1st. A neglect of practical duties. This danger must be met by fortifying practical education, by giving young girls habits of order and of regularity, which double time and assign a place in life to every duty; and above all, habits of practical and solid piety, which means nothing else than a courageous fulfilment of duty.
2d. An exaltation of imagination, leading one to crave intellectual enjoyments that cannot always be granted.
Here again piety alone can preserve equilibrium. The important point is, to make education respond to the gifts of God without overloading or smothering them, for they usually bring with them counterbalancing perils. Excessive culture is dangerous, insufficient culture perhaps more so.
3d. Pride. This must be prevented by good sense cultivated in a Christian manner. It is to be remarked that, if mental culture, like personal charms, can excite pride, study has at least a counterpoise. It gives an enlightened seriousness to the mind, while successes due to beauty and dress cannot but be frivolous and mischievous.
Pride, I acknowledge, affords a specious plea for the maintenance of systems restricting feminine education. We would preserve to them that modesty which is said to be their brightest ornament. I agree that modesty is not only a virtue, but a great charm; but I am by no means sure that ignorance is its best guardian. Nay, taken in a certain sense, it is a pagan virtue, that is to say, a false or very imperfect quality. Give to a woman, as you would to a man, all the knowledge, capacity, development of which she is susceptible; give her at the same time Christian humility, and she will be adorned with a modest simplicity, truer and more charming than that of the poor Hindoo woman who believes herself to be an animal, rather superior to the creatures in her poultry-yard, but very inferior in nature to her husband. This enlightened humility is a genuine virtue, the mother of many other virtues, the inspirer of a high degree of perfection. For humility does not prevent our recognizing the progress we have made. By opening our eyes to the merits of others, it shows us our own defects; and if we were to attain the summit of human ability, it would hold up an ideal superiority that should stimulate effort without arousing either pride or discouragement.
We may be sure that a cultivated mind is of all others the best fitted to a comprehension of duty. It is intelligent humilty, that is to say, true modesty, which preserves us from pedantry.
Vanity! That is the great danger, it is said. But the reputation that a woman acquires by literary or artistic talent is not the rock most to be dreaded. I say again that self-conscious beauty and worldly triumphs fill the heart with a vanity that has no corrective in the cause that produced it.
Study and art, by elevating the soul, serve as a counterpoise to the sentiments of vanity they may excite. I see no such safeguard in successes won by advantages of another sort.
All is summed up in saying that great gifts bring with them a danger against which the mind must be fortified in advance by education. Education must adapt itself to different natures: it must, while developing the germs planted by God, direct this development with firmness, averting perils and avoiding mistakes. It must make the moral development keep pace with the mental; preserving equilibrium between the ideal and the practical life, which interfere with each other less than is supposed, and accordance of which alone constitutes the dignity of existence.