Women -- Biography; Women -- Social and moral questions
Your opportunities of spiritual culture are abundant. None need be so
diligent in business as to have no time for religion. The Sabbath
guarantees a season for unmolested attention to the soul. Wealth cannot
buy up its spiritual blessings, and poverty operates as no
disqualification for its favours. It smiles as sweetly in the humble
cottage as in the marble palace. On this day thousands of recognised
ministers, and hundreds of thousands of Sabbath-school teachers,
reason, plead, and expostulate with millions of their fellow-creatures,
on the greatest of all themes. Over and above these, what earnest
lessons are being instilled in the retirements of home! There is also
another source of spiritual education, open nearly to all, namely,
access to books whose aim is to teach the practical principles of
religion. Then the Bible is within the reach of all. It is the
text-book of the pulpit, the daily manual of the school, and the
familiar companion of the family. Full of human sympathies, breathing
unsullied purity, illustrating principles by examples, investing
precepts in poetry, and commending itself not more to the learned than
the unlearned, the Bible possesses every quality which can contribute
to success as an instrument of spiritual culture.
_EDUCATION COMPLETE._
Thus have we sketched, on a small scale, a complete scheme of
education. How to live?—that is the question. How to use all your
powers to the glory of God and the greatest advantage to yourselves and
others—how to live completely? The intellectual part of your nature is
superior to the physical; the moral higher than the intellectual; and
the spiritual highest of all. Education complete is the full and
harmonious cultivation of these four divisions. Not exhaustive
development in any one, supremely important though it may be—not even
an exclusive discipline of two, or even three of these divisions; but
the culture of them all, and the training in due proportion of all
their faculties. When these powers act simultaneously and harmoniously,
no one unduly depressed, and no one improperly exalted, education has
discharged its function, and a type of womanhood is realised which
closely resembles your Creator’s ideal. Perfect culture is perfect
character. What a glorious creature is such a woman! Her body is the
temple of the Holy Ghost, and her mind is enriched with the fine gold
and jewellery of knowledge. Not only friends but even foes are
constrained to acknowledge that she is the “glory of man,” in every
sense a “help corresponding with his dignity.” More glorious than
anything in the material universe is she who earnestly cultivates all
her powers and practically recognises all her relationships, who has
come _to a perfect woman, to the measure of the stature of the fulness
of Christ_. We admit that all are not created alike, but we know that
it is impossible to set limits to the attainments of the smallest or
the achievements of the weakest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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