other sort of knowledge which is valuable. Give me but this trait of
character in a young woman, and I will not despair of her, however low
may be her present condition, or how degraded soever may have been her
former life. Give me but a hearty desire, a hungering and thirsting for
improvement--physical, moral, intellectual, social and religious--and I
will dare to believe that the most debased and depressed soul
_may_ be restored, at least in some good measure, to that likeness
to Jehovah in which it was originally created.

One thing more, however, should be remembered. Not a few who really
have within them the desire of improvement, and who mean to make the
Bible and its doctrines their standard, fail of accomplishing much
after all. The reason is, they measure themselves, continually, by
their neighbors. If they are no more ignorant or no more vicious than
their neighbors--Misses S. and L., perhaps--or on the other hand, if
they are as wise and as virtuous as Miss R.--they seem to rest
satisfied. Or at any rate, if, they make as much progress in the great
path of self-knowledge, or do as much good in the world as the latter,
they are anxious for no more, and settle down in inaction.

Now every such individual ought to know that the habit of measuring
herself by others, in this way, will hang like a millstone about her
neck; and if it do not drown her in the depths of ignorance and
imbecility, will at least make her forever a child, in comparison with
what she should be. It will keep her grovelling on the earth's surface,
when she ought to be exploring the highest heavens. It will keep her a
near neighbor to the sisterhood of worms on which she treads, when she
ought to be soaring towards those lofty heights which Gabriel once
traversed--nay, which he even now traverses--fast by the throne of the
Eternal.