customs, _for the future_. They have not sought to make you feel
your present responsibilities, your present power to do good, your
present capacity for communicating and securing happiness, so much as
to make you believe there are responsibilities, and powers, and
capacities, and rewards, to be yours when you come to be large enough
and old enough to appreciate or receive them.

But whatever your parents may have left undone in regard to the
formation of your character, it is yours to do. Need I urge the
necessity of the case? The present is an exceedingly important period
of your life; and what is to be done, must be done quickly. But what
your parents have hitherto left undone, they will be likely to continue
to leave undone. Unless you apply yourself, therefore--and that
immediately--to the finishing of a work, that, owing to the
circumstances in which they have been and still are placed, and the
views they have entertained, they have left unfinished, your education
is not likely to be, by any means, so perfect as it should be. You must
take it up, therefore, where they have left it; and do, for yourself,
what they have not done for you. In other words, you must engage, at
once, in the great work of self-education.

It may, indeed, be the case, that you are the child of parents who have
done their best, and who have done it intelligently. Blessed is the
young woman who has such parents, but thrice blessed are the parents
themselves, if, in the performance of their work, they have the co-
operation of the daughter. There must be self-education even where
there are the best of parents. In fact, the work of parental training
and that of self-education, should go on together; they cannot well be
separated. Parental effort will produce but half its legitimate
results, when not seconded by the efforts of infancy and childhood, and