t prayer and reverential
desire to bring the future into perpetually operating force upon your
principles and practice, do not, at the same time, be deterred by any
superstitious fears from profiting by yourself and urging on others
every immediate and temporal motive, not inconsistent with the great
one, "to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever."[78]

While your principal personal object and personal gratification in your
studies is to be derived from the gradual improvement of your mind and
tastes, this gradual improvement will be often so imperceptible that you
will need support and cheering during many weeks and months of
apparently profitless mental application. Such support you may provide
for yourself in the daily satisfaction resulting from having fulfilled a
certain task, from having obeyed a law, though only a self-imposed one.
Men, in their studies, have almost always that near and immediate object
which I recommend to you to create for yourself. For them, as well as
for you, the distant future of attained mental eminence and excellence
is indeed the principal object. They, however, have it in their power to
cheat the toil and cheer the way by many intermediate steps, which
serve both as landmarks in their course and objects of interest within
their immediate reach. They can almost always have some special object
in view, as the result and reward of the studies of each month, or
quarter, or year. They read for prizes, scholarships, fellowships, &c.;
and these rewards, tangibly and actually within their reach, excite
their energies and quicken their exertions.

For women there is nothing of the kind; it is therefore a useful
exercise of her ingenuity to invent some substitute, however inferior to
the original. For this purpose, I have never found any thing so
effectual as a self-imposed system of study,--the stricter the better.
It is not desirable, however, that this system should be one of very
constant employment; the strictness of which I spoke only refers to its
regularity. As the great object is that you should break through your
rules as seldom as possible, it would be better to fix the number of
your hours of occupation rather below, certainly not above, your average
habits. The time that may be to spare on days in which you meet with no
interruption from visitors may also be systematically disposed of: you
may always have some book in hand which will be ready to fill up any
unoccupied moments, with