taught the conscientious use of either, squanders both at random, or rather moulders both away, without plan, without principle, and without pleasure; all whose projects begin and terminate in self; who con­siders the rest of the world only as they may be subservient to her gratification; [Page 127]and to whom it never occurred, that both her time and money were given for the gratification and good of others.

It is not much to the credit of the other sex, that they now and then lend themselves to the indulgence of this selfish spirit in their wives, and cherish by a kind of false fondness those faults which should be combated by good sense and a reason­able counteraction; slothfully preferring a little false peace, the purchase of pre­carious quiet, and the reputation of good nature, to the higher duty of forming the mind, fixing the principles, and strengthening the character of her with whom they are connected. Perhaps too, a little vanity in the husband helps out his good nature; he secretly rewards him­self by the consciousness of his superiority; he feels a self-complacency in his patient condescension to her weakness, which tacitly flatters his own strength: and he is, as it were, paid for stooping by the increased sense of his own tallness. Seeing [Page 128]also, perhaps, but little of other women, he gets to believe that they are all pretty much alike, and that, as a man of sense, he must content himself with what he takes to be the common lot. Whereas, in truth, by his misplaced indulgence, he has rather made his own lot than drawn it; and thus, through an indolent despair in the husband of being able to improve by opposing them, it happens that help­less, fretful, and daudling wives often acquire a more powerful ascendancy than the most discreet and amiable women; and that the most absolute female tyranny is established by these sickly and caprici­ous humours.

The poets again, who, to do them justice, are always ready to lend a helping hand when any mischief is to be done, have contributed their full share towards confirming these feminine follies: they have strengthened by adulatory maxims, sung in seducing strains, those faults which their talents and their influence [Page 129]should have been employed in correcting. When fair and youthful females are com­plimented with being Fine by defect and delicately weak! Is not a standard of feebleness held out to them to which vanity will gladly resort, and to which softness and indolence can easily act up, or rather act down, if I may be allowed the expression?

When ladies are told by the same misleading, but to them high, authority, that ‘smiles and tears are the irresistible arms with which Nature has furnished them for conquering the strong,’ will they not eagerly fly to this cheap and ready artillery, instead of labouring to furnish themselves with a reasonable mind, an equable temper, and a meek and quiet spirit?

Every animal is endowed by Providence with the peculiar powers adapted to its nature and its wants; while none, except the human, by grafting art on natural [Page 130]sagacity, injures or mars the gift. Spoist women, who fancy there is something more picquant and alluring in the mutable graces of caprice, than in the monotonous smoothness of an even temper, and who also having heard much, as was observed before, about their "amiable weakness," learn to look about them for the best succedaneum to strength, the supposed absence of which they sometimes endea­vour to supply by artifice. By this engine the weakest woman frequently furnishes the converse to the famous reply of the French Minister, who, when he was accused of governing the mind of that feeble Queen Mary de Medicis by sorcery, replied, ‘that the only sorcery he had used was that influence which strong minds na­turally have over weak ones.’

But though it be fair so to study the tempers, defects, and weaknesses of others as to convert our knowledge of them to the promotion of their benefit and our own; and though it be making a lawful [Page 131]use of our penetration to avail ourselves of the faults of others for ‘their good to edification;’ yet all deviations from the strait line of truth and simplicity; every plot insidiously to turn influence to unfair account; all contrivances to extort from a bribed complaisance what reason and justice would refuse to our wishes; these are some of the operations of that lowest and most despicable engine, selfish cunning, by which little minds sometimes govern great ones.

And unluckily, women, from their natural desire to please, and from their sometimes doubting by what means this grand end may be best effected, are in more danger of being led into dissimu­lation than men; for dissimulation is the result of weakness, and the refuge of doubt and distrust, rather than of conscious strength, the dangers of which lie another way. Frankness, truth, and simplicity, therefore, as they are inexpressibly charm­ing, [Page 132]so are they peculiarly commendable in women, and nobly evince that while they wish to please, (and why should they not wish it?) they disdain to have recourse to any thing but what is fair, and just, and honorable to effect it; that they scorn to attain the most desired end by any but the most lawful means. The beauty of sim­plicity is indeed so intimately felt and generally acknowledged by all who have a true taste for personal, moral, or intellectual beauty, that women of the deepest artifice often find their account in assuming an exterior the most foreign to their character, and by affecting the most studied naiveté. It is curious to see the quantity of art some people put in practice in order to appear natural; and the deep design which is set at work to exhibit simplicity. And indeed this feigned simplicity is the most mis­chievous, because the most engaging of all the Proteus forms which dissimulation can put on. For the most free and bold senti­ments [Page 133]have been sometimes hazarded with fatal success under this unsuspected mask. And an innocent, quiet, indolent, artless manner has been adopted as the most refined and successful accompaniment of sentiments, ideas, and designs, neither inno­cent, quiet, nor artless.

CHAP. XVI. On dissipation and the modern habits of fashionable life.

PERHAPS the interests of true friendship, elegant conversation, mental improvement, social pleasure, maternal duty, and con­jugal comfort, never received such a blow as when Fashion issued out that arbitrary and universal decree, that every body must be acquainted with every body; together with that consequent, authoritative, but rather inconvenient clause, that every body must also go every where every night. The devout obedience paid to this law is in­compatible with the very being of friend­ship; for as the circle of acquaintance expands, and it will be continually expand­ing, the affections will be beaten out into such thin lamina as to leave little solidity [Page 135]remaining. The heart which is continually exhausting itself in professions grows cold and hard. The feelings of kindness di­minish in proportion as the expression of kindness becomes more diffuse and indis­criminate. The very traces of ‘simpli­city and godly sincerity’ in a delicate female, wear away imperceptibly by con­stant collision with the world at large. And perhaps no woman takes so little interest in the happiness of her real friends, as she whose affections are incessantly eva­porating in universal civilities; as she who is saying fond and flattering things at random to a circle of five hundred every night.

The decline and fall of animated and instructive conversation has been in a good measure effected by this barbarous project of assembling en masse. An excellent pre­late ^* with whose friendship the author was long honoured, and who himself excelled [Page 136]in the art of conversation, used to remark, that a few years had brought about a great revolution in the manners of society: that it used to be the custom, previously to going into company, to think that something was to be communicated or received, taught or learnt; that the powers of the understanding were expected to be brought into exercise, and that it was therefore necessary to quicken the mind, by reading and thinking, for the share the individual might be expected to take in the general discourse; but that knowledge, and taste, and wit, and erudition, seemed now to be scarcely considered as necessary materials to be brought into the pleasure­able commerce of the world; in which there was little chance of turning them to much account; and therefore he who possessed them, and he who possessed them not, were nearly on a footing.

It is obvious also that multitudinous assemblies are so little favourable to that cheerfulness which it should seem to be their [Page 137]very end to promote, that if there were any chemical process by which the quantum of spirits animal or intellectual could be ascertained the diminution would be found to have been inconceivably great, since the transformation of man and woman from a social to a gregarious animal.

But if it be true as to the injury which friendship, society, and cheerfulness, have sustained by this change of manners, how much more pointedly does the remark apply to family happiness!

Notwithstanding the known fluctuation of manners and the mutability of language, could it be foreseen, when the Apostle Paul exhorted ‘married women to be keepers at home,’ that the time would arrive when that very phrase would be selected to designate one of the most decided acts of dissipation? Could it be foreseen that when a fine lady should send out a notification that on such a night she shall be AT HOME, these two words (be­sides intimating the rarity of the thing) [Page 138]would present to the mind an image the most undomestic which language can convey? My country readers, who may require to have it explained that these two magnetic words now possess the powerful influence of drawing together every thing fine within the sphere of their attraction, may need also to be apprized, that the guests afterwards are not asked what was said by the company, but whether the crowd was prodigious? The rule for de­ciding on the merit of a fashionable society not being by the taste or the spirit, but by the score and the hundred. The question of pleasure, like a Parliamentary question, is now carried by numbers. And when two parties modish, like two parties poli­tical, are run one against another on the same night, the same kind of mortification attends the leader of a defeated minority, the same triumph attends the exulting carrier of superior numbers, in the one case as in the other.

[Page 139]An eminent divine has said, that ‘per­severance in prayer will either make a man leave off sinning, or a conti­nuance in sin will make him leave off prayer.’ This remark may be accom­modated to those ladies who, while they are devoted to the enjoyments of the world, yet retain considerable solicitude for the instruction of their daughters. But if they are really in earnest to give them a Christian education, they must themselves renounce a dissipated life. Or if they resolve to pursue the chace of pleasure they must renounce this prime duty. Con­traries cannot unite. The moral nurture of a tall daughter can no more be ad­ministered by a mother whose time is absorbed by crowds abroad, than the physi­cal nurture of her infant offspring can be supplied by her in a perpetual absence from home. And is not that a preposter­ous affection which leads a mother to devote a few months to the inferior duty of furnishing aliment to the mere animal life, [Page 140]and then to desert her post when the more important moral and intellectual cravings require sustenance? This great object is not to be effected with the shreds and parings rounded off from the circle of a dissipated life; but in order to its ade­quate execution the mother should carry it on with the same spirit and perseverance at home, which the father thinks it ne­cessary to be exerting abroad in his public duty or professional engagements.

The usual vindication, and in theory it has a plausible sound, which has been offered for the large portion of time spent by women in acquiring ornamental talents is, that they are calculated to make the possessor love home, and that they in­nocently fill up the hours of leisure. The plea has indeed so promising an appear­ance that it is worth inquiring whether it be in fact true. Do we then, on fairly pursuing the inquiry, discover that those who have spent most time in such light acquisitions, are really remarkable for lov­ing [Page 141]home or staying quietly there? or that when there, they are sedulous in turn­ing time to the best account? I speak not of that rational and respectable class of women, who, applying (as many of them do) these elegant talents to their true pur­pose, employ them to fill up the vacancies of better occupations, and to embellish the leisure of a life actively good. But do we generally see that even the most valu­able and sober part of the reigning female acquisitions leads their possessor to scenes most favourable to the enjoyment of them? to scenes which we should naturally sup­pose she would seek, in order to the more effectual cultivation of such rational plea­sures?

Would not those delightful pursuits, botany and drawing, for instance, seem likely to court the fields, the woods, and gardens of the paternal seat, as more con­genial to their nature, and more appro­priate to their exercise, than barren water­ing places, destitute of a tree, or an herb, [Page 142]or a flower, or an hour's interval from successive pleasures, to prosit by them even if they abounded with the whole vegetable world from the ‘Cedar of Le­banon to the Hyssop on the wall.’

From the mention of watering places, may the author be allowed to suggest a few remarks on the evils which have arisen from the general conspiracy of the gay to usurp the regions of the sick; and converting the health-restoring foun­tains, meant as a refuge for disease, into the resorts of vanity for those who have no disease but idleness?

This inability of staying at home, as it is one of the most infallible, so it is one of the most dangerous symptoms of the reigning mania. It would be more tolerable, did this epidemic malady only break out as formerly, during the winter, or some one season. Heretofore, the tenantry and the poor, the natural de­pendents on the rural mansions of the opulent, had some definite period to which [Page 143]they might joyfully look forward for the approach of those patrons, part of whose business in life it is, to influence by their presence, to instruct by their example, to sooth by their kindness, and to assist by their liberality, those, whom Providence in the distribution of human lots, has placed under their more immediate pro­tection. Though it would be far from truth to assert that dissipated people are never charitable, yet I will venture to say, that dissipation is inconsistent with the spirit of charity. That affecting precept followed by so gracious a promise, ‘Never turn away thy face from any poor man, and then the face of the Lord shall never be turned away from thee,’ cannot literally mean that we should give to all, as then we should soon have nothing left to give: but it seems to intimate the habitual attention, the duty of inquiring out all cases of distress, in order to judge which are fit to be relieved; now for this inquiry [Page 144]the dissipated have little taste and less leisure.

Let a reasonable conjecture (for calcu­lation would fail!) be made of how large a dimunition of the general good has been effected in this single respect, by causes, which, though they do not seem import­ant in themselves, yet make no inconsider­able part of the mischief arising from modern manners: and I speak now to persons who intend to be charitable. What a deduction will be made from the aggre­gate of charity, by a circumstance appa­rently trisling, when we consider what would be the beneficial effects of that regular bounty which must almost un­avoidably result from the evening walks of a great and benevolent family among the cottages of their own domain: the thousand little acts of, comparatively, un­expensive kindness which the sight of petty wants and difficulties would excite; wants, which will scarcely be felt in the [Page 145]relation; and which will probably be neither seen, nor felt, nor fairly repre­sented, in their long absences, by an agent. And what is even almost more than the good done, is the habit of mind kept up in those who do it: would not this habit exercised on the Christian prin­ciple, that "even a cup of cold water," given upon right motives, shall not lose its reward; while the giving ‘all their goods to feed the poor,’ without the true principle of charity shall profit them nothing; would not this habit, I say, be almost the best part of the education of daughters ^*?

