Creditable and discreditable elements may enter into the assumed fact as it regards man; but if he does not die for love because he more thoroughly acknowledges his responsibility, keeping God in his right place _above_, and his own heart and its idols in their right place _below_, then we may drop the unwomanly sneer, and go and do likewise. I shall have little hope for woman, till _she_ learns to feel that to die for love is not so much a pitiful as a disgraceful thing; that it proves of itself that God was never to her what he should have been; that life had no aim so holy as the weak indulgence of a sentiment or a passion, or some generous longing for some duty God did not set before her; that all the world's work and society's ambition was hidden from her by a desire for personal happiness, spread like a film over her moral vision. No better education do I claim for woman than her entire _self-possession_, the ultimate endowment of all the promise she carries in her nature. "The great law of culture," says Carlyle, "is, Let each become all that he was created capable of being; expand, if possible, to his full growth; and show himself in his own shape and stature, be they what they may."--"The excellent woman," writes the Hindoo in Calcutta, "is she who, if the father dies, can be father and provider to the household." "Who," says Count Zinzendorf in Germany,--"who but my wife could have been alternately servant and mistress without affectation and without pride? Who could have maintained like her, in a democratic community, all outward and inward distinctions? Who, without a murmur, would have met such peril? Who could have raised such sums of money, and acquitted them on her own credit?" To such women I think men will always offer generous help; and, even if they did not, there are props of God's own disposing. Let woman once reject the absurd notion that she was created for happiness, let her constitute herself instead a creator of it, let her accept with joy the fact that this is a working-day world; then she will no longer strive to escape from labor, discipline, or sorrow, but will gladly hail each in its turn as part of God's appointed teaching, a shadow crossing the sunshine to show that it is bright. Perhaps such a life is not easy, perhaps many feet must falter on such a path; but, indicating what I earnestly believe to be the will and way of God for us all, I earnestly entreat you to enter and walk therein. Some words written by John Ruskin upon Art seem to me to have such force in this connection as to make it justifiable to quote them. Speaking of a painter who could only paint the fair and graceful in landscape, he says:--