No; but your wife didn’t know what she meant; neither did Mr. Keble. Women and clergymen have so long been in the habit of using pretty words without ever troubling themselves to understand them, that they now revolt from the effort, as if it were an impiety. So far as your wife had any meaning at all, it was that until she was made an angel of, and had nothing to do but be happy, and sing her flattering opinions of God for evermore,—dressing herself and her children becomingly, and leaving cards on her acquaintances, were sufficiently acceptable services to Him, for which trivial though they were, He would reward her with immediate dinner, and everlasting glory. That was your wife’s real notion of the matter, and modern Christian women’s generally, so far as they have got any notions at all under their bonnets, and the skins of the dead robins they have stuck in them,—the disgusting little savages. But that is by no means the way in which either your hands are to be delivered from making the pots, or her head from carrying them. Oh, but you will do it by deputy, and by help of capital, will you? Here is the Grand Junction Canal Brick, Tile, and Sanitary Pipe Company, Limited; Capital, £50,000, in 10,000 shares of £5 each; “formed for the purpose of purchasing and working an estate comprising fifty-eight acres of land known as the ‘Millpost Field,’ and ‘The Duddles,’ situate at Southall, in the county of Middlesex.” You will sit at home, serene proprietor, not able, still less willing, to lift so much as a spadeful of Duddles yourself; but you will feed a certain number of brickmaking Ethiopian slaves thereon, as cheap as you can; and teach them to make bricks, as basely as they can; and you will put the meat out of their mouths into your own, and provide for their eternal salvation by gracious ministries from Uxbridge. A clerical friend of mine in that neighbourhood has, I hear, been greatly afflicted concerning the degenerate natures of brickmakers. Let him go and make, and burn, a pile or two with his own hands; he will thereby receive apocalyptic visions of a nature novel to his soul. And if he ever succeeds in making one good brick, (the clay must lie fallow in wind and sun two years before you touch it, my master Carlyle tells me,) he will have done a good deed for his generation which will be acknowledged in its day by the Stone of Israel, when the words of many a sermon will be counted against their utterers, every syllable as mere insolent breaking of the third commandment.