[Page 146]But transplant this wealthy and boun­tiful family periodically amidst the frivo­lous and uninteresting bustle of the water­ing place; where it is not denied that frequent public and fashionable acts of charity may make a part, and it is well they do make part, of the business and of the amusement of the day; with this latter, indeed, they are sometimes good­naturedly mixed up. But how shall we compare the regular systematical good these persons would be doing at their own home, with the light, and amusing, and bustling bounties of these public places? The illegal raffle at the toy-shop, for some distress, which though it may be real, and which if real ought to be re­lieved, is yet less easily ascertained than [Page 147]the wants of their own poor, or the debts of their distressed tenants. How shall we compare the broad stream of bounty which should be flowing through and re­freshing whole districts, with the penu­rious current of the subscription breakfast for the needy musician, in which the price of the gift is taken out in the diversion, and in which pleasure dignifies itself with the name of bounty? How shall we com­pare the attention, and time, and zeal which would otherwise, perhaps, be de­voted to the village school, spent in hawk­ing about benefit tickets for a broken player, while the kindness of the benefac­tress, perhaps, is rewarded by scenes in which her charity is not always repaid by the purity of the exhibition.

Far be it from the author to wish to check the full tide of charity wherever it is disposed to flow! Would she could mul­tiply the already abundant streams, and behold every source purified! But in the public resorts there are many who are [Page 148]able and willing to give. In the seques­tered, though populous village, there is, perhaps, only one affluent family: the dis­tress which they do not behold, will proba­bly not be attended to: the distress which they do not relieve will probably not be relieved at all: the wrongs which they do not redress will go unredressed: the op­pressed whom they do not rescue will sink under the tyranny of the oppressor. Through their own rural domains too, charity runs in a clearer current, and is less polluted with any suspicion of that muddy tincture which it is sometimes apt to contract in passing through the impure soil of the world.

But to return from this too long digres­sion: the old standing objection formerly brought forward by the prejudices of the other sex, and too eagerly laid hold on as a shelter for indolence and ignorance by ours, was, that intellectual accomplish­ments too much absorbed the thoughts and affections, took women off from the [Page 149]necessary attention to domestic duties, and superinduced a contempt or neglect of whatever was useful.—But it is peculiarly the character of the present day to detect ab­surd opinions, and expose plausible theories by the simple and decisive answer of experi­ment; and it is presumed that this popu­lar error, as well as others, is daily re­ceiving the refutation of actual experience. For it cannot surely be maintained on ground that is any longer tenable, that acquirements truly rational are calculated to draw off the mind from real duties. Whatever removes prejudices, whatever stimulates industry, whatever rectifies the judgment, whatever corrects self-con­ceit, whatever purifies the taste, and raises the understanding, will be likely to contri­bute to moral excellence: to woman moral excellence is the grand object of education; and of moral excellence, domes­tic life is to woman the appropriate sphere.

Count over the list of females who have made shipwreck of their fame and virtue, [Page 150]and have furnished the most lamentable examples of the dereliction of family duties; and the number will not be found con­siderable who have been led astray by the pursuit of knowledge. And if a few de­plorable instances of this kind be produced, it will commonly be found that there was little infusion in the minds of such women of that correcting principle without which all other knowledge only "puffeth up."

The time nightly expended in late female vigils is expended by the light of far other lamps than those which are fed by the student's oil; and if families are to be found who are neglected through too much study in the mistress, it will probably be proved to be Hoyle, and not Homer, who has robbed her children of her time and affections. For one family which has been neglected by the mother's passion for books, an hundred have been deserted through her passion for play. The hus­band of a fashionable woman will not often find that the library is the apartment the [Page 151]expences of which involve him in debt or disgrace. And for one literary slattern who now manifests her indifference to her husband by the neglect of her person, there are scores of elegant spendthrifts who ruin theirs by excess of decoration.

May I digress a little while I remark, that I am far from asserting that literature has never filled women with vanity and self-conceit; but I will assert, that in general those whom books are supposed to have spoiled, would have been spoiled in another way without them. She who is a vain pedant because she has read much, has probably that defect in her mind which would have made her a vain fool if she had read nothing. It is not her hav­ing more knowledge but less sense, which makes her insufferable; and illiteracy would have added little to her value, for it is not what she has, but what she wants, which makes her unpleasant. These instances too only furnish a fresh argument [Page 152]for the general cultivation of the female mind. The wider diffusion of sound knowledge would remove that temptation to be vain which may be excited by its rarity.

But while we would assert that a woman of a cultivated intellect is not driven by the fame necessity into the giddy whirl of public resort; who but regrets that real cultivation does not inevitably preserve her from it? No wonder that inanity of cha­racter, that vacuity of mind, that torpid ignorance, should plunge into dissipation as their natural refuge; should seek to bury their insignificance in the crowd of pressing multitudes, and hope to escape analysis and detection in the undistinguished masses of mixed assemblies! There attrition rubs all bodies smooth, and makes all surfaces alike; thither superficial and external ac­complishments naturally fly as to their proper scene of action; as to a field where competition is in perpetual exercise; where [Page 153]the laurels of admiration are to be won, and the trophies of vanity triumphantly carried off!

It would indeed be matter of little com­parative regret, if this corrupt air were only breathed by those of the above description whose natural element it seems to be; but who can forbear regretting that the power of fashion attracts also into this impure and unwholesome atmosphere minds of a better make, of higher aims and ends, of more ethereal temper? Minds who, renouncing enjoyments for which they have a genuine taste, and which would make them really happy, neglect society they love and pursuits they admire, in order that they may seem happy and be fashionable in the chace of pleasures they despise, and in company they dis­approve! But no correctness of taste, no depth of knowledge, will infallibly preserve a woman from this contagion, unless her heart be impressed with a deep Christian conviction that she is responsible for the [Page 154]application of knowledge as well as for the dedication of time.

This contagion is so deep, so wide, and fatal, that if I were called upon to assign the predominant cause of the greater part of the misfortunes and corruptions of the great and gay in our days, I should not look for it principally in any seemingly great or striking cause; not in the practice of notorious vices, not originally in the dereliction of Christian principle; but I should not hesitate to ascribe it to a growing, regular, systematic series of amusements; to an incessant, boundless, and not very disreputable DISSIPATION. Other corruptions, though more formidable in appearance, are yet less fatal in some respects, because they leave us intervals to reflect on their turpitude, and spirit to lament their excesses: but dissipation is the more hopeless, as by engrossing almost the whole of life, and enervating the whole moral and intellectual system, it leaves neither time for reflection, nor space for [Page 155]self-examination, nor temper for the che­rishing of right affections, nor leisure for the operation of sound principles, nor in­terval for regret, nor vigour to resist temptation, nor energy to struggle for amendment.

The great master of the science of plea­sure among the ancients, who reduced it into a system, which he called the chief good of man, directed that there should be interval enough between the succession of delights to sharpen inclination; and ac­cordingly instituted periodical days of ab­stinence: well-knowing that gratification was best promoted by previous self-denial. But so little do our votaries of fashion understand the true nature of pleasure, that one amusement is allowed to overtake another without any interval, either for recollection of the past, or preparation for the future. Even on their own selfish principle, therefore, nothing can be worse understood than this unremitted pursuit of enjoyment: for to such a degree of [Page 156]labour is this pursuit carried, that their pleasures exhaust instead of exhilarating; and their recreations require to be rested from.

And, not to argue the question on the ground of religion, but merely on that of present enjoyment; look abroad and see who are the people that complain of weariness, listlessness, and dejection? You will not find them among such as are overdone with work, but with pleasure. The natural and healthful fatigues of busi­ness are recruited with natural and cheap gratifications; but a spirit worn down with the toils of amusement, requires plea­sures of poignancy; varied, multiplied, stimulating!

It has been observed by medical writers, that that sober excess in which many in­dulge, by constantly eating and drinking a little too much at every day's dinner and every night's supper, more effectually undermines the health, than those acci­dental excesses with which others now and [Page 157]then break in upon a life of general sobriety. This illustration is not intro­duced with a design to recommend occa­sional deviations into gross vice, by way of a pious receipt for mending the morals; but merely to suggest that there is more probability that those who are sometimes driven by unresisted passion into irregu­larities which shock their cooler reason, are more liable to be roused to a sense of their danger, than persons whose per­ceptions of evil are blunted by a round of systematical, excessive, and yet not scandal­ous dissipation. And when I affirm that this system of regular indulgence relaxes the soul, enslaves the heart, bewitches the senses, and thus disqualifies for pious thought or useful action, without having any thing in it so gross as to shock the conscience; and when I hazard an opinion that this state is more formidable because less alarming than that which bears upon it a more determined character of evil, I no more mean to speak of the latter in [Page 158]slight and palliating terms, than I would intimate that because the sick sometimes recover from a fever, but seldom from a palsy, that a fever is therefore a safe or a healthy state.

But there seems to be an error in the first concoction, out of which the subsequent errors successively grow. First then, as has been observed before, the showy education of women tends chiefly to qualify them for the glare of public assemblies: secondly, they seem in many instances to be so educated, with a view to the greater probability of their being splendidly married: thirdly, it is alleged in vindication of those dissipated practices, that daughters can only be seen, and ad­mirers procured at balls, operas, and assemblies; and that therefore, by a natural consequence, balls, operas, and assemblies must be followed up without intermission till the object be effected. For the accom­plishment of this object it is that all this complicated machinery had been pre­viously [Page 159]viously set a going, and kept in motion with an activity not at all slackened by the disordered state of the system; for some machines, instead of being stopped, go faster because the true spring is out of order; the only difference being that they go wrong, and so the increased rapidity only adds to the quantity of error.

It is also, as we have already remarked, an error to fancy that the love of pleasure exhausts itself by indulgence, and that the very young are chiefly addicted to it. The contrary appears to be true. The desire grows with the pursuit upon the same principle as motion is quickened by the continuance of the impetus.

First then, it cannot be thought unfair to trace back the excessive fondness for amusement to that mode of education we have elsewhere reprobated. Few of the accomplishments, falsely so called, assist the development of the faculties: they do not exercise the judgment, nor bring into action those powers which fit the [Page 160]heart and mind for the occupations of life: they do not prepare women to love home, to understand its occupations, to enliven its uniformity, to fulfil its duties, to multiply its comforts: they do not lead to that sort of experimental logic, if I may so speak, compounded of observation and reflection, which makes up the moral science of life and manners. Talents which have display for their object despise the narrow stage of home: they demand mankind for their spectators, and the world for their theatre.

While one cannot help shrinking a little from the idea of a delicate young creature, lovely in person, and engaging in mind and manners, sacrificing nightly at the public shrine of Fashion, at once the votary and the victim; one cannot help figuring to oneself how much more interesting she would appear in the eyes of a man of feeling, did he behold her in the more endearing situations of domestic life. And who can forbear wishing, that the good [Page 161]sense, good taste, and delicacy of the men had rather led them to prefer seeking companions for life in the almost sacred quiet of a virtuous home? There they might have had the means of seeing and admiring those amiable beings in the best point of view: there they might have been enabled to form a juster estimate of female worth, than is likely to be obtained in scenes where such qualities and talents as might be expected to add to the stock of domestic comfort must necessarily be kept in the back ground, and where such only can be brought into view as are not par­ticularly calculated to insure the certainty of home delights.

But by what unaccountable infatuation is it that men too, even men of sense, join in the confederacy against their own happiness by looking for their home com­panions in the resorts of vanity? Why do [Page 162]not such men rise superior to the illusions of fashions? why do they not uniformly seek her who is to preside in their families in the bosom of her own? in the practice of every domestic duty, in the exercise of every amiable virtue, in the exertion of every elegant accomplishment? those ac­complishments of which we have been reprobating, not the possession, but the application? there they would find her exerting them to their true end, to enliven business, to animate retirement, to embel­lish the charming scene of family delights, to heighten the interesting pleasures of social intercourse, and, rising to their noblest object, to adorn the doctrine of God her Saviour.

If, indeed, woman were mere outside form and face only, and if mind made up no part of her composition, it would fol­low that a ball-room was quite as appro­priate a place for choosing a wife, as an exhibition room for choosing a picture. But, inasmuch as women are not mere [Page 163]portraits, their value not being determin­able by a glance of the eye, it follows that a different mode of appreciating their value, and a different place for viewing them antecedent to their being individu­ally selected, is desirable. The two cases differ also in this, that if a man select a picture for himself from among all its ex­hibited competitors, and bring it to his own house, the picture being passive, he is able to fix it there: while the wife, picked up at a public place, and accus­tomed to incessant display, will not, it is probable, when brought home stick so quietly to the spot where he fixes her; but will escape to the exhibition room again, and continue to be displayed at every subsequent exhibition, just as if she were not become private property, and had never been definitively disposed of.

It is the novelty of a thing which asto­nishes us, and not its absurdity: objects may be so long kept before the eye that it begins no longer to observe them; or [Page 164]may be brought into such close contact with it, that it does not discern them. Long habit so reconciles us to almost any thing, that the grossest improprieties cease to strike us when they are once melted into the common course of action. This, by the way, is a strong reason for car­fully sifting every opinion and every practice before we let them incorporate into the mass of our habits, after which they will be no more examined.—Would it not be accounted preposterous for a young man to say he had fancied such a lady would dance a better minuet, because he had seen her behave devoutly at Church, and therefore had chosen her for his partner? and yet he is not thought at all absurd when he intimates that he chose a partner for life because he was pleased with her at a ball. Surely the place of choosing and the motive of choice, would be just as appropriate in one case as in the other, and the mistake, if the judgment failed, not quite so serious.

