re of equal, if of unlike, frailties; whose weak
human heart beats no more tunefully than yours.

But it is the object of a liberal education not only to obscure the
knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify the natural differences
between the two. Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but
principally by catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is
astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the
girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very
small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for
judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is more largely
displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally widened. They
are taught to follow different virtues, to hate different vices, to
place their ideal, even for each other, in different achievements. What
should be the result of such a course? When a horse has run away, and
the two flustered people in the gig have each possessed themselves of a
rein, we know the end of that conveyance will be in the ditch. So, when
I see a raw youth and a green girl fluted and fiddled in a dancing
measure into that most serious contract, and setting out upon life's
journey with ideas so monstrously divergent, I am not surprised that
some make shipwreck, but that any come to port. What the boy does almost
proudly, as a manly peccadillo, the girl will shudder at as a debasing
vice; what is to her the mere common sense of tactics, he will spit out
of his mouth as shameful. Through such a sea of contrarieties must this
green couple steer their way; and contrive to love each other; and to
respect, forsooth; and be ready, when the time arrives, to educate the
little men and women who shall succeed to their places and perplexities.

And yet, when all has been said, the man who should hold back from
marriage is in the same case with him who runs away from battle. To
avoid an occasion for our virtues is a worse degree of failure than to
push forward pluckily and make a fall. It is lawful to pray God that we
be not led into temptation; but not lawful to skulk from those that come
to us. The noblest passage in one of the noblest books of this century,
is where the old pope glories in the trial, nay, in the partial fall and
but imperfect triumph, of the younger hero.[3] Without some such manly
note, it were perhaps better to have no conscience at all. But there is
a vast difference between teaching fl