No harm! I would rather hear you were dead than that you lived a life like that!

On the other hand, every day of your life you can make the wings of your soul grow by an honest bit of self-denial, by an honest bit of work for others, by an honest bit of mental work.

Every day you can be more worth having; there is not one of you here who has not the power to make herself—­and to pray herself—­into a noble, dutiful woman.

"Get up, M. le Comte! you have great things to do to-day."

[Footnote 3:  Gray’s Letters to W. Mann.]

A Friday Lesson.

Our course of lessons for this term brings us to-day to Jephthah’s story; to decide on the amount of blame due to the father is not a matter which so nearly concerns us as to learn the lesson of true womanhood taught us by the daughter.  Hers was no blind obedience; her reason for sacrificing herself gives us the true position of a woman as a helpmeet, and as a helpmeet in the performance of public duty.  “If thou hast opened thy mouth unto the Lord”—­her father must do his duty at all costs, and she will help him to do it, even at the cost of her own life.  The place of every woman is to make duty possible and imperative for those about her—­for brother, sister, husband, friend.  How many women keep their menkind back from public duty by their fretfulness about the inconveniences entailed on themselves?  A clergyman or doctor has to face fatigue or infection,—­a citizen wishes to vote according to his conscience and against his interest:  how often a woman—­wife, sister, or mother—­puts expediency before him, persuades him that “‘second best’ will do,” instead of aiming at “one equal temper of heroic hearts.”

Besides the love of her country and the sense of public duty, which shine out in Jephthah’s daughter, notice the plain lesson of simple obedience, “That she subdued her to her Father’s will.”

The ideal of obedience is less thought of now than in the “Ages of Faith,”—­perhaps, in one way, this is only a right development; but, though obedience is a “young” stage of moral growth, it is a necessary one,—­mankind went through it, and each man or woman worth the name must go through it even as our Lord Himself did.  I recognize the strength, the North-country virtue of “grit” in such independence and sturdiness as that of the Yorkes in “Shirley,” but the willing and reasonable obedience of a strong nature seems to me still higher—­it is a nobler attitude of mind to feel, “I don’t care whether I get my own way in this or that, or am my own master; I want to be in touch with the larger, higher life around me,” that larger life of moral growth into which only a humble, teachable nature can enter.  The larger, stronger nature—­the big dog—­yields gladly to its master; the small terrier nature loves to find an opportunity to yap and snarl.  There is nothing fine about the unreasoning instinct to resent an order—­it