[Page 165]There is, among the more elevated classes of society, a certain set of persons who are pleased exclusively to call them­selves, and whom others by a sort of com­pelled courtesy are pleased to call, the fine world. This small detachment con­sider their situation with respect to the rest of mankind, just as the ancient Gre­cians did theirs; that is, the Grecians thought there were but two sorts of beings, and that all who were not Gre­cians were barbarians; so this certain set considers society as resolving itself into two distinct classes, the fine world and the people; to which last class they turn over all who do not belong to their little co­terie, however high their rank or fortune. Celebrity, in their estimation, is not be­stowed by birth or talents, but by being connected with them. They have laws, immunities, privileges, and almost a langu­age of their own; they form a kind of dis­tinct cast, and with a sort of esprit du corps detach themselves from others, even [Page 166]in general society, by an affectation of distance and coldness; and only whisper and smile in their own little groupes of the initiated; their confines are jealously guarded, and their privileges are incom­municable.

In this society a young man loses his natural character, which, whatever it might originally have been, is melted down and cast into the one prevailing mould of Fashion; all the strong, native, discriminating qualities of his mind being made to take one shape, one stamp, one superscription! However varied and dis­tinct might have been the materials which nature threw into the crucible, plastic Fashion takes care that they shall all be the same, or at least appear the same, when they come out of the mould. A young man in such an artificial state of society, accustomed to the voluptuous ease, refined luxuries, soft accommodations, ob­sequious attendance, and all the unre­strained indulgencies of a fashionable club, [Page 167]is not likely after marriage to take very cordially to a home, unless very extraor­dinary exertions are made to amuse, to attach, and to interest him: and he is not likely to lend a very helping hand to the happiness of the union, whose most laborious exertions have hitherto been little more than a selfish stratagem to re­concile health with pleasure. Excess of gratification has only served to make him irritable and exacting; it will of course be no part of his project to make sacrifices, but to receive them: and what would appear incredible to the Paladins of gallant times, and the Chevaliers Preux of more heroic days, even in the necessary business of establishing himself for life, he some­times is more disposed to expect attentions than to make advances.

Thus the indolent son of fashion, with a thousand fine, but dormant qualities, which a bad tone of manners forbids him to bring into exercise; with real energies which that tone does not allow him to [Page 168]discover, and an unreal apathy which it commands him to feign; with the heart of an hero, perhaps, if called into the field, he affects the manners of a Sybarite; and he, who with a Roman, or what is more, with a British valour, would leap into the gulph at the call of public duty, Yet in the soft and piping time of peace, when fashion had resumed her rights, he would murmur if a rose leaf lay double under him.

The clubs above alluded to, as has been said, generate and cherish luxurious habits, from their perfect ease, undress, liberty, and equality of distinction in rank: they promote a spirit for play, and in short, every temper and spirit which tends to undomesticate; and what adds to the mischief is, all this is attained at a cheap rate compared with home in the same style.

These indulgencies, and that habit of mind, gratify so many passions, that it can never be counteracted successfully by any [Page 169]thing of its own kind, or which gratifies the same habits. Now, a passion for gratify­ing vanity, and a spirit of dissipation, is a passion of the same kind; and therefore, though for a few weeks, a man who has chosen his wife in the haunts of dissipation, and this wife, a woman made up of accom­plishments, may, from the novelty of the connexion and of the scene, continue domes­tic; yet in a little time she will find that those passions, to which she has trusted for making his married life pleasant, will long for the more comfortable pleasures of the club; and she will, while they are pursued, be consigned over to solitary evenings at home, or driven back to the old dissi­pations.

To conquer the passion for club gratifi­cations, a woman must not strive to feed it with sufficient aliment in the same kind in her society, either at home or abroad; for this she cannot do: but she must supplant and overcome it by a passion of a different nature, which Providence has kindly [Page 170]planted within us, the love of fire-side en­joyments. But to qualify herself for ad­ministering these, she must cultivate her understanding and her heart; acquiring at the same time that modicum of accom­plishments suited to his taste, which may qualify her for possessing, both for him and for herself, greater varieties of safe recreation.

One great cause of the want of attach­ment in these modish couples is, that by living in the world at large, they are not driven to depend on each other as the chief source of comfort. Now it is pretty clear, in spite of modern theories, that the very frame and being of societies, whether great or small, public or private, is jointed and glued together by dependence. Those attachments which arise from, and are compacted by, a sense of mutual wants, mutual affection, mutual benefit, and mu­tual obligation, are the cement which secure the union of the family as well as of the state.

[Page 171]Unfortunately, when two young persons of the above description marry, the union is sometimes considered rather as the end than the beginning of an engagement: the attachment of each to the other is rather viewed as an object already completed, than as one which marriage is to confirm more closely. But the companion for life is not always chosen from the purest motive; she is selected, perhaps, because she is admired by other men, rather than because she possesses in an eminent degree those peculiar qualities which are likely to constitute the individual happiness of the man who chooses her. Vanity usurps the place of affection; and indolence swallows up the judgment. Not happiness, but some easy substitute for happiness is pur­sued; and a choice which may excite envy, rather than produce satisfaction, is adopted as the means of effecting it.

The pair, not matched, but joined, set out separately with their independent and individual pursuits; whether it made a [Page 172]part of their original plan or not, that they should be indispensably necessary to each other's comfort, the sense of this necessity, probably not very strong at first, rather diminishes than increases by time; they live so much in the world, and so little together, that to stand well with their own set continues the favourite project of each; while to stand well with each other is con­sidered as an under part of the plot in the drama of life: whereas, did they start in the conjugal race with the fixed idea that they were to look to each other for the principal happiness of life, not only prin­ciple, but prudence, and even selfishness would convince them of the necessity of sedulously cultivating each other's esteem and affection as the grand spring of pro­moting that happiness. But vanity, and the desire of flattery and applause, still continue to operate. Even after the hus­band is brought to feel a perfect indiffer­ence for his wife, he still likes to see her decorated in a style which may serve to [Page 173]justify his choice. He encourages her to set off her person, not so much for his own gratification, as that his self-love may be flattered, by her continuing to attract the admiration of those whose opinion is the standard by which he measures his fame, and which fame is to stand him in the stead of happiness. Thus is she necessarily exposed to the two-fold tempt­ation of being at once neglected by her husband, and exhibited as an object of attraction to other men. If she escape this complicated danger, she will be in­debted for her preservation not to his prudence, but to her own principles.

In some of these modish marriages, instead of the decorous neatness, the plea­sant intercourse, and the mutual warmth of communication of the once social dinner; the late and uninteresting meal is com­monly hurried over by the languid and slovenly pair, that the one may have time to dress for his club, and the other for her party. And in these cold abstracted [Page 174] têtes-à-têtes, they often take as little pains to entertain each other, as if the one was precisely the only human being in the world in whose eyes the other did not feel it necessary to appear agreeable.

But if these young and perhaps really amiable persons could struggle against the imperious tyranny of fashion, and contrive to pass a little time together, so as to get acquainted with each other; and if each would live in the lively and conscientious exercise of those talents and attractions which they sometimes know how to pro­duce on occasions not quite so justifiable; they would, I am persuaded, often find out each other to be very agreeable people. And both of them, delighted and delight­ing, would no longer be driven to the anxious necessity of perpetually flying from home as from the only scene which offers no possible materials for pleasure.

It may seem a contradiction to have asserted that beings of all ages, tempers, and talents, should with such unremitting [Page 175]industry follow up any way of life if they did not find some enjoyment in it; yet I appeal to the bosoms of these incessant hunters in the chace of pleasure, whether they are really happy. No.—In the full tide and torrent of diversion, in the full blaze of gaiety, The heart distrusting asks if this be joy? But there is an anxious restlessness which, if not interesting, is bustling. There is the dread and partly the discredit of being suspected of having one hour unmortgaged, not only to successive, but contending engagements; this it is, and not the plea­sure of the engagement itself, which is the object. There is an agitation in the arrangements which imposes itself on the vacant heart for happiness. There is a tumult kept up in the spirits which is a busy though treacherous substitute for comfort. The multiplicity of solicitations soothes vanity. The very regret that they [Page 176]cannot be all accepted has its charms; for dignity is flattered because refusal implies importance. Then there is the joy of being invited when others are neglected; the triumph of showing one's less modish friend that one is going where she cannot come; and the feigned regret at being obliged to go, assumed before her who is half wild at being obliged to stay away. These are some of the supplemental shifts for happiness with which vanity contrives to feed her hungry followers.

In the succession of open houses in which Pleasure is to be started and pursued on any given night, the existing place is never taken into the account of enjoy­ment: the scene of which is always sup­posed to lie in any place where her votaries happen not to be. Pleasure has no present tense: but in the house which her pur­suers have just quitted, and in the house to which they are just hastening, a stranger might conclude the slippery goddess had [Page 177]really fixed her throne, and that her worshippers considered the existing scene, which they seem compelled to suffer, but from which they are eager to escape, as really detaining them from some positive joy to which they are flying in the next crowd; till, if he meet them there, he will find the component parts of each precisely the same. He would hear the same stated phrases interrupted, not answered, by the same stated replies, the unfinished sentence "driven adverse to the winds" by pressing multitudes; the same warm regret mu­tually exchanged by two friends (who had been expressly denied to each other all the winter) that they had not met before; the same soft and smiling sorrow at being torn away from each other now; the same anxiety to renew the meeting, with perhaps the same secret resolution to avoid it. He would hear described with the same pa­thetic earnestness the difficulties of getting into this house, and the dangers of getting [Page 178]out of the last! the perilous retreat of former nights, effected amidst the shock of chariots and the clang of contending coachmen! a retreat indeed effected with a skill and peril little inferior to that of the ten thousand, and detailed with far juster triumph; for that which happened only once in a life to the Grecian Hero occurs to these British heroines every night.

With "mysterious reverence" I forbear to descant on those serious and interesting rites, for the more august and solemn celebration of which Fashion nightly con­venes these splendid myriads to her more sumptuous temples. Rites! which, when engaged in with due devotion, absorb the whole soul, and call every passion into exercise, except indeed those of love, and peace, and kindness, and gentleness. In­spiring rites! which stimulate fear, rouse hope, kindle zeal, quicken dulness, sharpen discernment, exercise memory, inflame cu­riosity! [Page 179]Rites! in short, in the due per­formance of which all the energies and attentions, all the powers and abilities, all the abstraction and exertion, all the diligence and devotedness, all the sacrifice of time, all the contempt of ease, all the neglect of sleep, all the oblivion of care, all the risks of fortune (half of which if directed to their true objects would change the very face of the world): all these are concentrated to one point; a point in which the wise and the weak, the learned and the ignorant, the fair and the fright­ful, the sprightly and the dull, the rich and the poor, the Patrician and Plebeian, meet in one common and uniform equality; an equality as religiously respected in these solemnities, in which all distinctions are levelled at a blow, and of which the very spirit is therefore democratical, as it is combated in all other instances.

CHAP. XVII. On public amusements.

IT is not proposed to enter the long contested field of controversy as to the individual amusements which may be con­sidered as safe and lawful for those women of the higher class who make a strict pro­fession of Christianity. The judgment they will be likely to form for themselves on this subject, and the plan they will con­sequently adopt, will depend much on the clearness or obscurity in their religious views, and on the greater or less progress they have made in their Christian course. It is in their choice of amusements that you get in some measure to know the real dispositions of mankind. In their business, in the leading employments of life, their path is in a good degree chalked out [Page 182]for them: there is in this respect a sort of general character wherein the greater part, more or less, must coincide. But in their pleasures the choice is voluntary, the taste is self-directed, the propensity is inde­pendent; and of course the habitual state, the genuine bent and bias of the temper, are most likely to be seen in those pursuits which every man is at liberty to choose for himself.

When a truly religious principle shall have acquired such a degree of force as to produce that conscientious and habitual improvement of time before re­commended, it will discover itself by an increasing indifference and even deadness to those pleasures which are interesting to the world at large. A woman under the predominating influence of such a principle, will begin to discover that the same thing which in itself is innocent may yet be comparatively wrong. She will begin to feel that there are many amuse­ments and employments which though [Page 183]they have nothing censurable in them­selves, yet if they be allowed to intrench on hours which ought to be dedicated to still better purposes; or if they are protracted to an undue length; or above all, if by softening and relaxing her mind and dissipating her spirits, they so indispose her for better pursuits as to render subsequent duties a burden, they are in that case clearly wrong for her, whatever they may be for others. Now as temptations of this sort are the peculiar dangers of better kind of characters, the sacrifice of such little gratifications as may have no great harm in them, come in among the daily calls to self-denial in a Christian.

The fine arts, for instance, polite litera­ture, elegant society, these are among the lawful, and liberal, and becoming recreations of higher life; yet if even these be cultivated to the neglect or exclusion of severer duties; if they in­terfere with serious studies, or disqualify the mind for religious exercises, it is an intima­tion [Page 184]that they have been too much in­dulged; and, under such circumstances, it might be the part of Christian circum­spection to inquire if the time devoted to them ought not to be abridged. Above all, a tender conscience will never lose fight of one safe rule of determining in all doubtful cases: if the point be so nice that though we hope upon the whole there may be no harm in engaging in it, we may at least be always quite sure that there can be no harm in letting it alone.

