Woman's Mission. February 18. It is the glory of woman that she was sent into the world to live for others rather than for herself; and therefore, I should say, let her smallest rights be respected, her smallest wrongs redressed; but let her never be persuaded to forget that she is sent into the world to teach man--what I believe she has been teaching him all along, even in the savage state, namely, that there is something more necessary than the claiming of rights, and that is, the performing of duties; to teach him specially, in these so-called intellectual days, that there is something more than intellect, and that is--purity and virtue. _Lecture on Thrift_. 1869. The Heroic Life. February 19. Provided we attain at last to the truly heroic and divine life, which is the life of virtue, it will matter little to us by what wild and weary ways, or through what painful and humiliating processes, we have arrived thither. If God has loved us, if God will receive us, then let us submit loyally and humbly to His law--"whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth." _All Saints' Day Sermons_. The Wages of Sin. February 20. It is sometimes said, "The greater the sinner the greater the saint." I do not believe it. I do not see it. It stands to reason--if a man loses his way and finds it again, he is so much the less forward on his way, surely, by all the time he has spent in getting back into the way. And if any of you fancy you can sin without being punished, remember that the prodigal son is punished most severely. He does not get off freely the moment he chooses to repent, as false preachers will tell you. Even after he does repent and resolves to go back to his father's house he has a long journey home in poverty and misery, footsore, hungry, and all but despairing. But when he does get home; when he shows he has learnt the bitter lesson; when all he dares to ask is, "Make me as one of thy hired servants,"--he is received as freely as the rest. _Water of Life Sermons_. 1864. Silent Depths. February 21. Our mightiest feelings are always those which remain most unspoken. The most intense lovers and the greatest poets have generally, I think, written very little personal love-poetry, while they have shown in fictitious characters a knowledge of the passion too painfully intimate to be spoken of in the first person. _MS._ 1843. True Justification. February 22. God grant us to be among those who wish to be really justified by faith, by being made just persons by faith,--who cannot satisfy either their conscience or their reason by fancying that God looks on them as right when they know themselves to be wrong; and who cannot help trusting that union with Christ must be something real and substantial, and not merely a metaphor and a flower of rhetoric. _MS._ 1854. A Present Hell. February 23.