st defined.

"Above all these duties--civil and human (says the mother to her
son)--is the duty you owe to the Supreme Being. Religion is a commerce
established between God and man through the grace of God to man and
through the duty of man to God. Elevated souls have for their God
sentiments and a cult apart, which do not resemble at all those of the
people; everything issues from the heart and goes to God."

In these works, she attacked also the fad of free-thinking in vogue
among the young men of the time. She was one of the few women of that
age who could not separate themselves from reason and thought, even in
religion; the latter was a matter for the reason and the intellect to
decide, and was thus an elevated product of the mind rather than an
instinct coming from the heart, or a positive revelation as it was in
the seventeenth century. In this view, Madame de Lambert indicated the
beginning of the later eighteenth-century spirit.

Mme. de Lambert taught her children to be satisfied with nothing
but the highest attainable object. She advised her son to choose his
friends from among men above him, in order to accustom himself to
respectful and polite demeanor; "with his equals he might cultivate
negligence and his mind might become dull." She desired her children
to think differently from the people--"Those who think lowly and
commonly, and the court is filled with such." To their servants they
were to be good and kind, for humanity and Christianity make
all equal. She was the first to use those words, "humanity" and
"equality," which later became the bywords of everyone, and the first
to teach that conscience is the best guide. "Conscience is defined as
that interior sentiment of a delicate honor which assures you that you
have nothing with which to reproach yourself."

Possibly the most important and lasting effect of Mme. de Lambert's
influence resulted from the expression of her ideas on the education
of young women who "are destined to please, and are given lessons
only in methods of delighting and pleasing." She was convinced that in
order to resist temptation and be normal, women must be educated, must
learn to think. Her counsels to her daughter are remarkable for an
unusual insight into the temperament of her sex and for an extreme
fear that makes her call to her aid all precautions and resources. She
thus advises her daughter:

"Try to find resources within yourself--this is a revenue of certain
pl