The principle of being responsible for the use of time once fixed in the mind, the conscientious Christian will be making a continual progress in the great art of turning time to account. In the first stages of her religion she will have abstained from pleasures which began a little to wound the conscience, or which assumed a ques­tionable shape; but she will probably have abstained with regret, and with a secret wish that conscience could have permitted [Page 185]her to keep well with pleasure and religion too. But you may discern in her sub­sequent course that she has reached a more advanced stage, by her beginning to neglect even such pleasures or employ­ments as have no moral turpitude in them, but are merely what are called innocent. This relinquishment arises, not so much from her feeling still more the restraints of religion, as from the im­provement in her religious taste. Pleasures cannot now attach her merely from their being innocent, unless they are interesting also, and to be interesting they must be consonant to her superinduced views. She is not contented to spend a large portion of her time harmlessly, it must be spent profitably also. Nay, if she be indeed earnestly ‘pressing towards the mark,’ it will not be even enough for her that her present pursuit be good if she be convinced that it might be still better. Her contempt of ordinary en­joyments will increase in a direct propor­tion [Page 186]to her increased relish for those plea­sures which religion enjoins and bestows. So that at length if it were possible to suppose that an angel could come down to take off as it were the interdict, and to invite her to resume all the pleasures she had renounced, and to resume them with complete impunity, she would reject the invitation, because she would despise, from an improvement in her spiritual taste, those delights from which she had at first abstained through fear. Till her will and affections come heartily to be engaged in the service of God, the progress will not be comfortable; but when once they are so engaged, the attachment to this service will be cordial, and her heart will not desire to go back and toil again in the drudgery of the world. For her religion has not so much given her a new creed, as a new heart, and a new life.

As her views are become new, so her tempers, dispositions, tastes, actions, pursuits, choice of company, choice of [Page 187]amusements, are new also; her employ­ment of time is changed; her turn of conversation is altered; ‘old things are passed away, all things are become new.’ In dissipated and worldly so­ciety, she will seldom fail to feel a sort of uneasiness, which will produce one of these two effects; she will either, as proper seasons present themselves, struggle hard to introduce such subjects as may be useful to others; or, supposing that she finds her­self unable to effect this, she will, as far as she prudently can, absent herself from that unprofitable kind of society. Indeed her manner of conducting herself under these circumstances may serve to furnish her with a test of her own sincerity. For while people are contending for a little more of this amusement, and pleading for a little extension of that gratification, and fighting to hedge in a little more territory to their pleasure-ground, they are exhibit­ing a kind of evidence against themselves, [Page 188]that they are not yet ‘renewed in the spirit of their mind.’

It has been warmly urged as an objec­tion to certain religious books, and par­ticularly against a recent work of high worth and celebrity, by a distinguished layman ^*, that they have set the standard of self-denial higher than reason or even than Christianity requires. These works do indeed elevate the general tone of reli­gion to a higher pitch than is quite con­venient to those who are at infinite pains to construct a comfortable and compre­hensive plan, which shall unite the ques­tionable pleasures of this world with the promised happiness of the next. I say it has been sometimes objected, even by those readers who on the whole greatly admire the particular work in question, that it is unreasonably strict in the precep­tive and prohibitory parts; and especially that it individually and specifically forbids [Page 189]certain fashionable amusements, with a severity not to be found in the scriptures; and is scrupulously rigid in condemning diversions against which nothing is said in the New Testament: each objector, how­ever, is so far reasonable, as only to beg quarter for her own favorite amusement, and generously abandons the defence of those in which she herself has no pleasure.

But these objectors do not seem to understand the true genius of Christianity. They do not consider that it is the charac­ter of the Gospel to exhibit a scheme of principles, of which it is the tendency to infuse such a spirit of holiness as must be utterly incompatible, not only with customs decidedly vicious, but with the very spirit of worldly pleasure. They do not consider that Christianity is neither a table of ethics, nor a system of opinions, nor a bundle of rods to punish, nor an exhibition of rewards to allure, nor a scheme of restraints, nor merely a code of laws; but it is a new principle infused [Page 190]into the heart, by the word and the spirit of God, out of which principle will inevit­ably grow right opinions, renewed affec­tions, correct morals, and holy habits, with an invariable desire of pleasing God, and a constant fear of offending him. A real Christian, whose heart is once tho­roughly imbued with this principle, can no more return to the amusements of the world, than a philosopher can be refreshed with the amused with the recreations of a child. The New Testament is not a mere statute-book: it is not a table where every offence is detailed, and its corres­ponding penalty annexed: it is not so much a compilation, as a spirit of laws: it does not so much prohibit every individual wrong practice, as suggest a temper and general principle with which every wrong practice is incompatible. It did not, for instance, so much attack the then-reigning and corrupt fashions, which were probably, like the fashions of other countries, tem­porary [Page 191]porary and local; but it struck at that worldliness which is the root and stock from which all corrupt fashions proceed.

The prophet Isaiah, who addressed him­self more particularly to the Israelitish women, inveighed not only against vanity, luxury, and immodesty, in general; but with great propriety inveighed against those precise instances of each, to which the women of rank in the particular coun­try he was addressing were especially ad­dicted; nay, he enters into the minute detail ^* of their very personal decorations, and brings specific charges against their levity and extravagance of apparel; mean­ing, indeed, chiefly to censure the turn of character which these indicated. But the Gospel of Christ, which was to be addressed to all ages, stations, and countries, seldom contains any such detailed animadversions; for though many of the censurable modes which the prophet so severely reprobated [Page 192]continued probably to be still prevalent in Jerusalem in the days of our Saviour, yet how little would it have suited the universality of his mission, to have con­fined his preaching to such local, limited, and fluctuating customs! not but that there are many texts which actually do define the Christian conduct as well as temper, with sufficient particularity to serve as condemnation of many prac­tices which are pleaded for, and often point pretty directly at them.

Had Peter on that memorable day, when he added three thousand converts to the Church by a single sermon, nar­rowed his subject to a remonstrance against this diversion, or that public place, or the other vain amusement, it might indeed have suited the case of some of the female Jewish converts who were present; but such restrictions as might have been appro­priate to them would probably not have applied to the cases of the Parthians and Medes, of which his audience was partly [Page 193]composed; or such as might have belonged to them would have been totally inappli­cable to the Cretes and Arabians; or again, those which suited them would not have applied to the Elamites and Mesopota­mians. By such partial and circumscribed addresses, his multifarious audience, com­posed of all nations and countries, would not have been, as we are told they were, "pricked to the heart." But when he preached on the broad ground of general ‘repentance and remission of sins in the name of Jesus Christ,’ it was no won­der that they all cried out ‘What shall we do?’ These collected foreigners, at their return home, would have found very different usages to correct in their different countries; of course a detailed restriction of the popular abuses at Jerusalem would have been of little use to strangers return­ing to their respective nations. The ardent apostle, therefore, acted more consistently in communicating to them the large and comprehensive spirit of the Gospel, which [Page 194]should at once involve all their scattered and separate duties, and reprove all their scattered and separate corruptions; for the whole always includes a part, and the greater involves the less. Christ and his Disciples, instead of limiting their condemn­ation to the peculiar vanities reprehended by Isaiah, embraced the very soul and principle of them all, in such exhortations as the following: ‘Be ye not conformed to the world:’— ‘If any man love the world the love of the Father is not in him:’— ‘The fashion of this world passeth away.’ Our Lord and his Apostles, whose future unlimited audience was to be made up out of the whole world, attacked the evil heart, out of which all those incidental, local, and popular cor­ruptions proceeded.

In the time of Christ and his immediate followers, the luxury and intemperance of the Romans had arisen to a pitch un­known before in the world; but as the same Gospel was to be preached hereafter [Page 195]before the Roman emperors themselves, which its Divine Author and his disciples were then preaching to the hungry and necessitous; the large precept, ‘Whether ye eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God,’ was likely to be of more general use, than any seperate exhortation to temperance, to thankful­ness, to moderation as to quantity or ex­pence; which last indeed must always be left in some degree to the judgment and the circumstances of the individual.

When the Apostle of the Gentiles visited the "Saints of Caesar's household," he could not have heard without abhor­rence of some of the fashionable amuse­ments in the court of Nero. He must have reflected with peculiar indignation on many things which were practised in the Circensian games: yet, instead of prun­ing this corrupt tree and singling out the inhuman gladiatorial sports for the object of his condemnation, he laid his axe to the root of all sin, by preaching to them [Page 196]that Gospel of Christ of which ‘he was not ashamed;’ and shewing them that believed, that ‘it was the power of God and the wisdom of God.’ Though it is somewhat remarkable, that about the very time of his preaching to the Romans, the public taste had sunk to such an excess of depravity that the very women engaged in those shocking encounters with the gla­diators.

But in the first place, it was better that their right practice should grow out of the right principle; and next his specifically reprobating these diversions would have had this ill effect, that succeeding ages, seeing that they in their amusements came somewhat short of those dreadful excesses of the polished Romans, would only have plumed themselves on their own compara­tive superiority; and thus, on this prin­ciple, even the bull-fights of Madrid might have had their panegyrists. But the truth is, the apostle knew that such abominable corruptions could never subsist [Page 197]together with Christianity, and in effect the honour of abolishing these barbarous diversions was reserved for Constantine the first Christian emperor.

Besides, the apostles, by inveighing against some particular diversions, would have seemed to sanction all which they did not actually censure: and as, in the lapse of time and the revolution of govern­ments, customs change and manners fluctuate; had a minute reprehension of the fashions of the then existing age been published in the New Testament, that por­tion of scripture must in time have become obsolete, even in that very same country, when the fashions themselves should have changed. And Paul and his brother apostles knew that their epistles would be the oracles of the Christian world when these temporary diversions would be forgot­ten. In consequence of this knowledge, by the universal precept to avoid ‘the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life,’ they have pre­pared [Page 198]a lasting antidote against the prin­ciple of all corrupt pleasures, which will ever remain equally applicable to the loose fashions of all ages, and of every country to the end of the world.

To vindicate diversions therefore, which are in themselves unchristian, on the pre­tended ground that they are not specific­ally condemned in the Gospel, would be little less absurb than if the heroes of Newmarket should bring it as a proof that their periodical meetings are not con­demned in Scripture, because St. Paul, when writing to the Corinthians, in avail­ing himself of the Isthmian games as a happy illustration of the Christian race, did not drop any censure on the practice itself: a practice which was indeed as much more pure than the races of Chris­tian Britain, as the moderation of being contented with the triumph of a crown of leaves is superior to that criminal spirit of gambling which iniquitously enriches the victor by beggaring the competitor.

[Page 199]But, as was said above, local abuses were not the object of a book whose in­structions were to be of universal and lasting application. As a proof of this, little is said in the Gospel of the then-existing cor­ruption of polygamy; nothing against the savage custom of exposing children, or even against slavery; nothing expressly against suicide or duelling; the last Gothic custom, indeed, did not exist among the crimes of Paganism. But is there not an implied prohibition against polygamy in the general denunciation against adultery? Is not exposing of children condemned in that charge against the Romans, that "they were without natural affection?" Is there not a strong censure against slavery conveyed in the command to ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you?’ and against suicide and duelling, in the general prohibition against murder, which is strongly en­forced by the solemn manner in which [Page 200]murder is traced back to its first seed of anger in the sermon on the mount.

Thus it is clear, that when Christ sent the Gospel to all nations, he meant that that Gospel should proclaim those prime truths, general laws, and fundamental doctrines, which must necessarily involve the prohibition of all peculiar, local, and inferior errors; errors which could not have been specifically guarded against, without having a distinct Gospel for every country, or without swelling the divine volume into such inconvenient length as would have defeated one great end of its promulgation ^* And while its lead­ing principles are of universal application, it must always, in some measure, be left to the discretion of the preacher and to the conscience of the hearer, to examine whether the life and habits of those who profess it are conformable to its spirit.

[Page 201]The same Divine Spirit which indited the Holy Scriptures, is promised to purify the hearts and renew the natures of re­penting and believing Christians; and the compositions it inspired are in some degree analogous to the workmanship it effects. It prohibited the vicious practices of the apostolical days, by prohibiting the passions and principles which rendered them gratifying; and still working in like manner on the hearts of real Christians, it corrects the taste which was accustomed to find its proper gratification in the resorts of vanity; and thus effectually provides for the reformation of the habits, and infuses a relish for rational and domestic enjoy­ments, and for whatever can administer pleasure to that spirit of peace, and love, and hope, and joy, which animates and rules the renewed heart of the true Christian.

But there is a portion of Scripture which, though to a superficial reader it may seem but very remotely connected with the [Page 202]present subject, yet to readers of another cast, it seems to settle the matter beyond controversy: In the parable of the great supper, this important truth is held out to us, that even things good in themselves may be the means of our eternal ruin, by drawing our hearts from God, and causing us to make light of the offers of the Gospel. One invited guest had bought an estate, another had made a purchase equally blameless of oxen; a third had married a wife, an act not illaudable in itself. They had all different reasons; but they all agreed in this, to decline the invitation to the supper. The worldly possessions of one, the worldly business of another, and what should be particularly attended to, the love of a third to his dearest relative, (a love by the way not only allowed but commanded in Scripture,) were brought forward as excuses for not attending to the important business of religion. The consequence however was the same to all. ‘None [Page 203]of those which were bidden shall taste of my supper.’ If then things innocent, things necessary, things laudable, things commanded, become sinful, when by un­seasonable or excessive indulgence they detain the heart and affections from God, how vain will all those arguments ne­cessarily be rendered which are urged by the advocates for certain amusements on the ground of their harmlessness; if those amusements serve (not to mention any positive evil which may belong to them) in like manner to draw away the thoughts and affections from all spiritual objects!

