Consistency of principle is brought to the test in every daily, hourly occurrence of woman’s life, and if she have been brought up without an abiding sense of duty and responsibility, she is of all beings most unfortunate; influences the most potent are committed to her care, and from her they issue like the simoom of the desert, breathing moral blight and death.  I have endeavoured, in some degree, to enforce the power of indirect influences on the minds of children:  they are very powerful in the other relations of life; in the conjugal, the truth is too well known and attested by tale and song to need additional corroboration here—­and this book is principally, though not wholly, dedicated to woman in her maternal character.

The extreme importance of the manifestation of consistency in mothers may be argued from this fact, that it is of infinite importance to children to see the daily operation of an immutable and consistent rule of right, in matters sufficiently small to come within the sphere of childish observation, and, therefore, if called upon to give a definition of the peculiar mission of woman, and the peculiar source of her influence, I should say it is the application of large principles to small duties,—­the agency of comprehensive intelligence on details.  That largeness of mental vision, which, while it can comprehend the vast, is too keen to overlook the little, is especially to be cultivated by women.  It is a great mistake to suppose the two qualities are incompatible; and the supposition that they are so, has done much mischief; the error arises not from the extent, but from the narrowness of our capacity, To aspire is our privilege, and a privilege which we are by no means slack to use, without considering that the operations of infinitude are even more incomprehensible in their minuteness than in their magnitude, and that, therefore, to be always looking from the minute towards the vast, is only a proof of the finite nature of our present capacity.  The loftiest intellect may, without abasement, be employed on the minutest domestic detail, and in all probability will perform it better than an inferior one:  it is the motive and end of an action which makes it either dignified or mean.  In the homely words of old Herbert

    All may of thee partake: 
      Nothing can be so mean,
    Which, with this tincture, for thy sake
      Will not grow bright and clean.

It is then in the minutiae of daily life and conduct that this consistency has its most beneficial operation, and it must derive its power from the personal character for this reason, that no virtues but indigenous ones are capable of the sort of moral transfusion here mentioned.  It is rare to see a parent, eminently distinguished by any moral virtue, unsuccessful in the transmitting that virtue to children, simply because, being an integral part of character, it is consistent in its mode of operation; so virtues originating in effort, or practised for the sake of example, are seldom transferable; the same consistency cannot be expected in the exercise of them, and this may explain the small success of pattern mothers, par excellence so called, and whose good intentions and sacrifices ought not to be objects of derision; the very appearance of effort mars the effect of all effort.