The best illustration of this is a sisterhood of three or four rich old maids, with all the advantages of leisure. You will observe that they invariably remain, as to their education, where they were left by their teachers many years before. They will often lament, perhaps, that in their day education was very inferior to what it is now; but it never occurs to them that the large leisure of subsequent years might, had it been well employed, have supplied those deficiencies of which they are sensible. Nothing is more curiously remote from masculine habits than the resignation to particular degrees of ignorance, as to the inevitable, which a woman will express in a manner which says: "You know I am so; you know that I cannot make myself better informed." They are like perfect billiard-balls on a perfect table, which stop when no longer impelled, wherever they may happen to be. It is this absence of intellectual initiative which causes the great ignorance of women. What they have been well taught, that they know, but they do not increase their stores of knowledge. Even in what most interests them, theology, they repeat, but do not extend, their information. All the effort of their minds appears (so far as an outside observer may presume to judge) to act like water on a picture, which brings out the colors that already exist upon the canvas but does not add anything to the design. There is a great and perpetual freshness and vividness in their conceptions, which is often lacking in our own. Our conceptions fade, and are replaced; theirs are not replaced, but refreshed. What many women do for their theological conceptions or opinions, others do with reference to the innumerable series of questions of all kinds which present themselves in the course of life. They attempt to solve them by the help of knowledge acquired in girlhood; and if that cannot be done, they either give them up as beyond the domain of women, or else trust to hearsay for a solution. What they will _not_ do is to hunt the matter out unaided, and get an accurate answer by dint of independent investigation.