To conclude; when this topic happens to become the subject of conversation, instead of addressing severe and pointed attacks to young ladies on the sin of attending places of diversion, would it not be better first to endeavour to excite in them that principle of Christianity with which such diversions seem not quite com­patible; as the physician, who visits a patient in an eruptive fever, pays little [Page 204]attention to those spots, which to the ignorant appear to be the disease, except indeed so far as they serve as indications to let him into its nature, but goes strait to the root of the malady? He attacks the sever, he lowers the pulse, he changes the system, he corrects the general habit; well knowing, that if he can but restore the vital principle of health, the spots, which were nothing but symptoms, will die away of themselves.

In instructing others we should imitate our Lord and his Apostles, and not always aim our blow at each particular corruption; but making it our business to convince our pupil that what brings forth the evil fruit she exhibits, cannot be a slip of the true vine; we should thus avail ourselves of individual corruptions for im­pressing her with a sense of the necessity of purifying the common source from which they flow—a corrupt nature. Thus making it our grand business to rectify the heart, we pursue the true, the compen­dious, [Page 205]the only method of universal ho­liness.

I would however take leave of those amiable and not ill-disposed young persons, who complain of the rigour of human prohibitions, and declare ‘they meet with no such strictness in the Gospel,’ by asking them with the most affectionate earnestness, if they can conscientiously reconcile their nightly attendance at every public place which they frequent, with such precepts as the following: ‘Redeem­ing the time:—"Watch and pray:"— "Watch, for ye know not at what time your Lord cometh:"— "Abstain from all appearance of evil:"— "Set your affections on things above:"— "Be ye spiritually minded:"— "Crucify the flesh with its affections and lusts?’ And I would venture to offer one criterion by which the persons in question may be enabled to decide on the positive inno­cence and safety of such diversions; but [Page 206]they must be sincere in their scrutiny and honest in their avowal. If on their return at night from those places they find they can retire, and ‘commune with their own hearts;’ if they find the love of God operating with undiminished force en their minds; if they can ‘bring every thought into subjection,’ and concentrate every wandering imagination; if they can soberly examine into their own state of mind: I do not say if they can do all this perfectly, and without distraction; (for who can do this at any time?) but if they can do it with the same degree of seriousness, pray with the same degree of fervour, and renounce the world in as great a measure as at other times; and if they can lie down with a peaceful consciousness of having avoided in the evening "that temptation" which they had prayed not to be "led into" in the morning, they may then more rea­sonably hope that all is well, and that they [Page 207]are not speaking false peace to their hearts ^*

CHAP. XVIII. A worldly spirit incompatible with the spirit of Christianity.

Is it not whimsical to hear such complaints against the strictness of religion as we are frequently hearing, from beings who are voluntarily pursuing, as has been shown in the preceding Chapters, a course of life which Fashion makes infinitely more laborious? How really burden­some would Christianity be if she enjoined such sedulity of application, such unre­mitting labours, such a succession of fatigues! if religion commanded such hardships and self-denial, such days of hurry, such evenings of exertion, such nights of broken rest, such perpetual sacrifices of quiet, such exile from family delights, as Fashion imposes, then indeed [Page 210]the service of Christianity would no longer merit its present appellation of being "a reasonable service:" then the name of perfect slavery might be justly applied to that which we are told in the beautiful language of our church, is "a service of perfect freedom:" a ser­vice, the great object of which, is ‘to deliver us from the bondage of cor­ruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.’

A worldly temper, by which I mean a disposition to prefer worldly pleasures, worldly satisfactions, and worldly advan­tages, to the immortal interests of the soul; and to let worldly considerations actuate us instead of the dictates of religion in the concerns of ordinary life; a worldly temper, I say, is not, like almost any other fault, the effect of passion or the con­sequence of surprise when the heart is off its guard. It is not excited incidentally by the operation of external circumstances on the infirmity of nature; but it is the vital [Page 211]spirit, the essential soul, the living principle of evil. It is not so much an act, as a state of being; not so much an oc­casional complaint as a tainted constitution of mind. If it do not always show itself in extraordinary excesses, it has no perfect intermission. Even when it is not immediately tempted to break out into overt and specific acts, it is at work within, stirring up the heart to disaffection against holiness, and infusing a kind of moral disability to whatever is intrinsically good. It infects and depraves all the powers and faculties of the soul; for it operates on the understanding by blinding it to whatever is spiritually good; on the will, by making it averse from God; on the affections, by disordering and sensualizing them; so that one may almost say to those who are under the supreme dominion of this spirit, what was said to the hosts of Joshua, "Ye cannot serve the Lord."

This worldliness of mind is not at all commonly understood, and for the [Page 212]following reason:—People suppose that in this world our chief business is with the things of this world, and that to conduct the business of this world well, that is, conformably to moral principles, is the chief substance of moral and true good­ness. Religion, if introduced at all into the system, only makes its occasional and, if I may so speak, its holiday appearance. To bring religion into every thing, is thought incompatible with the due atten­tion to the things of this life. And so it would, if by religion were meant talking about religion. The phrase therefore is: ‘One cannot always be praying; we must mind our business and social duties as well as our devotion.’ Worldly business being thus subjected to worldly, though in some degree moral, maxims, the mind during the conduct of business grows worldly; and a continually in­creasing worldly spirit dims the sight and relaxes the moral principle on which the affairs of the world are conducted, as well [Page 213]as indisposes the mind for all the exercises of devotion.

But this temper, as far as relates to business, assumes the semblance of good­ness; so that those who have not right views are apt to mistake the carrying on the affairs of life on a tolerably moral principle for religion. They do not see that the evil lies not in their so carrying on business, but in their not carrying on the things of this life in subserviency to those of eternity; in their not carrying them on with the unintermitting idea of responsibility. The evil does not lie in their not being always on their knees, but in their not bringing their religion from the closet into the world: in their not bringing the spirit of the Sunday's devo­tions into the transactions of the week: in not transforming their religion from a dry, and speculative, and inoperative system, into a lively, and insluential, and unceasing principle of action.

[Page 214]Though there are, blessed be God! in the most exalted stations, women who adorn their Christian profession by a con­sistent conduct; yet are there not others who are labouring hard to unite the irre­concileable interests of earth and heaven? who, while they will not relinquish one jot of all this world has to bestow, yet by no means renounce their hopes of a better? who do not think it unreasonable that their indulging in the fullest possession of present pleasure should interfere with the most certain reversion of future glory? who, after living in the most unbounded gratification of ease, vanity, and luxury, fancy that heaven must be attached of course to a life of which Christianity was the outward profession, and which has not been stained by any flagrant or dishonour­able act of guilt?

Are there not many who, while they entertain a respect for religion, (for I address not the unbelieving or the licen­tious,) [Page 215]while they believe its truths, ob­serve its forms, and would be shocked not to be thought religious, are yet im­mersed in this life of disqualifying world­liness? who, though they make a con­science of going to the public worship once on a Sunday, and are scrupulously observant of the other rites of the Church, yet hesitate not to give up all the rest of their time to the very same pursuits and pleasures which occupy the hearts and lives of those whose enjoyment is not ob­structed by any dread of a future account? and who are acting on the wise principle of "the children of this generation" in making the most of the present world from the conviction that there is no other to be expected.

It must be owned, indeed, that faith in unseen things is at times sadly weak and defective even in the truly pious; and that it is so, is the subject of their grief and humiliation. O! how does the real Christian take shame in the coldness of [Page 216]his belief, in the lowness of his attain­ments! How deeply does he lament that ‘when he would do good evil is present with him!"— "that the life he now lives in the flesh, is’ not, in the degree it ought to be, ‘by faith in the son of God!’ Yet one thing is clear, how­ever weak his belief may seem to be, it is evident that his actions are mainly geverned by it; he evinces his sincerity to others by a life in some good degree ana­logous to the doctrines he professes: while to himself he has this conviction, that faint as his confidence may be at times, yet at the worst of times he would not exchange that faint measure of trust and hope for all the actual pleasures and possessions of his most splendid acquaintance; and as a proof of his sincerity he never seeks the cure of his dejection, where they seek theirs, in the world, but in God.

But as to the faith of worldly persons, however strong it may be in speculation, however orthodox their creed, one cannot [Page 217]help fearing that it is little defective in sincerity: for if there were in the mind a full persuasion of the truth of revelation, and of the eternal bliss it promises, would there not be more obvious diligence for its attainment? We discover great ardour in carrying on worldly projects, because we believe the good which we are pursuing is real, and will reward the trouble of the pursuit: we believe it to be attainable by diligence, and prudently proportion our earnestness to this conviction: but where we see persons professing a lively faith in a better world, yet labouring little to obtain an interest in it, can we forbear suspecting that their belief, not only of their own title to eternal happiness, but of eternal happiness itself, is not well grounded? and that, if they were to ‘examine them­selves truly,’ the faith would be found to be much of a piece with the practice?

Even that very taste for enjoyment which leads the persons in question to possess themselves of the qualifications for [Page 218]the pleasures of the existing scene; that understanding which leads them to acquire those talents which may enable them to relish the resorts of gaiety here, should induce those who are really looking for a future state of happiness to wish to acquire something of the taste, and temper, and talents, which may be considered as qualifications for its enjoyment. The neglect to do this must proceed from one of these two causes; either they must think their present course a safe and pro­per course; or they must think that death is to produce some sudden and surprising alteration in the human character: but the office of death is to transport us to a new state, not to transform us to a new nature: the stroke of death is intended to effect our deliverance out of this world, and our introduction into another; but it is not likely to effect any sudden and sur­prising or total change in our hearts or our tastes: so far from this, that we are assured in Scripture, ‘that he that is [Page 219]filthy will be filthy still, and he that is holy will be holy still.’ Though we believe that death will completely cleanse the holy soul from its remaining pollutions, that it will exchange defiling corruption into perfect purity, entangling temptation into complete freedom, want and pain into health and fruition, doubts and fears into perfect security, and oppressive weari­ness into everlasting rest; yet there is no magic in the wand of death which will convert an unholy soul into a holy one. And it is awful to reflect, that such tempers as have the allowed predominance here will maintain it for ever: that such as the will is when we close our eyes upon the things of time, such it will be when we open them on those of eternity. The mere act of death no more fits us for heaven, than the mere act of the mason who pulls down our old house fits us for a new one. If we die with our hearts running over with the love of the world, there is no promise to lead us to expect [Page 220]that we shall rise with them full of the love of God: death indeed will shew us to ourselves such as we are, but will not make us such as we are not: and it will be too late to be acquiring self-knowledge when we can no longer turn it to any account but that of tormenting ourselves. To illustrate this truth still farther by an allusion familiar to the persons I address: the drawing up the curtain at the theatre, though it serves to introduce us to the entertainments behind it, does not create in us any new faculties to understand or to relish these entertainments: these must have been long in acquiring; they must have been provided beforehand, and brought with us to the place, if we would relish the pleasutes of the place; for the entertainment can only operate on that taste we carry to it. It is too late to be acquiring when we ought to be enjoying.

That spirit of prayer and praise, those dispositions of love, meekness, ‘peace, quietness, and assurance;’ that indif­ference [Page 221]to the fashion of a world which is passing away; that longing after deliver­ance from sin, that desire of holiness, to­gether with all the specific marks of the spirit here, must surely make some part of our qualification for the enjoyment of a world, the pleasures of which are all spiritual. And who can conceive any thing equal to the awful surprise of a soul long immersed in the indulgencies of vanity and pleasure, yet all the while lulled by the self-complacency of a religion of mere forms; who, while it counted upon heaven as a thing of course, had made no preparation for it; who can conceive any surprise equal to that of such a soul on shutting its eyes on a world of sense, of which all the objects and delights were so congenial to its nature, and opening them on a world of spirits of which all the cha­racters of enjoyment are of a nature new, unknown, surprising, and specifically dif­ferent? pleasures as inconceivable to its apprehension and as unsuitable to its taste, [Page 222]as the gratifications of one sense are to the organs of another, or as the most ex­quisite works of genius to absolute imbe­cility of mind.

While we would with deep humility confess that we cannot purchase heaven by any works or right dispositions of our own, while we gratefully ac­knowledge that it must be purchased for us by ‘Him who loved us, and washed us from our sins in his blood;’ yet let us remember that we have no reason to expect we could be capable of enjoying the pleasures of a heaven so purchased without heavenly mindedness. When those persons who are apt to expect as much comfort from religion as if their hearts were not full of the world, now and then, in a fit of honesty and low spirits, complain that Christianity does not make them as good and as happy as they were led to expect from that assur­ance, that ‘great peace have they who love the Lord," and that "they who [Page 223]wait on him shall want no manner of thing that is good;’ when they lament that the paths of religion are not those "paths of pleasantness" they were led to expect; their case reminds one of a cele­brated physician who used to say, that the reason why his prescriptions, which commonly cured the poor and the tem­perate, did so little good among his rich luxurious patients, was, that while he was labouring to remove the disease by medi­cines, of which they only took drams, grains, and scruples; they were inflaming it by a multiplicity of injurious aliments which they swallowed by ounces, pounds, and pints.

