In the first place, God has conferred no useless gifts; for all the things he has made there is a reason and an aim. If the companion of man is a reasonable creature; if, like man, she is made in the image and likeness of God; if she, too, has received from her Creator the sublimest of gifts, understanding, she ought to make use of it. These gifts, received from God for an especial purpose, must be cultivated. Scripture tells us that souls left to waste, like fallow ground, bring forth only wild fruits, _spines et tribulos_. And God did not make the souls of women, any more than the souls of men, to be shifting, barren, or unhealthy soil. Moreover, every reasonable creature is to render to God an account of his gifts. Each one in the judgment day will be dealt with according to the gifts he has received and the use he has made of them. God has given us all hands, (which, according to the interpreters, signify prompt and intelligent action,) but on condition that we do not bring them to him empty. Again, he has categorically explained his intentions in the parable of the talents, where he declares that a strict account must be rendered to him, talent by talent. I do not know a father of the church or any moralist who has ever asserted that this parable did not concern women as well as men. There is no serious distinction to be made. Each must give an account of what he has received; and good human sense, like good divine sense, plainly indicates that one sex has no more right than the other to bury or to waste the possessions granted by Heaven to be employed and increased. In short, I say with St. Augustine, no creature to whom God has confided the lamp of intelligence has a right to behave like a foolish virgin, letting the oil become exhausted because she has neglected to renew it; letting that light die out that was to have enlightened her path and that of others too, if only, as in the case of some wives and mothers, that of her husband and children. The generality of books relating to the merits, the destinies, and the virtues of woman, far from considering her as a being created in the image of God, intelligent, free, and responsible to her Creator for her actions, treat of her as a possession of man, made solely for him, and whose end he is. In all these books, a woman is only a blooming creature meant to be adored, but not respected--a being essentially inferior whose existence has no other aim than to secure the happiness of man, or bend to his most frivolous purposes; dependent, above all, upon man, who alone is her master, her legislator, and her judge--absolutely, as if she had no soul, no conscience, no moral liberty; as if God were nothing to her; as if he had not endowed her soul with cravings, faculties, aspirations, in one word, with rights that are at the same time duties. {33}