But the day of nuns has gone forever.  A higher development must be sought for.  The nun becomes impossible when we train the intellect; Devotion says, Worship; the Mind adds, The Lord thy God.  The Conscience says, Do right; the Intellect shows what is right.  The Heart says, Love thy fellow-men; the Intellect tells the right way of loving them.  Piety and charity! these are glorious! these are the two angels from Heaven which prompt us to help our brothers who need our help; but intellect must show us the way to do it.  To take a single instance.  Piety and charity cannot show us how to drain and ventilate and rebuild the hovels of the poor in New York.  No, every spade, every saw, every hammer employed in that most righteous undertaking must be directed by intellect, by science.  Piety and charity may prompt, but intellect must guide.

I know full well that many a woman’s heart, guided only by her sacred instinct of loving, acts out the law of right without any conscious questioning of the intellect; that a thousand tender feet carry the gospel of Christ along the alleys of New York and London, or along the corridors of the Crimean hospital, though even there also woman’s wit has to aid woman’s heart.  The noble heart, the Christian love of Florence Nightingale took her to those eastern shores; this made the voice tender and the hand gentle.  But whoso reads the account of what she did, will see that beside these, wit and wisdom, keen discerning of means to ends, ability to see what ought to be done, intellect, reason in short, was necessary in order to make a Florence Nightingale possible, together with an exhaustless fund of bodily endurance, fortitude and stoicism.

Thus, then, we find that devotion, conscience, heart, and intellect are all necessary to each other in the harmonious development of Human Nature.  Will they be found sufficient for a perfect life?

Put together a strong soul, a tender conscience, a woman’s heart, and a man’s intellect, and we have a Charlotte Bronte,—­surely one of the best types of the modern mind.  Will she find these four noble parts of Human Nature sufficient for the task of living?

Let Charlotte Bronte answer, walking painfully across the moor with hand held hard to beating side, sitting now and then upon a stone to keep herself from falling, wondering why the daylight blinds her so, obliged to give up Villette owing to the terrible headaches which it brings on.  Let Charlotte Bronte answer, dying before her time at thirty-nine years of age, when the path of fame was just beginning to be bright before her, and the world was just beginning to know how much it wanted her.  Charlotte Bronte, the gifted and the feeble, the lynx-eyed and the blind, so full of glorious strength and pitiable weakness!  Charlotte Bronte, who feels the pressure of every-day life to be as hard as a giant’s grasp upon her throat!  Charlotte Bronte cannot tell why she is so unhappy, why she feels like a prisoner in the world,—­why