These fashionable Christians should be reminded that there was no half engage­ment made for them at their baptism; that they are not partly their own and partly their Redeemer's. He that is ‘bought with a price’ is the sole property of the purchaser. Faith does not consist merely in submitting the opinions of the [Page 224]understanding, but the dispositions of the heart: religion is not a sacrifice of sen­timents but of affections: it is not the tribute of fear, extorted from a flave, but the voluntary homage of love paid by a child.

Neither does a Christian's piety consist in living in retreat and railing at the prac­tices of the world, while, perhaps, her heart is full of the spirit of that world at which she is railing: but it consists in subduing the spirit of the world and op­posing its practices even while her duty obliges her to live in it.

Nor is the spirit or the love of the world confined to those only who are making a figure in it; nor are its opera­tions bounded by the precincts of the metropolis nor the limited regions of first rate rank and splendor. She who inveighs against the luxury and excesses of London, and solaces herself in her own comparative fobriety, because her more circumscribed fortune compels her to take [Page 225]up with the second-hand pleasures of successive watering-places, which pleasures she pursues with avidity, is governed by the same spirit: and she whose still nar­rower opportunities stint her to the petty diversions of her provincial town, if she be busied in swelling and enlarging her own smaller sphere of vanity and idleness, however she may comfort herself with her own comparative goodness by railing at the unattainable pleasures of the water­ing-place, or of the capital, is governed by the same spirit: for she who is as vain, as dissipated, and as extravagant as existing circumstances admit, would be as vain, as dissipated and as extravagant as the gayest objects of her invective now are, if she could change places with them. It is not merely by what we do that we can be sure the spirit of the world has no dominion over us, but by fairly con­sidering what we should probably do if more were in our power.

[Page 226]The worldly Christian, if I may be allowed such a contradiction in terms, must not imagine that she acquits herself of her religious obligations by her mere weekly oblation of prayer. There is no covenant by which communion with God is restricted to an hour or two on the Sunday: she does not acquit herself by setting apart a few particular days in the year for the exercise of a periodical devotion, and then flying back to the world as eagerly as if she were resolved to repay herself largely for her short fit of self-denial; the stream of pleasure running with a more rapid current from having been interrupted by this forced obstruction. And the avidity with which one has seen certain persons of a still less correct character, than the class we have been considering, return to a whole year's carnival, after the self-imposed penance of a Passion week, gives a shrewd intima­tion that they considered the temporary [Page 227]abstraction, less as an act of penitence for the past, than as a purchase of indemnity for the future. Such bare-weight pro­testants prudently condition for retaining the Popish doctrine of indulgences, which they buy, not indeed of the late spiritual court of Rome, but of that secret, self­acquitting judge, which, ignorance of its own turpitude and of the strict require­ments of the divine law has established, supreme in the tribunal of every unre­newed heart.

But the practice of self-examination is impeded with one clog, which renders it peculiarly inconvenient to the gay and worldly: for the royal prophet (who was, however, himself as likely as any one to be acquainted with the difficulties peculiar to greatness) has annexed as an indispen­sable concomitant to ‘communing with our own heart’ that we should "be still." Now this clause of the injuction renders the other part of it not a little inconsistent with the present habits of fashionable life, [Page 228]of which stillness is clearly not one of the constituents. It would, however, greatly assist those who do not altogether decline the practice, if they established into a rule the habit of detecting certain suspi­cious practices, by realizing them, as it were, to their own minds, by drawing them out in detail, and placing them before their eyes cloathed in language; for there is nothing that so effectually exposes an absurdity which has passed muster for want of such an inquisition, as giving it shape and form. How many things which now work themselves into the habit, and pass current, would then shock us by their palpable inconsistency! Who, for instance, could stand the sight of such a debtor and creditor account as this— item; So many card-parties, balls, and operas due to me in the following year, for so many manuals and meditations paid beforehand during the last six days in Lent? With how much indignation soever this suggestion may be treated; [Page 229]whatever offence may be taken at such a combination of the serious and the ludi­crous; however we may revolt at the idea of such a composition with our Maker, when put into so many words; does not the habitual course of some go near to realize such a statement?

But a Christian's race, as a venerable Prelate ^* observes, is not run at so many heats, but by a constant course and pro­gress is continually gaining ground upon sin, and approaching nearer to the king­dom of God.

Am I then ridiculing this pious retire­ment of contrite sinners? Am I then jesting at that "troubled spirit" which God has declared is his "acceptable sacri­fice?" God forbid! Such reasonable retirements have been the practice and continue to be the comfort of some of the sincerest Christians; and will continue to be resorted to as long as Christianity, [Page 230]that is, as long as the world shall last. It is well to call off the thoughts, even for a short time, not only from sin and vanity, but even from the lawful pursuits of business, and the laudable cares of life; and, at times, to annihilate as it were, the space which divides us from eternity.

Yet to those who seek a short annual retreat as a mere form; who dignify with the idea of a religious retirement a week when it is rather unfashionable to be seen in town; who retire with an unabated resolution to return to the maxims, the pleasures, and the spirit of that world which they are going mechanically to renounce; is it not to be feared that such a short succession, which does not even pretend to subdue the principle, but only to suspend the act, may only serve to set a keener edge on the appetite for [Page 231]the pleasures they are quitting? Is is not to be feared that the bow may fly back with redoubled violence from having been unnaturally bent? That by varnishing over a life of vanity with the externals of a formal and temporary piety, they may not more dangerously skin over the trouble­some some soreness of a tender conscience, by laying This slattering unction to the soul. For is it not among the delusions of a worldly piety to consider Christianity as a thing which cannot, indeed, safely be omitted, but which is to be got over; a certain quantity of which is, as it were, to be taken in the lump, with long intervals between the repetitions? To consider reli­gion as imposing a set of hardships, which must be occasionally encountered in order to procure a peaceable enjoyment of the long respite? That these severe conditions thus fulfilled, the acquitted Christian having paid the annual demand of a rigor­ous [Page 232]requisition, she may now lawfully re­turn to her natural state, and the old reckoning being adjusted, she may begin a new score, and receive the reward of her punctual obedience in the resumed indulgence of those gratifications, which she had for a short time laid aside as a hard task to please a hard master: but this task performed, and the master ap­peased, the mind may discover its natural bent, in joyfully returning to the objects of its real choice? Whereas, is it not clear that if the religious exercises had pro­duced the effect which it is the nature of true religion to produce, the penitent could not return with her old genuine alacrity to those habits of the world, from which the pious weekly manuals through which she has been labouring with the punctuality of an almanack as to the day, and the accuracy of a bead-roll as to the number, was intended by the devout authors to rescue their reader?

[Page 233]I am far from insinuating that this literal sequestration ought to be prolonged throughout the year, or that all the days of business are to be made equally days of solemnity and continued meditation. This earth is a place in which a much larger portion of a common Christian's time must be assigned to action than to con­templation. Women of the higher class were not sent into the world to shun society but to improve it. They were not designed for the cold and visionary virtues of solitudes and monasteries, but for the amiable and endearing offices of social life; they are of a religion which does not impose idle austerities, but enjoins active duties; a religion of which the most benevolent actions require to be sanctified by the purest motives; a religion which does not condemn its followers to the comparatively easy task of seclusion from the world, but assigns them the more difficult province of living uncorrupted in it; which, while it forbids them to [Page 234]"follow a multitude to do evil," includes in that prohibition the sin of doing nothing, and which moreover enjoins them to be followers of him ‘who went about doing good.’

But may we not reasonably contend that though the same sequestration is not required, yet that the same spirit and temper which one hopes is thought ne­cessary by all during the occasional humi­liation, must by every real Christian be extended throughout all the periods of the year? And when that is really the case, when once the spirit of religion shall indeed govern the heart, it will not only animate her religious actions and employments, but will gradually extend itself to the chastising her conversation, will discipline her thoughts, influence her common business, and sanctify her very pleasures.

But it should seem that many who entertain a general notion of Christian duty do not consider it as of universal and unremitting obligation, but rather as a [Page 235]duty binding at times on all, and always on some. To the attention of such we would recommend that very explicit ad­dress of our Lord on the subject of self-denial, the temper directly opposed to a worldly spirit: ‘And he said unto them ALL if any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross DAILY.’ Those who think self-denial not of universal obligation will observe the word all, and those who think the obligation not constant will attend to the term daily. These two little words cut up by the root all the occasional reli­gious observances grafted on a worldly life.

There is indeed scarcely a more pitiable being than one who instead of making her religion the informing principle of all she does, has only just enough to keep her in continual fear; who drudges through her stinted exercises with a superstitious kind of terror, while her general life shows that the love of God is not the governing prin­ciple [Page 236]in her heart: Who seems to suffer all the pains and penalties of Christ­ianity, but is a stranger to ‘that liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.’ Let it not be thought a ludicrous invention if the author hazard the producing a real illustration of these remarks in the instance of a lady of this stamp, who returning from church on a very cold day, and remarking with a good deal of self-com­placency how much she had suffered in the performance of her duty, comforted her­self with adding, ‘that she hoped how­ever it would answer.’

But there is no comfort in any religion short of that by which the diligent Christ­ian strives that all his actions shall have the love of God for their motive, and the glory of God for their end; while to go about to balance one's good and bad actions one against the other, and to take comfort in the occasional predominance of the former, while the cultivation of the principle from which they should spring [Page 237]is neglected, is not the road to all those peaceful fruits of the spirit to which true Christianity conducts the humble and penitent believer.

But I am aware that a better cast of characters than those we have been con­templating; that even the amiable and the well-disposed, who while they want courage to resist what they have too much principle to think right, and too much sense to justify, will yet plead for the palliating system, and accuse these remarks of unnecessary rigour. They will declare ‘that really they are as religious as they can be; they wish they were better; they have little satisfaction in the life they are leading, yet they cannot break with the world; they cannot fly in the face of custom; it does not become in­dividuals like them to oppose the torrent of fashion.’ Beings so interesting abounding with engaging qualities; who not only feel the beauty of goodness but reverence the truths of Christianity, and [Page 238]are awfully looking for a general judg­ment, one is grieved to hear lament "that they only do as others do," when they are perhaps themselves of such rank and importance that if they would begin to do right, others would be brought to do as they did. One is grieved to hear them indolently assert that ‘they wish it were otherwise,’ when they possess the power to make it otherwise, by setting an example which they know would be followed. One is sorry to hear them content them­selves with declaring, that ‘they have not the courage to be singular,’ when they must feel by seeing the influence of their example in worse things, that there would be no singularity in piety itself, if once they became sincerely pious. Besides, this diffidence does not break out on other occasions. They do not blush to be quoted as the opposers of an old mode or the inventors of a new one. Nor are they equally backward in being the first to appear in a strange [Page 239]fashion, such an one as often excites won­der, and sometimes even offends against delicacy. Let not then diffidence be pleaded as an excuse only on occasions wherein courage would be virtue.

Will it be thought too harsh a question if we venture to ask these gentle cha­racters who are thus intrenching them­selves in the imaginary safety of multitudes, and who say "we only do as others do," whether they are willing to run the tremendous risk of consequences, and to fare as others fare?

But while these plead the authority of Fashion as a sufficient reason for their conformity to the world, one who pleads a paramount authority positively says, ‘Be ye not conformed to the world.’ Nay, it is urged as the very badge and distinction by which the character opposite to the Christian is to be marked, ‘that the friendship of the world is enmity with God.’

[Page 240]Temptation to conform to the world was never perhaps more irresistible than in the days which immediately preceded the Deluge. And no man could ever have pleaded the fashion in order to justify a criminal assimilation with the reigning manners, with more propriety than the Patriarch Noah. He had the two grand and contending objects of terror to en­counter which we have; the fear of ridi­cule, and the fear of destruction; the dread of sin, and the dread of singularity. Our cause of alarm is at least equally pressing with his; for it does not appear, even while he was actually obeying the Divine command in providing the means of his future safety, that he saw any actual symptoms of the impending ruin. So that in one sense he might have truly pleaded as an excuse for slackness of pre­paration, ‘that all things continued as they were from the beginning;’ while many of us, though the storm is begun, [Page 241]never think of providing the refuge: though we have had a fuller revelation, have seen Scripture illustrating, prophecy ful­filling, with every awful circumstance that can either quicken the most sluggish re­missness, or confirm the feeblest faith.

