correct great errors, while allowing its laws to take their course
in punishing small ones. If you prepare a dish of food carelessly,
you do not expect Providence to make it palatable; neither if,
through years of folly, you misguide your own life, need you expect
Divine interference to bring round everything at last for the best.
I tell you, positively, the world is not so constituted: the
consequences of great mistakes are just as sure as those of small
ones, and the happiness of your whole life, and of all the lives
over which you have power, depend as literally on your own common
sense and discretion as the excellence and order of the feast of a
day.

Think carefully and bravely over these things, and you will find
them true: having found them so, think also carefully over your own
position in life. I assume that you belong to the middle or upper
classes, and that you would shrink from descending into a lower
sphere. You may fancy you would not: nay, if you are very good,
strong-hearted, and romantic, perhaps you really would not; but it
is not wrong that you should. You have, then, I suppose, good food,
pretty rooms to live in, pretty dresses to wear, power of obtaining
every rational and wholesome pleasure; you are, moreover, probably
gentle and grateful, and in the habit of every day thanking God for
these things. But why do you thank Him? Is it because, in these
matters, as well as in your religious knowledge, you think He has
made a favourite of you? Is the essential meaning of your
thanksgiving, "Lord, I thank Thee that I am not as other girls are,
not in that I fast twice in the week while they feast, but in that I
feast seven times a week while they fast," and are you quite sure
this is a pleasing form of thanksgiving to your Heavenly Father?
Suppose you saw one of your own true earthly sisters, Lucy or Emily,