sing, the highest stage of human development,
you do them harm; because, in general, falsehood is always harmful, and
because, in particular, so far as you influence them at all, you
prevent them from taking measures to stop the wrong-doing. You ought
to counsel them to bear with Christian resignation what they cannot
help; but you ought with equal fervor to counsel them to look around
and see if there are not many things which they can help, and if there
are, by all means to help them. What is inevitable comes to us from
God, no matter how many hands it passes through; but submission to
unnecessary evils is cowardice or laziness; and extolling of the evil
as good is sheer ignorance, or perversity, or servility. Even the ills
that must be borne, should be borne under protest, lest patience
degenerate into slavery. Christian character is never formed by
acquiescence in, or apotheosis of wrong.

The principle that underlies these extracts, and makes them
ministrative of evil, is the principle that a woman can benefit her
children by sacrificing herself. It teaches, that pale, thin faces and
feeble steps are excellent things in young mothers,--provided they are
gained by maternal duties. We infer that it is meet, right, and the
bounden of such to give up society, reading, riding, music, and become
indifferent to dress, cultivation, recreation, to everything, in short,
except taking care of the children. It is all just as wrong as it can
be. It is wrong morally; it is wrong socially; wrong in principle,
wrong in practice. It is a blunder as well as a crime, for it works
woe. It is a wrong means to accomplish an end; and it does not
accomplish the end, after all, but demolishes it.

On the contrary, the duty and dignity of a mother require that she
should never subordinate herself to her children. When she does so,
she does it to their manifest injury and her own. Of course, if
illness or accident demand unusual care, she does well to grow thin and
pale in bestowing unusual care. But when a mother in the ordinary
routine of life grows thin and pale, gives up riding, reading, and the
amusements and occupations of life, there is a wrong somewhere, and her
children shall reap the fruits of it. The father and mother are the
head of the family, the most comely and the most honorable part. They
cannot benefit their children by descending from their Heaven-appointed
places, and becoming perpetual and exclusive feet a