and imagination must be kept in a pure and lofty element of thought. Whatever expresses the highest moods and states to which the human spirit may attain, whether it be religion or patriotism or art or literature, has inestimable worth for her, since it is a sign and symbol of her kinship with the world of invisible and real things, with God. The decisive consideration for her also is not what knowledge is most entertaining or useful, but what knowledge is best adapted to form the mind and to confirm character.
She must become accustomed from her childhood to plain food and simple ways, that she may never lose the power to take delight in innocent amusements and pure pleasures. Let her love beauty, and strive to make herself and the world beautiful; but let her understand that a hard and proud heart, a vacant and vulgar mind, not a plain face, is ugly, and that a countenance over which innocence, cheerfulness and intelligence are diffused is necessarily fair. Vanity and selfishness, greed and sensuality, envy and pride, spite and cowardice, spoil all loveliness and mar all life. Nothing horrible or dreadful can happen to us except through our own fault and folly, and the greatest misery is the consciousness of our own sin. Virtue alone brings sure and abiding joy. It is praiseworthy, and without it nothing is so. Behavior rather than knowledge is the end of education. Hence its foundation is moral, and therefore religious; and where in the modern world we are intent on sharpening the wits without first laying this moral and religious foundation, the inevitable result must be the blighting of the noblest flower and fruit of human life.
Education, indeed, can but unfold the being we have received. It cannot make a poet of a mathematician, a great mind of a small one. But it should not be our concern to become great men or women, it being our business to make of ourselves genuine men and women; and this right education, aided by each one's industry and good will, can effect for all. Let no woman believe there is aught of good in weakness. There is no joy but in strength—strength of body, strength of mind, strength of heart, strength of soul. "To be weak is to be miserable." Faith is strength, virtue
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