She was always for tolerance in religion, and even encouraged independence of mind in such matters in her children, for she recognised that the voice of God might not sound the same to the child as it did to the father and mother, and that a child should never be afraid to speak freely to its parents. The only book she ever published--though her letters and journals and the occasional verses written for family events show literary aptitude and something more--was _Family Worship_ (1876), a small volume of selections from the Bible and prayers for everyday use. Lady John Russell used her very considerable intellectual gifts not for herself but for others, for her husband, her children, her friends. Her mind was intensely receptive and ever eager for information. Thinking always more of others than of herself, she could throw herself into their thoughts and feelings. Although her lot had been thrown in the world’s most crowded ways, she was unworldliness itself, and she seems to have had little belief in the value of experience. When her eldest son, Lord Amberley, became engaged to be married at the age of twenty-one, she owned that she might have wished him to wait till he was a little older, but she continued: “On the other hand, there is something very delightful in his marrying while heart and mind are fresh and innocent and unworldly, and I even add inexperienced--for I am not over-fond of experience. I think it just as often makes people less wise as more wise.” Scattered through her letters and diaries are many wise reflections, and many pointed observations on the great people she knew. Of Disraeli, when she met him in 1858, she said he was a sad flatterer, and less agreeable than so able a man of such varied pursuits ought to be. Speaking of Gladstone’s visit to Scotland in November 1879, she said: “There is always something that makes me sad in such tremendous hospitality.” Of a book by her sister-in-law, the _Life and Letters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, First Earl of Minto_, she wrote: “There are no lies in it, and therefore you must not expect a great sale.” She thought much of the position of women, and although as early as 1870 she earnestly wished for legal and social equality for them, she could not shut her eyes to what woman had already been, “the equal, if not the superior, of man in all that is highest and noblest and loveliest.” She strongly disapproved of setting the sexes against one another, and considered that equal justice should be done to both without any spirit of antagonism. Lady John Russell herself is an abiding example of the best type of woman, quick to sympathise, ready to counsel, who, while admiring her husband as a statesman and giving him every assistance in his public career, admired the man more than the politician. After the birth of their eldest son, she wrote: