I should say, mistrust new lights which are a hindrance to old duties, “For meek obedience too is Light.”  It is more likely that we should be mistaken, than that a duty should cease to be binding.  Let us take to heart Cromwell’s appeal to his Parliament, “I beseech you, my beloved brethren, I beseech you by the mercies of Christ, to believe that you may be mistaken.”

The third difficulty is that girls often fail to see that home life is one of the “Home Arts,” which requires training and practice as much as music does.  How much of our home life is set to music?  How much of it sets all harmony and rhythm at defiance?  A true woman is

    “Like the keystone to an arch
      That consummates all beauty: 
    She’s like the music to a march
      That sheds a joy on duty.”

Do you make your father forget his bothers when he comes in from his business?  Do you give your mother a share in your interests?  Does your brother look forward to his time at home, instead of thinking it a bore?  No one has such power over your brothers as you have:  you can do more than any one to give them high ideals:  how many a brother, who has fallen to the stable-yard level of company, might have been held up if his sister had used her wits and tact to make herself as agreeable to him as she does to other people!

Sometimes it is not selfishness which makes home life a failure, but the not having

          “among least things,
    An undersense of greatest.”

A girl tries to live nobly at home and fails:  she is not enough wanted, her mother is not blind, and does not want to be deposed from housekeeping; her father is not paralytic, and only wants her to play to him in the evening; life seems choked by tiny interruptions, such as doing the flowers, or writing notes, and she sinks into a placid or unplacid drudge—­the aspirations with which she left school have died out.

Need this be?  If she went into a sisterhood or a hospital, the tiny details would all be glorified by the halo which surrounds a vocation; it would all be part of a saintly life.  Why is home not felt to be a vocation?  Why cannot a girl welcome some tiresome commission or fidgeting rule of her mother’s, as much as if it were imposed by some Mother Superior?  Ought not the trifling duties to be fuel to her burning desire for her nobleness of life, instead of dust to choke it?  You can make them which you will.

Girls often say, “I have nothing to do, worth doing, at home; I want to go and do some real work;” and they sometimes have the face to say this, while they are still as full of faults as when they left school, and when every hour of the day, at home, brings with it an opportunity of conquering some fault.