that you may be able at the end of it to say, as proudly as any
peasant, that you have not eaten the bread of idleness.

Then, secondly, I said, you are not to be cruel. Perhaps you think
there is no chance of your being so; and indeed I hope it is not
likely that you should be deliberately unkind to any creature; but
unless you are deliberately kind to every creature, you will often
be cruel to many. Cruel, partly through want of imagination, (a far
rarer and weaker faculty in women than men,) and yet more, at the
present day, through the subtle encouragement of your selfishness by
the religious doctrine that all which we now suppose to be evil will
be brought to a good end; doctrine practically issuing, not in less
earnest efforts that the immediate unpleasantness may be averted
from ourselves, but in our remaining satisfied in the contemplation
of its ultimate objects, when it is inflicted on others.

It is not likely that the more accurate methods of recent mental
education will now long permit young people to grow up in the
persuasion that, in any danger or distress, they may expect to be
themselves saved by the Providence of God, while those around them
are lost by His improvidence: but they may be yet long restrained
from rightly kind action, and long accustomed to endure both their
own pain occasionally, and the pain of others always, with an unwise
patience, by misconception of the eternal and incurable nature of
real evil. Observe, therefore, carefully in this matter; there are
degrees of pain, as degrees of faultfulness, which are altogether
conquerable, and which seem to be merely forms of wholesome trial or
discipline. Your fingers tingle when you go out on a frosty
morning, and are all the warmer afterwards; your limbs are weary
with wholesome work, and lie down in the pleasanter rest; you are