CHAPTER IV.
ELEMENTS OF CHARACTER.
Elements of character may be said to develop themselves when a child begins for the first time to be actuated by motives distinct from the operation of its senses. Thus, when it has learned to prefer the approbation of its mother, to the gratification of its own appetite, it has exhibited one of those elements of character, which, in all probability, will prove most important in its future life.
That ceaseless activity of body and mind which has already been alluded to, will at this stage of experience become capable of a fixed and definite purpose; and when the ends which the child endeavors to attain are associated with a sense of good and evil, it will have commenced the existence of a moral agent, and as such will demand the assiduous and unremitting attention of its mother.
Important as it is, that maternal love should be so directed as to teach the use of a mind, yet, after all, this part of a mother's duty bears but a small proportion to that of forming the characters of her children. It is true, they would form themselves, or rather circumstances would form them, without any instrumentality of hers; but how? Can it be the part of a Christian mother to leave circumstances alone to decide whether her child shall be happy or miserable for all eternity? No; that part of educatian which consists in storing the memory, may possibly be committed with propriety to other hands; but as a mother's instruction is properly more moral than intellectual, that far more important part of educationwhich consists in forming the habits of children, and thus laying the foundation of character, must belong to the mother.
A mother's superior advantages in the art of communicating ideas has already been described; and if, in the mere act of imparting knowledge, her qualifications are so admirably adapted to her duties, how much greater must be their yalue in implanting the first ideas of right and wrong, or rather in the great work of giving impulse and direction to the
