ther: you can't
quarrel in a side-by-side push; but the moment that even the best men
stop pushing, and begin talking, they mistake their pugnacity for
piety, and if's all over. I will not speak of the crimes which in past
times have been committed in the name of Christ, nor of the follies
which are at this hour held to be consistent with obedience to Him;
but I _will_ speak of the morbid corruption and waste of vital power
in religious sentiment, by which the pure strength of that which
should be the guiding soul of every nation, the splendour of its
youthful manhood, and spotless light of its maidenhood, is averted or
cast away. You may see continually girls who have never been taught to
do a single useful thing thoroughly; who cannot sew, who cannot cook,
who cannot cast an account, nor prepare a medicine, whose whole life
has been passed either in play or in pride; you will find girls like
these, when they are earnest-hearted, cast all their innate passion of
religious spirit, which was meant by God to support them through the
irksomeness of daily toil, into grievous and vain meditation over the
meaning of the great Book, of which no syllable was ever yet to be
understood but through a deed; all the instinctive wisdom and mercy of
their womanhood made vain, and the glory of their pure consciences
warped into fruitless agony concerning questions which the laws of
common serviceable life would have either solved for them in an
instant, or kept out of their way. Give such a girl any true work that
will make her active in the dawn, and weary at night, with the
consciousness that her fellow-creatures have indeed been the better
for her day, and the powerless sorrow of her enthusiasm will transform
itself into a majesty of radiant and beneficent peace.

So with our youths. We once taught them to make Latin verses, and
called them educated; now we teach them to leap and to row, to hit a
ball with a bat, and call them educated. Can they plough, can they
sow, can they plant at the right time, or build with a steady hand? Is
it the effort of their lives to be chaste, knightly, faithful, holy in
thought, lovely in word and deed? Indeed it is, with some, nay with
many, and the strength of England is in them, and the hope; but we
have to turn their courage from the toil of war to the toil of mercy;
and their intellect from dispute of words to discernment of things;
and their knighthood from the errantry of adventure to the state