Besides, the Patriarch's plea for follow­ing the fashion was stronger than you can produce. While you must see that many are going wrong, he saw that none were going right. ‘All flesh had corrupted his way before God;’ whilst, blessed be God! you have still instances enough of piety to keep you in countenance. While you lament that the world seduces you, (for every one has a little world of his own,) your world perhaps is only a petty neighbourhood, a few streets and squares; but the Patriarch had really the contagion of a whole united world to resist: he had literally the example of the whole face of the earth to oppose. The "fear of man" also would then have been a more pardonable fault, when the [Page 242]lives of the same individuals who were likely to excite respect or fear was pro­longed many ages, than it can be in the short period now assigned to human life. And that opinion should operate still less powerfully which is the breath of a being so frail and so short-lived,

You who find it so difficult to withstand the individual allurement of one modish acquaintance, would in the Patriarch's case have concluded the struggle to be quite ineffectual, and would have sunk under the supposed fruitlessness of resistance. "Myself," would you not have said? ‘or at most my little family of eight persons can never hope to stop this torrent of corruption; I lament the fruitlessness of opposition; I deplore the necessity of conformity with the prevailing system: but it would be a foolish presumption to hope that one family can effect a [Page 243]change in the state of the world.’ In your own case, however, it is not certain to how wide an extent the hearty union of even fewer persons in such a cause might reach: at least is it nothing to do what the Patriarch did? was it nothing to preserve himself from the general destruction? was it nothing to deliver his own soul? was it nothing to rescue the souls of his whole family?

It is certainly a mark of a sound judg­ment to comply with the world when­ever we safely can; such compliance strengthens our influence by reserving to ourselves the greater weight of authority on those occasions, when our conscience obliges us to differ. Those who are wise will cheerfully conform to all its innocent usages; but those who are Christians will be scrupulous in defining which are really innocent previous to their conformity to them. Not what the world, but what the Gospel calls innocent will be found [Page 244]at the grand scrutiny to have been really so. A discreet Christian will take due pains to be convinced he is right before he will presume to be singular: but from the instant he is persuaded that the Gospel is true, and the world of course wrong, he will no longer risk his safety by following multitudes, or his soul by staking it on human opinion. All our most dangerous mistakes arise from our not constantly referring our practice to the standard of scripture, instead of the mutable standard of human opinion, by which it is impossible to fix the real value of characters. For this latter standard in some cases determines those to be good who do not run all the lengths in which the notoriously bad allow themselves. The Gospel has an universal, the world has a local standard of goodness: in some societies certain vices alone are dishonour­able, such as covetousness and cowardice; while those sins of which our Saviour has [Page 245]said, that they which commit them ‘shall not inherit the kingdom of God,’ detract nothing from the respect some persons receive. Nay those very charac­ters, whom the Almighty has expressly declared "He will judge ^*" are received, are caressed, in that which calls itself the best company.

But to weigh our actions by one stand­ard now, when we know they will be judged by another hereafter, would be reckoned the height of absurdity in any transactions but those which involve the interests of eternity. ‘How readest thou?’ is a more specific direction than any comparative view of our own habits with the habits of others: and at the final bar it will be of little avail that our actions have risen above those of bad men, if our views and principles shall be found to have been in opposition to the Gospel of Christ.

[Page 246]Nor is their practice more commend­able, who are ever on the watch to pick out the worst actions of good men, by way of justifying their own conduct on the comparison. The faults of the best men, ‘for there is not a just man upon the earth who sinneth not,’ can in no wise justify the errors of the worst: and it is not invariably the example of even good men that we must take for our un­erring rule of conduct: nor is it by a single action that either they or we shall be judged, for in that case who could be saved? but it is by the general prevalence of right principles and good habits; by the predominance of holiness and righteous­ness, and temperance in the life, and by the power of humility, faith and love in the heart.

CHAP. XIX. On the leading doctrines of Christianity.— The corruption of human nature.—The doctrine of redemption.—The necessity of a change of heart, and of the divine in­fluences to produce that change.—With a sketch of the Christian character.

THE author having in this little work taken a view of the false notions often imbibed in early life from a bad education, and of their pernicious effects; and having attempted to point out the respective re­medies to these, she would now draw all that has been said to a point, and declare plainly what she humbly conceives to be the source whence all these false notions, and this wrong conduct, have procedeed: The prophet Jeremiah shall answer, ‘It is because they have forsaken the foun­tain of living waters, and have hewn [Page 248]out to themselves cisterns, broken cis­terns that can hold no water:’ it is an ignorance past belief of what Christ­ianity really is: the remedy, therefore, and the only remedy that can be applied with any prospect of success, is RELIGION, and by Religion she would be understood to mean the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

It has been before hinted, that Religion should be taught at an early period of life; that children should be brought up ‘in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.’ The manner in which they should be taught has likewise with great plainness been suggested; that it should be done in so lively and familiar a manner as to make Religion amiable, and her ways to appear, what they really are, "ways of pleasantness." And a slight sketch has been given of the genius of Christianity, by which her amiableness would more clearly appear. But this, being a subject of such vast importance, compared with which every other subject sinks into nothing; it seems not sufficient to [Page 249]speak on the doctrines and duties of Christ­ianity in detached parts, but it is of importance to point out, though in a brief manner, the mutual dependence of one doctrine upon another, and the influence which these doc­trines have upon the heart and life, so that the duties of Christianity may be seen to grow out of its doctrines: by which it will ap­pear that Christian virtue differs essentially from Pagan: it is of a quite different kind: the plant itself is different, it comes from a different root, and grows in a dif­ferent soil.

By this it will be seen how the hum­bling doctrine of the disobedience of our first parents, and the consequent corrup­tion of human nature, make way for the bright display of redeeming love. How from the abasing thought that ‘we are all as sheep going astray, every one in his own way:’ that none can return to the shepherd of our souls, ‘except the Father draw him:’ that ‘the natural man cannot receive the things [Page 250]of the spirit, because they are spiritually discerned:’ how from this humiliating view of the helplessness, as well as the guilt and corruption of human nature, we are to turn to that animating doctrine, the offer of divine assistance. So that though human nature will appear from this view in a deeply degraded state, and consequently all have cause for humility, yet not one has cause for despair: the disease indeed is dreadful, but a physician is at hand, both able and willing to save us: though we are naturally ‘without strength, our help is laid upon one that is mighty.’

We should observe then, that the doc­trines of our Saviour are, if I may so speak, like his coat, all woven into one piece. We should get such a view of their reciprocal dependence as to be per­suaded that without a deep sense of our own corruptions we can never seriously believe in a Saviour, because the substan­tial and acceptable belief in Him must [Page 251]always arise from the conviction of our want of Him. That without a firm per­suasion that the Holy Spirit can alone restore our fallen nature, repair the ruins of sin, and renew the image of God upon the heart, we never shall be brought to serious, humble prayer for repentance and restoration; and that, without this repentance there is no salvation: for though Christ has died for us, and con­sequently to Him alone we must look as a Saviour, yet He has himself declared that He will save none but true penitents.

CHAP. XX. On the duty and efficacy of prayer.

IT is not proposed to enter largely on a topic which has been exhausted by the ablest pens. But as a work of this nature seems to require that so important a subject shuld not be overlooked, it is intended to notice in a slight manner of a few of those many difficulties and popular objections which are brought forward against the use and efficacy of prayer, even by those who would be unwilling to be suspected of impiety and unbelief.

There is a class of objectors who strangely profess to withhold homage from the Most High, not out of contempt, but reverence. They affect to consider the use of prayer as derogatory to the omniscience of God, because it looks as [Page 296]if we thought he stood in need of being informed of our wants; and as derogatory to his goodness, as implying that he needs to be put in mind of them.

But is it not enough for such poor frail beings as we are to know, that God himself does not consider prayer as de­rogatory either to his wisdom or good­ness? And shall we erect ourselves into judges of what is consistent with the attributes of HIM before whom angels fall prostrate with self-abasement? Will he thank such defenders of his attributes, who, while they profess to reverence, scruple not to disobey him? It ought rather to be viewed as a great encourage­ment to prayer, that we are addressing a Being, who knows our wants better than we can express them, and whose prevent­ing goodness is always ready to relieve them.

It is objected by another class, and on the specious ground of humility too, though we do not always find the objector [Page 297]himself quite as humble as his plea, that it is arrogant in such insignificant beings as we are to presume to lay our petty necessities before the Great and Glorious God, who cannot be expected to con­descend to the multitude of trisling and even interfering requests which are brought before him by his creatures. These and such like objections arise from mean and unworthy thoughts of the Great Creator. It seems as if those who make them con­sidered the Most High as ‘such an one as themselves;’ a Being, who can perform a certain quantity of business, but who would be overpowered with an additional quantity. Or at best, is it not considering the Almighty in the light, not of an infinite God, but of a great man, of a king, or a minister, who, while he superintends great and national concerns, is obliged to neglect small and individual petitions, be­cause he cannot spare that leisure and attention which suffice for every thing? They do not consider him as that infinitely [Page 298]glorious Being who, while he beholds at once all that is doing in heaven and in earth, is at the same time as attentive to the prayer of the poor destitute, as present to the sorrowful sighing of the prisoner, as if these forlorn creatures were the objects of his undivided attention.

These critics, who are for sparing the Supreme Being the trouble of our prayers, and would relieve Omnipotence of part of his burden, by assigning to his care only such a portion as may be more easily managed, if I may so speak without pro­faneness, seem to have no conception of his attributes.

They forget that infinite wisdom puts him as easily within reach of all know­ledge, as infinite power does of all per­formance: that he is a Being in whose plans complexity makes no difficulty, and multiplicity no confusion: that to ubi­quity distance does not exist; that to infinity space is annihilated: that past, present, and future, are discerned more [Page 299]accurately at one glance of his eye, to whom a thousand years are as one day, than a single moment of time or a single point of space can be by ours.

To the other part of the objection founded on the supposed interference (that is, irreconcileableness) of one man's petitions with those of another, this answer seems to suggest itself: first, that we must take care that when we ask, we do not "ask amiss;" that, for instance, we ask chiefly, and in an unqualified manner, only for spiritual blessings to ourselves and others; and in doing this the prayer of one man cannot interfere with that of another. Next, in asking for temporal and inferior blessings, we must qualify our petition even though it should extend to deliverance from the severest pains, or to our very life itself, according to that ex­ample of our Saviour: ‘Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Never­theless, not my will, but thine, be done.’ By thus qualifying our prayer, we exer­cise [Page 300]ourselves in an act of resignation to God; we profess not to wish what will interfere with his benevolent plan, and yet we may hope by prayer to secure the blessing so far as it is consistent with it. Perhaps the reason why this objection to prayer is so strongly felt, is the too great disposition to pray for merely temporal and worldly blessings, and to desire them in the most unqualified manner, not sub­mitting to be without them, even though the granting them should be inconsistent with the general plan of Providence.

Another class continue to bring for­ward, as pertinatiously as if it had never been answered, the exhausted argument, that seeing God is immutable, no petitions of ours can ever change Him: that events themselves being settled in a fixed and unalterable course, and bound in a fatal necessity, it is folly to think that we can disturb the established laws of the universe, or interrupt the course of Providence by our prayers: and that it is absurd to sup­pose [Page 301]these firm decrees can be reversed by any requests of ours.

Without entering into the wide and trackless field of fate and free will, from which pursuit I am kept back equally by the most profound ignorance and the most invincible dislike, I would only ob­serve, that these objections apply equally to all human actions as well as to prayer. It may therefore with the same propriety be urged, that seeing God is immutable and his decrees unalterable, therefore our actions can produce no change in Him or in our own state. Weak as well as im­pious reasoning! It may be questioned whether the modern French and German philosophers might not be prevailed upon to acknowledge the existence of God, if they might make such a use of his attri­butes. The truth is, and it is a truth dis­coverable without any depth of learning, all these objections are the offspring of pride. Poor, short-sighted men cannot reconcile the omniscience and decrees of [Page 302]God with the efficacy of prayer; and, because he cannot reconcile them, he modestly concludes they are irreconcileable. How much more wisdom as well as hap­piness results from an humble christian spirit! Such a plain practical text as, ‘Draw near unto God, and he will draw near unto you,’ carries more conso­lation, more true knowledge of his wants and their remedy to the heart of a peni­tent sinner, than all the tomes of casuistry which have puzzled the world ever since the question was first set afloat by its ori­ginal propounders.

And as the plain man only got up and walked, to prove there was such a thing as motion, in answer to the phi­losopher who denied it; so the plain Christian, when he is borne down with the assurance that there is no efficacy in prayer, requires no better argument to repel the assertion than the good he finds in prayer itself.

[Page 303]All the doubts proposed to him respect­ing God do not so much affect him as this one doubt respecting himself: ‘If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me.’ For the chief doubt and difficulty of a Christian consists, not so much in a distrust of God's ability and willingness to answer the prayer of the upright, as in a distrust of his own upright­ness, and in the quality of the prayer which he offers up.

Let the subjects of a dark fate maintain a sullen, or the slaves of a blind chance a hopeless silence, but let the child of a compassionate Almighty Father supplicate his mercies with an humble confidence, inspired by the assurance, that ‘the very hairs of his head are numbered.’ Let him take comfort in that individual and minute attention, without which not a sparrow falls to the ground, as well as in that cheering promise, that, as ‘His eyes are over the righteous," so are "his ears open to their prayers.’ And as [Page 304]a pious Bishop has observed, ‘Our Saviour has as it were hedged in and inclosed the Lord's Prayer with these two great fences of our faith, God's willingness and his power to help us:’ the pre­face to it assures us of the one, which, by calling God by the tender name of "Our Father," intimates his readiness to help his children: and the animating conclusion, "Thine is the Power," rescues us from every unbelieving doubt of his ability to help us.

