and
birth. I do not mean to say that there is no sanctity and no
sacrament. Moonshine is not nothing. It is light,--real, honest
light,--just as truly as the sunshine. It is sunshine at second-hand.
It illuminates, but indistinctly. It beautifies, but it does not
vivify or fructify. It comes indeed from the sun, but in too
roundabout a way to do the sun's work. So, if a woman is pretty nearly
sanctified before she is married, wifehood and motherhood may
accomplish the work; but there is not one man in ten thousand of the
writers aforesaid who would marry a vixen, trusting to the sanctifying
influences of marriage to tone her down to sweetness. A thoughtful,
gentle, pure, and elevated woman, who has been accustomed to stand face
to face with the eternities, will see in her child a soul. If the
circumstances of her life leave her leisure and adequate repose, that
soul will be to her a solemn trust, a sacred charge, for which she will
give her own soul's life in pledge. But how many such women do you
suppose there are in your village? Heaven forbid that I should even
appear to be depreciating woman! Do I not know too well their
strength, and their virtue which is their strength? But, stepping out
of idyls and novels, and stepping into American kitchens, is it not
true that the larger part of the mothers see in their babies, or act as
if they saw, only babies? And if there are three or four or half a
dozen of them, as there generally are, so much the more do they see
babies whose bodies monopolize the mother's time to the disadvantage of
their souls. She loves them, and she works for them day and night; but
when they are ranting and ramping and quarrelling, and torturing her
over-tense nerves, she forgets the infinite, and applies herself
energetically to the finite, by sending Harry with a round scolding
into one corner, and Susy into another, with no light thrown upon the
point in dispute, no principle settled as a guide in future
difficulties, and little discrimination as to the relative guilt of the
offenders. But there is no court of appeal before which Harry and Susy
can lay their case in these charming "happiest days"!

Then there are parents who love their children like wild beasts. It is
a passionate, blind, instinctive, unreasoning love. They have no more
intelligent discernment, when an outside difficulty arises with respect
to their children, than a she-bear. They wax furious over the most
r