en, in the education of women, ought to be,
the conscience, the heart, and the affections; the development of those
moral qualities which Providence has so liberally bestowed upon them,
doubtless with a wise and beneficent purpose. Originators of
conscientiousness, how can they implant what they have never cultivated,
nor brought to maturity in themselves? Sovereigns of the affections, how
can they direct the kingdom whose laws they have not studied, the
springs of whose government are concealed from them? The conscience and
the affections being primarily enlightened, all other cultivation, as
secondary, is most valuable. Intelligence, accomplishments, even
external elegance, become objects of importance, as assisting the
influence which women have, and exert too often for unworthy ends, but
which in this case could not fail to be beneficial. Let the light of
intellect and the charm of accomplishments be the willing handmaids of
cultivated and enlightened conscience. Cultivate the intellect with
reference to the conscience, that views of duty may be comprehensive, as
well as just; cultivate the imagination still with reference to the
conscience, that those inward aspirations which all indulge, more or
less, may be turned from the gauds of an idle and vain imagination, and
shed over daily life and daily duty the halo of a poetic influence;
cultivate the manners, that the qualities of heart and head may have an
additional auxiliary in obtaining that influence by which a mighty
regeneration is to be worked. The issues of such an education will
justify the claims made for women in these pages; then the spirit of
vanity will yield to the spirit of self-devotion: that spirit
confessedly natural to Women, and only perverted by wrong education.
Content with the sphere of usefulness assigned her by Nature and
Nature's God, viewing that sphere with the piercing eye of intellect,
and gilding it with the beautiful colours of the imagination, she will
cease the vain and almost impious attempt to wander from it. She will
see and acknowledge the beauty, the harmony of the arrangement which has
made her physical inferiority (the only inferiority which we
acknowledge) the very root from which spring her virtues and their
attendant influences. Removed from the actual collision of political
contests, and screened from the passions which such engender, she brings
party questions to the test of the unalterable principles of reason and
religi