Books and reading -- Great Britain; Conduct of life; Social problems; Women
All such knowledge should be given her as may enable her to understand,
and even to aid, the work of men: and yet it should be given, not as
knowledge,—not as if it were, or could be, for her an object to know; but
only to feel, and to judge. It is of no moment, as a matter of pride or
perfectness in herself, whether she knows many languages or one; but it
is of the utmost, that she should be able to show kindness to a stranger,
and to understand the sweetness of a stranger’s tongue. It is of no
moment to her own worth or dignity that she should be acquainted with
this science or that; but it is of the highest that she should be trained
in habits of accurate thought; that she should understand the meaning,
the inevitableness, and the loveliness of natural laws; and follow at
least some one path of scientific attainment, as far as to the threshold
of that bitter Valley of Humiliation, into which only the wisest and
bravest of men can descend, owning themselves for ever children,
gathering pebbles on a boundless shore. It is of little consequence how
many positions of cities she knows, or how many dates of events, or names
of celebrated persons—it is not the object of education to turn the woman
into a dictionary; but it is deeply necessary that she should be taught
to enter with her whole personality into the history she reads; to
picture the passages of it vitally in her own bright imagination; to
apprehend, with her fine instincts, the pathetic circumstances and
dramatic relations, which the historian too often only eclipses by his
reasoning, and disconnects by his arrangement: it is for her to trace the
hidden equities of divine reward, and catch sight, through the darkness,
of the fateful threads of woven fire that connect error with retribution.
But, chiefly of all, she is to be taught to extend the limits of her
sympathy with respect to that history which is being for ever determined
as the moments pass in which she draws her peaceful breath; and to the
contemporary calamity, which, were it but rightly mourned by her, would
recur no more hereafter. She is to exercise herself in imagining what
would be the effects upon her mind and conduct, if she were daily brought
into the presence of the suffering which is not the less real because
shut from her sight. She is to be taught somewhat to understand the
nothingness of the proportion which that little world in which she lives
and loves, bears to the world in which God lives and loves;—and solemnly
she is to be taught to strive that her thoughts of piety may not be
feeble in proportion to the number they embrace, nor her prayer more
languid than it is for the momentary relief from pain of her husband or
her child, when it is uttered for the multitudes of those who have none
to love them,—and is “for all who are desolate and oppressed.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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