it when I used to teach it. Say it
to them in your own plain and simple way, and I trust that it may do
them good.

"I want you to tell them from me that I have tried what the world and
its idols are, and I have found them `vanity of vanities.' Not that I
have been leading what is called a wicked life; not that I have loved
gay company or worldly amusements; not that I have lost sight of Christ
and heaven altogether, though they have been getting further off from my
sight every day; but I have been fashioning for myself an idol with my
own hands, which has been shutting out heavenly things from me more and
more. And now God has in mercy shattered my idol, and I trust that I
can see Jesus once more as I have not seen him, oh, for so long!

"I am startled when I look back and see how far I have gone astray, and
how I have let the devil cheat me with a thousand plausible falsehoods.
Oh, what a useless life I have been leading! What a selfish life I have
been leading! And yet I have been persuading myself that I was only
cultivating the powers which God gave me. But it has not been so; it is
as though I had been set to draw a picture of our Saviour, and had
ability and the best of materials given me for making a beautiful
likeness, and I had all the while gone on just drawing an image of
myself, and had then fallen down and worshipped it.

"Tell my girls, then,--for I may never have the opportunity of telling
them myself,--that there is no real happiness in such a life as mine has
lately been. It is really purely for self is this struggle after
distinction; God put us into this world for something far different. I
know, of course, that my scholars are not any of them likely to be
snared exactly in the same way that I have been. Still, they might be
tempted to think what a grand thing it would be to have the advantages
for getting knowledge and distinction that I have had. Ah, but what has
been my life, after all? Why, like that group of wax flowers under the
glass shade. Don't they look beautiful? But you see they are not real;
they have no life and no sweetness in them, and they can never make the
sick and the suffering happy as real flowers do. My life, with all its
advantages, and what people call accomplishments, has been as unreal, as
lifeless, as scentless as those wax flowers. It has not pleased God; it
has not made others happy; there has been nothing to envy in it, but oh,
quite the other way: it