The inaugural lecture on the opening of Queen’s College was delivered by the Rev. F. D. Maurice, the first Head of the College, on Wednesday, March 29, 1848. As his inspiring but stern words fell upon the ears of Dorothea Beale, we may well believe that the sense of vocation which must early have grown for her out of her natural dutifulness, became to her more clearly shaped. Certainly, in reading them now, we feel we are tracing back to its source a stream of that thought with which she herself in due time awed and inspired many a young teacher. ‘The vocation of a teacher is an awful one; you cannot do her real good, she will do others unspeakable harm if she is not aware of its usefulness. Merely to supply her with necessaries, merely to assist her in procuring them for herself ... is not fitting her for her work. You may but confirm her in the notion that the training of an immortal spirit may be just as lawfully undertaken in a case of emergency as that of selling ribbands. How can you give a woman self-respect, how can you win for her the respect of others, in whom such a notion or any modification of it dwells? Your business is by all means to dispossess her of it; to make her feel the greatness of her work, and yet to show her that it can be honestly performed.’ The speaker went on to deal with the word ‘Accomplishments,’ a word which at that time was supposed to cover the whole of a woman’s education; and he pleaded that something more than finish, something substantial and elementary was needed for those whose duty was ‘to watch closely the first utterances of infancy, the first dawnings of intelligence;—how thoughts spring into acts, how acts pass into habits. Surely they ought, above all others, to feel that the truths which lie nearest to us are the most wonderful ... that study is not worth much if it is not busy about the roots of things.’ Again, with what responsive if silent joy must the girl who had toiled alone at Euclid and Algebra have heard his encouraging words on Mathematics, then held to be an unfeminine pursuit. ‘To regard numbers with the kind of wonder with which a child regards them, to feel that when we are learning the laws of number we are looking into the very laws of the universe,—this makes the study of exceeding worth to the mind and character; yet it does not create the least impatience of ordinary occupations; ... on the contrary ... it helps us to know that nothing is mean but what is false.’