A Christian knows, because he feels, that prayer is, though in a way to him inscrutable, the medium of connection between God and his rational creatures; the means appointed by him to draw down his blessings upon us. The Christian knows, that prayer is the appointed means of uniting two ideas, one of the highest magnificence, the other of the most pro­found lowliness, within the compass of imagination; namely, that it is the link of communication between ‘the High and [Page 305]Lofty One who inhabiteth eternity,’ and that heart of the ‘contrite in which he de­lights to dwell.’ He knows that this inex­plicable union between Beings so unspeak­ably, so essentially different, can only be maintained by prayer.

The plain Christian, as was before ob­served, cannot explain why it is so; but while he feels the efficacy, he is contented to let the learned define it; and he will no more postpone prayer till he can produce a chain of reasoning on the man­ner in which he derives benefit from it, than he will postpone eating till he can give a scientific lecture on the nature of digestion: he is contented with knowing that his meat has nourished him; and he leaves to the philosopher, who may choose to defer his meal till he has elaborated his treatise, to starve in the interim. The Christian feels better than he is able to explain, that the functions of his spiritual life can no more be carried on without habitual prayer, than those of his natural [Page 306]life without frequent bodily nourishment. He feels renovation and strength grow out of the use of the appointed means, as necessarily in the one case as in the other. He feels that the health of his soul can no more be sustained, and its powers kept in continued vigour by the prayers of a dis­tant day, than his body by the aliment of a distant day.

But there is one motive to the duty in question, far more constraining to the true believer than all others that can be named; more imperious than any argu­ments on its utility, than any convictions of its efficacy, even than any experience of its consolations. Prayer is the com­mand of God; the plain, positive, repeated injunction of the Most High, who declares, "He will be inquired of." This is enough to secure the obedience of the Christian, even though a promise were not, as it always is, attached to the com­mand. But in this case the promise is as clear as the precept: ‘Ask, and ye shall [Page 307] receive;’—"Seek, and ye shall find." this is enough for the plain Christian. As to the manner in which prayer is made to coincide with the general scheme of God's plan in the government of human affairs; how God has left himself at liberty to reconcile our prayer with his own predetermined will, the Christian does not very critically examine, his pre­cise and immediate duty being to pray and not to examine; and probably this being among the ‘secret things which belong to God,’ and not to us, it will lie hidden among those numberless mys­teries which we shall not fully understand till faith is lost in sight.

In the mean time it is enough for the humble believer to be ass that the Judge of all the earth is doing right: it is enough for him to be assured in that word of God "which cannot lie," of numberless actual instances of the efficacy of prayer in obtaining blessings and avert­ing calamities, both national and indi­vidual [Page 308]vidual: it is enough for him to be con­vinced experimentally, by that internal evidence which is perhaps paramount to all other evidence, the comfort he has received from prayer when all other comforts have failed:—and above all, to and with the same motive with which we began, the only motive indeed which he requires for the performance of any duty, —it is motive enough for him, —that thus saith the Lord. For when a serious Christian has once got a plain unequivocal command from his Maker on any point, he never suspends his obedience while he is amusing himself with looking about for subordinate motives of action. Instead of curiously analysing the nature of the duty, he considers how he shall best fulfil it: for on these points at least it may be said without controversy, that ‘the igno­rant (and here who is not ignorant?) have nothing to do with the law but to obey it?’

[Page 309]Others there are who perhaps not con­troverting any of these premises, yet neglect to build practical consequences on the admission of them; who neither deny­ing the duty nor the efficacy of prayer, yet go on to live either in the irregular ob­servance, or the total neglect of it, as appetite, or pleasure, or business, or hu­mour may happen to predominate; and who, by living almost without prayer, may be said ‘to live almost without God in the world.’ To such we can only say, that they little know what they lose. The time is hastening on when they will look upon these blessings as invaluable which now they think not worth asking for. ‘O that they were wise! that they understood this! that they would con­sider their latter end!’

There are again others, who it is to be feared, having once lived in the habit of prayer, yet not having been well­grounded in those principles of faith and repentance on which genuine prayer is [Page 310]built, have by degrees totally discontinued it. "They do not find," say they, ‘that their affairs prosper the better or the worse; or perhaps they were un­successful in their affairs even before they dropt the practice, and so had no encouragement to go on.’ They do not know that they had no encourage­ment; they do not know how much worse their affairs might have gone on, had they discontinued it sooner, or how their prayers helped to retard their ruin. Or they do not know that perhaps ‘they asked amiss;’ or that, if they had obtained what they asked, they might have been far more unhappy. For a true believer never "restrains prayer" because he is not certain he obtains every individual request; for he is persuaded that God, in compassion to our ignorance, sometimes in great mercy withholds what we desire, and often disappoints his most favoured children by giving them, not what they ask, but what he knows is really good [Page 311]for them. The froward child, as a pious prelate ^* observes, cries for the shining blade which the tender parent withholds, knowing it would cut his fingers.

Thus to persevere when we have not the encouragement of visible success is an evidence of tried faith. Of this holy per­severance Job was a noble instance. Defeat and disappointment rather stimu­lated than stopped his prayers. Though in a vehement strain of passionate eloquence he exclaims, ‘I cry out of wrong, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but there is no judgment:’ yet so persuaded was he of the duty of continuing this holy importunity, that he persisted against human hope, till he attained to that pitch of unshaken faith by which he was enabled to break out into that sublime apostrophe, ‘Though he slay me, I will trust in him.’

[Page 312]But may we not say that there is a con­siderable class who not only bring none of the objections which we have stated against the use of prayer; who are so far from re­jecting, that they are exact and regular in the performance of it; who yet take it up on as low ground as is consistent with their ideas of their own safety; who, while they consider prayer as an indispen­sable form, believe nothing of that change of heart which it is intended to produce? Many who yet adhere scrupulously to the latter, are so far from entering into the spirit of this duty, that they are strongly inclined to suspect those of hypocrisy who adopt the true scriptural views of prayer. Nay, as even the Bible may be so wrested as to be made to speak almost any language in support of almost any opinion, these persons lay hold on Scripture itself to bear them out in their own slight views of this duty; and they profess to borrow from it the ground of that censure which [Page 313]they cast on the more serious Christians. Among the many passages which have been made to convey a meaning foreign to its original design, none has been seized upon with more avidity by such persons than the pointed censures of our Saviour on those ‘who for a pretence make long prayers;’ as well as on those ‘who use vain repetitions and think they shall be heard for much speaking.’ Now the things here intended to be reproved were the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and the ignorance of the heathen, together with those who depended on the success of their prayers, while they imitated the deceit of the one or the folly of the other. But our Saviour never meant those severe reprehensions should cool or abridge the devotion of pious Christians, to which they do not apply.

More or fewer words, however, so little constitute the value of prayer, that there is no doubt but one of the most affecting specimens is the short petition of the [Page 314]Publican; full fraught as it is with that spirit of contrition and self-abasement which is the very principle and soul of prayer. And this perhaps is the best model for that sudden lifting up of the heart which we call ejaculation. But I doubt in general, whether the few hasty words to which these frugal petitioners would stint the scanty devotions of others, will be always found ample enough to satisfy the humble penitent, who, being a sinner, has much to confess; who, hoping he is a pardoned sinner, has much to acknowledge. Such an one perhaps cannot always pour out the fullness of his soul in the prescribed abridg­ments. Even the sincerest Christian, when he wishes to find his heart warm, has often to lament its coldness. Though he feel that he has received much, and has there­fore much to be thankful for, yet he is not able at once to bring his wayward spirit into such a posture as shall fit it for the solemn business; for such an one has not merely his form to repeat, but he has his [Page 315]peace to make. A devout supplicant too will labour to assect and warm his mind with a sense of the attributes of God, in imitation of the holy men of old. Like Jehosophat, he will sometimes enumerate ‘the power, and the might, and the mercies of the Most High,’ in order to stir up the affections of awe, and gratitude, and humility in his own soul ^*. He has the example of his Saviour, whose heart dilated with the expression of the same holy affections: ‘I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth’. A heart thus warmed with divine love cannot always scrupulously limit itself to the mere business of prayer, if I may so speak. The humble supplicant though he be no longer governed by a love of the world, yet grieves to find that he cannot totally exclude it from his thoughts. Though he has on the whole, a deep sense of his own wants and of God's abundant fullness to supply [Page 316]them, yet when he most wishes to be rejoicing in these strong motives for love and gratitude, alas! even then, he has to mourn that his thoughts are gone astray after some "trifle, lighter than vanity it­self." The best Christian is but too liable, during the temptations of the day, to be ensnared by ‘the lust of the eye, and the pride of life,’ and is not always brought without effort to reflect, that he is but dust and ashes. How can even good persons, who are just come perhaps from listening to the flattery of their fellow-worms, ac­knowledge before God, without any pre­paration of the heart, that they are mise­rable sinners? They require a little time, to impress on their own souls the solemn confessions of sin they are making to Him, without which, brevity and not length might constitute hypocrisy. Even the sincerely pious have in prayer grievous wanderings to lament, from which others mistakingly suppose the advanced Christian to be exempt. Such wanderings that, as [Page 317]an old divine has observed, it would ex­ceedingly humble a good man, could he, after he had prayed, be made to see his prayers written down, with interlineations of all the vain and impertinent thoughts which had thrust themselves in amongst them. So that such an one will indeed, from a sense of these distractions, feel deep occasion with the Prophet to ask forgive­ness for "the iniquity of his holy things:" and would find cause enough for humi­liation every night, had he to lament the sins of his prayers only.

We know that such a brief petition as, "Lord help my unbelief," if the suppli­cant be in so happy a frame, and the prayer be darted with such strong faith that his very soul mounts with the petition, may suffice to draw down a blessing which may be withheld from the more prolix peti­tioner: yet, if by prayer we do not mean a mere form of words, whether they be long or short; if the true desinition of [Page 318]prayer be, that it is the desire of the heart; if it be that secret communion between God and the soul which is the very breath and being of religion; then is the Scrip­ture so far from suggesting that short measure of which it is accused, that it expressly says, "Pray without ceasing:" —"Pray evermore:"— ‘I will that men pray every where:"— "Continue instant in prayer.’

If such "repetitions" as these objectors reprobate, stir up desires as yet un­awakened, for "vain repetitions" are such as awaken, or express no new desire, and serve no religious purpose, then are "repetitions" not to be condemned. And if it be true that our Saviour gave the warning against "long prayers" in the sense these allege; if he gave the caution against vain repetitions in the sense these believe; then he broke his own rule in both instances: for once we are told ‘he continued all night in prayer to God.’ [Page 319]And again, in a most awful crisis of his life, it is expressly said, "He prayed the third time, using the same words ^*".

But as it is the effect of prayer to expand the affections as well as to sanctify them, the benevolent Christian is not satisfied to commend himself alone to the Divine favour. The heart which is full of the love of God, will overflow with love to its neighbour. All that are near to himself he wishes to bring near to God. Religion makes a man so liberal of soul, that he cannot endure to restrict any thing, much less divine mercies, to himself: he spi­ritualizes the social affections, by adding intercessory to personal prayer: for he knows, that petitioning for others is one of the best methods of exercising and en­larging our love and charity towards them. It is unnecessary to produce any of the numberlefs instances with which Scripture abounds, on the efficacy of in­tercession: [Page 320]I shall confine myself to a few observations on the benefits it brings to him who offers it.—When we pray for the objects of our dearest regard, it purifies love: when we pray for those with whom we have worldly intercourse, it smoothes down the swellings of envy, and bids the tumults of ambition subside: when we pray for our country, it sanc­tifies patriotism: when we pray for those in authority, it adds a divine motive to human obedience: when we pray for our enemies, it softens the savageness of war, and mollifies hatred into sorrow. And we can best learn, nay, we can only learn, the difficult duty of forgiving those who have offended us, when we bring ourselves to pray for them to Him whom we ourselves daily offend. When those who are the faithful followers of the same Divine Master pray for each other, the reciprocal intercession best realizes that beautiful idea of ‘the Communion of Saints.’

[Page 321]Some are for confining their intercessions only to the good, as if none but persons of merit were entitled to our prayers. Merit! who has it? Desert! who can plead it? in the sight of God, I mean. Who shall bring his own piety or the piety of others in the way of claim, before a Being of such transcendent holiness, that ‘the heavens are not clear in his sight?’ And if we wait for perfect holiness as a preliminary to prayer, when shall such erring creatures pray at all to HIM ‘who chargeth the Angels with folly?’

In closing this little work with the sub­ject of intercessory prayer, may the Author be allowed to avail herself of the feeling it suggests to her own heart? And while she implores that Being, who can make the meanest of his creatures instrumental to his glory, to bless this humble attempt to those for whom it was written, may she, without presumption, entreat that this work of Christian Charity may be re­ciprocal, [Page 322]and that those who honour these pages with a perusal may put up a peti­tion for her, that in the great day to which we are all hastening, she may not be found to have hypocritically suggested to others what she herself did not believe, or to have recommended what she did not desire to practice? In that awful day of everlasting decision, may both the reader and the writer be pardoned and accepted, ‘not for any works of righteousness which they have done’ but through the merits of the GREAT INTERCESSOR.