And whether with strangers or at home, remember Him Who was subject unto His parents, Him of Whom Jephthah’s daughter was but a faint type.

A Home Art; or, Mothers and Daughters.

    Know your own work, and do it.

This is a simple sounding rule, but we all find practical difficulties in following it.  You have most of you lately left school, and I think the difficulty of the first part of this saying must have struck some of you.  At school you knew your own work,—­you had a certain time-table, you walked with the crutches of routine; and when you left school and found your day mostly at your own disposal, you learnt that a free life is far more difficult, and therefore far nobler, than a life under direction.

It was pleasant at first to be able to carry out your own fancies, but you awoke after a while to the fact that you were not spending holidays but living your real life; and then the thought must have come, if you had any stuff in you, “I must anyhow live my life; am I living it nobly?”

How can you live a noble life?  Bacon gives us, perhaps, the best answer when he says that “the end of all learning should be the Glory of God and the Relief of Man’s Estate.”  Shall this be the result of your school learning?  Others can speak to you from experience, as I cannot, of the glory and happiness of a life spent in the Relief of Man’s Estate:  I would speak to you of a preliminary stage of work for that relief, of some of the difficulties which beset girls on first leaving school, and owing to which so much noble aspiration and unselfish enthusiasm run to waste.

I believe one of the main difficulties is friction at home; a difficulty on which I the rather dwell because it is harder, for those who know you personally, to speak of it without irritating you, or else criticizing your home.  How is this home difficulty met?  Some meet it by leaving home,—­which reminds me of the minister who said in his sermon, “This is a serious difficulty in our belief, my brethren; let us look it boldly in the face,—­and pass it by.”  Some lay themselves open to Punch’s attack, when he depicts a girl saying, “Mamma has become quite blind now, and papa is paralytic, and it makes the house so dull that I’m going to be a hospital nurse.”

Many who are too clear-sighted to neglect home duties, yet leave this difficulty unfaced, in that they look for all the pleasure of their life outside home, and within that home allow themselves to live in an atmosphere of friction and peevishness.  The girl who does that has left the riddle of home life unsolved:  she was meant to wrestle with that difficulty till she wrung from it the blessing, the peace which comes only from self-conquest and acceptance of all the circumstances of her life.