f their respective schools, from different
sources, but to the same end,--their destruction. Madame de Maintenon
worked to counteract the insidious infidelity that permeated the upper
walks of life--Hannah More, to counteract the practical atheism of
the lowest plane of life. The fundamental principle of her educational
system was the necessity of Christian instruction. She recognized
the close relationship of education and religion, and gauged well the
significance of the historical fact of woman's debt to Christianity
for her elevation. The question which she asked was not that of social
utility, but that of personal character. She saw too much of the
utilitarian principle in its actual workings, the reducing of human
life to the plane of mechanism, to permit her to base her educational
efforts upon a utilitarian foundation. She sought to cultivate that
"sensibility which has its seat in the heart rather than in the
nerves." Anything which detracted from modesty or delicacy, or tended
to make a girl bold or forward, she severely rebuked. She taught the
wastefulness of expending time upon the cultivation of a talent which
one does not possess, and held that excessive cultivation of the
aesthetic range of subjects contributes to a decline in those more
stable factors upon which is based the security of states. Neither
indelicate exposure of the person in style of dress nor extravagance
in dancing found favor at her hands. Such were some of the views which
were entertained and promulgated by the woman who created an epoch
in the attitude of society toward her sex. She taught the dignity of
womanhood, from which the duties of domesticity cannot detract, the
performance of them as a function of womankind being of all things
honorable. The pure common sense of Hannah More did for the women of
her time the service which had failed of performance by the Church.

Passing from the theoretical to the practical part of Hannah
More's work, it is interesting to see her putting into effect her
philanthropic labors. The people among whom she labored were destitute
of almost everything that makes life comfortable. Among the Mendip
Hills, out from Bristol, lived a wild, barbarous, lawless population,
compared with which the millers and the colliers of the mines were
mild and tractable. Among these people Hannah More established her
schools. Some of the children had already had the schooling of the
prison, and all of them had been tutor