that pure and tender heart of flesh, which teaches her always to find her highest interest in mankind, simply as mankind; to see the Divine most completely in the human; to prefer the incarnate to the disembodied, the personal to the abstract, the pathetic to the intellectual; to see, and truly, in the most common tale of village love or sorrow, a mystery deeper and more divine than lies in all the theories of politicians or the fixed ideas of the sage.

Such a course of history would quicken women’s inborn personal interest in the actors of this life-drama, and be quickened by it in return, as indeed it ought:  for it is thus that God intended woman to look instinctively at the world.  Would to God that she would teach us men to look at it thus likewise!  Would to God that she would in these days claim and fulfil to the uttermost her vocation as the priestess of charity!—­that woman’s heart would help to deliver man from bondage to his own tyrannous and all-too-exclusive brain—­ from our idolatry of mere dead laws and printed books—­from our daily sin of looking at men, not as our struggling and suffering brothers, but as mere symbols of certain formulae), incarnations of sets of opinions, wheels in some iron liberty-grinding or Christianity-spinning machine, which we miscall society, or civilisation, or, worst misnomer of all, the Church!

This I take to be one of the highest aims of woman—­to preach charity, love, and brotherhood:  but in this nineteenth century, hunting everywhere for law and organisation, refusing loyalty to anything which cannot range itself under its theories, she will never get a hearing, till her knowledge of the past becomes more organised and methodic.  As it is now, for want of large many-sided views of the past, her admiration is too apt to attach itself to some two or three characters only in the hero-list of all the ages.  Then comes the temptation to thrust aside all which interferes with her favourite idols, and so the very heart given her for universal sympathy becomes the organ of an exclusive bigotry, and she who should have taught man to love, too often only embitters his hate.  I claim, therefore, as necessary for the education of the future, that woman should be initiated into the thoughts and feelings of her countrymen in every age, from the wildest legends of the past to the most palpable naturalism of the present; and that not merely in a chronological order, sometimes not in chronological order at all; but in a true spiritual sequence; that knowing the hearts of many, she may in after life be able to comfort the hearts of all.