You know that I admire the old-fashioned type of woman—­the womanly woman,—­and you will not suspect me of wishing you to start off “on some adventure strange and new,” but I do want you not to be content to lead a commonplace life; you must, anyway, live your life:  resolve that by God’s grace you will live it nobly.  You cannot alter the outward form of your life,—­you will probably be surrounded by very commonplace household duties, and worries, and jars,—­but you can be like King Midas, whose touch turned the most common things to gold.  We have it in our power, as Epictetus tells us, to be the gold on the garment of Life, and not the mere stuff of which Fate weaves it.  We can choose whether we will live a king’s life or a slave’s:  Marcus Aurelius on his throne was a king, for nothing could conquer him; but Epictetus in chains was equally unconquerable and equally a king.  We all have the choice between the Crown and the Muck Rake, and I think we sometimes turn to the straws and the rubbish, not because they are fascinating to us, but because they seem the only things open to us:  we do not feel as if our lives had anything to do with Crowns.  If you think of your various homes from the point of view of turning their “necessities to glorious gains,” and as a field for winning your spurs, I suspect you are each feeling that this is very “tall talk” for such a commonplace home as yours.  “All lives have an ideal meaning as well as their prose translation;” but you feel perhaps that you are sure to be swamped in little bothers and duties, and pleasures, and dulness and stagnation, so that you will find it hard to see any ideal meaning at all.  This is not true, and to look on an ideal life as “tall talk” is a snare of the Devil; and in these days of common sense and higher education we need to guard against it, and to remember that “a thing may be good enough for practical purposes, but not for ideal purposes.”  “Ideal life” is not tall talk, but our plain duty, unless our Lord was mocking us when He said, “Be ye perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”

To know our ideal is one step towards attaining it.  “So run, not as uncertainly; so fight, not as one that beateth the air.”  Before taking such a definite step in life as leaving school, it would be very interesting to draw up a plan of what you would like your life to be, and also of what you hope to make of the life apparently before you, which may be very different from the life you would like.  If you kept it, like sealed orders, for five years, it would be interesting to see how your views had changed, and how prayers had been answered in unexpected ways, and it would also be a solemn warning to see, as we assuredly should, that wilful prayers had been heard to our hurt.