Do not confine your charity to giving money. You may have many opportunities of showing a tender and compassionate spirit where your money is not wanted.—There is a false and unnatural refinement in sensibility, which makes some people shun the sight of every object in distress. Never indulge this, especially where your friends or acquaintances are concerned. Let the days of their misfortunes, when the world forgets or avoids them, be the season for you to exercise your humanity and friendship. The sight of human misery softens the heart, and makes it better: it checks the pride of health and prosperity, and the distress it occasions is amply compensated by the consciousness of doing your duty, and by the secret endearment which nature has annexed to all our sympathetic sorrows.
Women are greatly deceived, when they think they recommend themselves to our sex by their indifference about religion. Even those men who are themselves unbelievers, dislike infidelity in you. Every man who knows human nature, connects a religious taste in your sex with softness and sensibility of heart; at least we always consider the want of it as a proof of that hard and masculine spirit, which of all your faults we dislike the most. Besides, men consider your religion as one of their principal securities for that female virtue in which they are most interested. If a gentleman pretends an attachment to any of you, and endeavours to shake your religious principles, be assured he is either a fool, or has designs on you which he dares not openly avow.
You will probably wonder at my having educated you in a church different from my own. The reason was plainly this: I looked on the difference between our churches to be of no real importance, and that a preference of one to the other was a mere matter of taste. Your mother was educated in the church of England, and had an attachment to it, and I had a prejudice in favour of every thing she liked. It never was her desire that you should be baptised by a clergyman of the church of England, or be educated in that church. On the contrary, the delicacy of her regard to the smallest circumstance that could affect me in the eye of the world, made her anxiously insist it might be otherwise. But I could not yield to her in that kind of generosity.—When I lost her, I became still more determined to educate you in that church, as I feel a secret pleasure in doing every thing that appears to me to express my affection and veneration for her memory.—I draw but a very faint and imperfect picture of what your mother was, while I endeavour to point out what you should be[A].
[A] The reader will remember, that such observations as respect equally both the sexes, are all along as much as possible avoided.
CONDUCT
AND
BEHAVIOUR.
To face Page 26.
T. Stothard delin R. Slann sculpt.
Conduct and Behaviour.
Published March 1st. 1797, by Cadell and Davies Strand.
One of the chief beauties in a female character, is that modest reserve, that retiring delicacy, which avoids the public eye, and is disconcerted even at the gaze of admiration.—I do not wish you to be insensible to applause. If you were, you must become, if not worse, at least less amiable women. But you may be dazzled by that admiration which yet rejoices your hearts.