The Hearth-Stone: Thoughts Upon Home-Life in Our CitiesOsgood, Samuel
Religion
The Hearth-Stone: Thoughts Upon Home-Life in Our Cities
Osgood, Samuel
Christian life; Conduct of life
In his next morning's walk, he will see in the many processions of
boarding-school girls promenading with no very elastic step, quite another
aspect of woman's destiny, and one that may give him mingled feelings as
he meditates upon the future of American mothers and their posterity. If
the stranger comes from a foreign country, he will be interested less in
these three aspects of the subject, than in a fourth of far less assuming
air. He will be more impressed with the looks of the daughters of the
people, with cheery step on their way to the public schools, than with the
champions of reform, the pupils of fashion, or the devotees of the ancient
ritual. Surely the education of girls is not neglected among us; yet,
whether it is wisely attended to, is one of the most serious and pressing
questions of our day,--a question in which every family is vitally
concerned. There are few readers who are not ready to give some thought to
the true idea and method of female education.
* * * * *
We must look for the true idea reverently, as under religious guidance,
not according to our own caprices or opinions. Nothing surely should awe
our wilful conceits into docile attention, more than the effort to find
the calling and the place of the being beyond all others dependent upon
our care. Where but in the school of the Creator and Preserver himself,
shall we learn what our daughters are called to be under his Providence?
Where but therein shall we learn to decipher that fair and wonderful
hieroglyph which God himself carved out in the person of Eve, and which
remains to this day the most expressive cipher of heaven's grace and care.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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