The heavy tasks which nature imposes upon women leave them less at leisure than men to reform and readjust these inherited garments. The necessity for prompt and early action obliges them to follow the intuitive faculties, as all must do who have not time to work out the problems of the reasoning ones. The instinct of possession is a ruling one in human nature, and a woman inheriting a superstition or a prejudice holds fast to it because it is something, and she has got it. It seems to her a possession. It may be a mischievous and unfortunate one, but it will take a good deal of time and thought to find that out. Those who have the training of women's minds often train them away from such a use of time and from such a labor of thought. Hence the fatal persistence of large classes of women in superstitions which the thinking world has outgrown, and the equally fatal zeal with which they impose the same insufficient modes of judgment upon their children.
I pray this generation of women, which has seen such enlargements of the old narrow order regarding the sex, I pray it to deserve its high post as guardian of the future. Let it bequeath to its posterity a noble standard of womanhood, free, pure, and, above all, laborious.
The standard of manhood really derives from that of womanhood, and not vice versa, as many imagine. However we may receive from tradition the order of their material creation, in that of training and education, the woman's influence comes before that of the man, and outlasts it.
The figure of the infant Christ dwells always in our mind, accompanied by that of the gracious mother who gave Him to the world. Let the fact of this great gift prefigure to us the august office of Woman. Hers be it also to preserve and transmit from age to age the Christian doctrine and the Christlike faith. And, in order that she may fully realize the glory and blessedness of giving, let her remember that what is worthily given to one time is given to all time.
UNIFORM WITH ARNOLD'S POEMS.
THE LIGHT OF ASIA;
OR,
The Great Renunciation.
Being the Life and Teaching of Gautama, Prince of India and Founder of Buddhism (as told in verse by an Indian Buddhist).