y influences on her children!

FOOTNOTES:

[112] Gibbon.

ON THE MEANS OF SECURING PERSONAL INFLUENCE.

The qualities which seem more especially needful in a character which is
to influence others, are, consistency, simplicity, and benevolence, or
love.

By consistency of character, I mean consistency of action with
principle, of manner with thought, of _self_ with _self_. The want of
this quality is a failing with which our sex is often charged, and
justly; but are we to blame? Our hearts are warm, our nerves irritable,
and we have seen how little there is, in existing systems of female
education, calculated to give wide, lofty, self-devoted principles of
action. Without such principles, there can be no consistency of conduct;
and without consistency of conduct, there can be no available moral
influence.

The peculiar evil arising from want of consistency, is the want of trust
or faith which it engenders. This is felt in the common intercourse with
the world. In our relations with inconsistent persons, we are like
mariners at sea without a compass. On the other hand, intercourse with
consistent persons gives to the mind a sort of tranquillity, peculiarly
favourable to happiness and to virtue. It is like the effect produced by
the perception of an immutable truth, which, from the very force of
contrast, is peculiarly grateful to the inhabitants of so changeable a
world as this. It is moral repose.

This sort of moral repose is most peculiarly advantageous to children,
because it allows ample scope for the development of their mental and
moral faculties; banishing from their minds all that chaotic
bewilderment into which dependence on inconsistent persons throws them.
It is advantageous to them in another, and more important way,--it
prepares them for a belief in virtue; a trust in others, which it is
easy to train up into a veneration for the source of all virtue; a trust
in the origin of all truth. There can be no clearness of moral
perception in the governed, where there is no manifestation of a moral
rule of right in the governor. In speaking of moral perception, I do not
mean to say that children have, properly speaking, a moral perception of
inconsistency; but it affects their comfort and well-being,
nevertheless. There is, in the nature of man, as great a perception of
moral, as of physical order and proportion; and the absence of the moral
produces pain and disgust to the soul, as the absence o