woman; one which will call
into fullest exercise her blessed faculty of sympathy, that pure and
tender heart of flesh, which teaches her always to find her highest
interest in mankind, simply as mankind; to see the Divine most
completely in the human; to prefer the incarnate to the disembodied,
the personal to the abstract, the pathetic to the intellectual; to
see, and truly, in the most common tale of village love or sorrow, a
mystery deeper and more divine than lies in all the theories of
politicians or the fixed ideas of the sage.

Such a course of history would quicken women's inborn _personal
interest_ in the actors of this life-drama, and be quickened by it in
return, as indeed it ought: for it is thus that God intended woman
to look instinctively at the world. Would to God that she would
teach us men to look at it thus likewise! Would to God that she
would in these days claim and fulfil to the uttermost her vocation as
the priestess of charity!--that woman's heart would help to deliver
man from bondage to his own tyrannous and all-too-exclusive brain--
from our idolatry of mere dead laws and printed books--from our daily
sin of looking at men, not as our struggling and suffering brothers,
but as mere symbols of certain formulae), incarnations of sets of
opinions, wheels in some iron liberty-grinding or Christianity-
spinning machine, which we miscall society, or civilisation, or,
worst misnomer of all, the Church!

This I take to be one of the highest aims of woman--to preach
charity, love, and brotherhood: but in this nineteenth century,
hunting everywhere for law and organisation, refusing loyalty to
anything which cannot range itself under its theories, she will never
get a hearing, till her knowledge of the past becomes more organised
and methodic. As it is now, for want of large many-sided views of
the past, her admiration is too apt to attach itself to some two or
three characters only in the hero-list of all the ages. Then comes
the temptation to thrust aside all which interferes with her
favourite idols, and so the very heart given her for universal
sympathy becomes the organ of an exclusive bigotry, and she who
should have taught man to love, too often only embitters his hate. I
claim, therefore, as necessary for the education of the future, that
woman should be initiated into the thoughts and feelings of her
countrymen in every age, from the wildest legends of the past to the
most palpable nat