There are those who consider—and I agree with them—that the education of boys under the age of twelve years ought to be entrusted, as much as possible, to women. Let me ask—of what period of youth and manhood does it not hold true? I pity the ignorance and conceit of the man who fancies that he has nothing left to learn from cultivated women. I should have thought that the very mission of woman was to be, in the highest sense, the educator of man, from infancy to old age; that that was the work towards which all the God-given capacities of women pointed.
Lecture on Thrift. 1869.
The Earthly Body. December 19.
Let us remember that if the body does feel a burden now (as it must at moments), what a happiness it is to have a body at all: how lonely, cold, barren, would it be to be a “disembodied spirit.” As St. Paul says, “Not that we desire to be unclothed, but to be clothed upon”—to have a spiritual, deathless, griefless life instilled into the body.
MS. Letter. 1842.
Home at Last. December 20.
When all the world is old, lad,
And all the trees are brown,
And all the sport is stale, lad,
And all the wheels run down;
Creep home and take your place there,
The spent and maimed among:
God grant you find one face there
You loved when all was young.
The Water Babies. 1862.
The Bible. December 21.
The hearts and minds of the sick, the poor, the sorrowing, the truly human, all demand a living God who has revealed Himself in living acts; a God who has taught mankind by facts, not left them to discover Him by theories and sentiments; a Judge, a Father, a Saviour, an Inspirer; in a word, their hearts demand the historic truth of the Bible—of the Old Testament no less than the New.