retribution. But, chiefly of all, she is to be taught to extend the
limits of her sympathy with respect to that history which is being
for ever determined as the moments pass in which she draws her
peaceful breath; and to the contemporary calamity, which, were it
but rightly mourned by her, would recur no more hereafter. She is
to exercise herself in imagining what would be the effects upon her
mind and conduct, if she were daily brought into the presence of the
suffering which is not the less real because shut from her sight.
She is to be taught somewhat to understand the nothingness of the
proportion which that little world in which she lives and loves,
bears to the world in which God lives and loves;--and solemnly she
is to be taught to strive that her thoughts of piety may not be
feeble in proportion to the number they embrace, nor her prayer more
languid than it is for the momentary relief from pain of her husband
or her child, when it is uttered for the multitudes of those who
have none to love them,--and is "for all who are desolate and
oppressed."

Thus far, I think, I have had your concurrence; perhaps you will not
be with me in what I believe is most needful for me to say. There
IS one dangerous science for women--one which they must indeed
beware how they profanely touch--that of theology. Strange, and
miserably strange, that while they are modest enough to doubt their
powers, and pause at the threshold of sciences where every step is
demonstrable and sure, they will plunge headlong, and without one
thought of incompetency, into that science in which the greatest men
have trembled, and the wisest erred. Strange, that they will
complacently and pridefully bind up whatever vice or folly there is
in them, whatever arrogance, petulance, or blind
incomprehensiveness, into one bitter bundle of consecrated myrrh.