“A perfect woman, nobly plann’d
    To warn, to counsel, to command: 
    The reason firm, the temperate will,
    Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill."[4]

Then, again, I would ask you to make use of your powers of reflection and memory.  Reflect what trials and difficulties are, in the common course of events, likely to assail you; remember former difficulties, former days or weeks of trial, when all your now dormant energies were developed and strained to the utmost.  You felt then the need of much greater powers of mind and body than those which you now complain are lying dormant and useless.  Further imagine the future cases that may occur in which every natural and acquired faculty may be employed for the great advantage of those who are dear to you, and when you will experience that this long interval of repose and preparation was altogether needful.

Such reflections, memories, and imaginations must, however, be carefully guarded, lest, instead of reconciling you to the apparent uselessness of your present life, they should contribute to increase your discontent.  This they might easily do, even though such reflections and memories related only to trials and difficulties, instead of contemplating the pleasures and the importance of responsibilities.  To an ardent nature like yours, trials themselves, even severe ones, which would exercise the powers of your mind and the energies of your character, would be more welcome than the tame, uniform life you at present lead.

The considerations above recommended can, therefore, be only safely indulged in connection with, and secondary to, a most vigilant and conscientious examination into the truth of one of your principal complaints, viz. that you have to do, like the Duke’s wife, “nothing at all."[5] You may be “seeking great things” to do, and consequently neglecting those small charities which “soothe, and heal, and bless.”  Listen to the words of a great teacher of our own day:  “The situation that has not duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man.  Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, pampered, despised actual, wherein thou even now standest, here, or nowhere, is thy ideal; work it out, therefore, and, working, believe, live, be free.  Fool! the ideal is in thyself; the impediment, too, is in thyself:  thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same ideal out of—­what matters whether the stuff be of this sort or of that, so the form thou give it be heroic, be poetic?  O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth,—­the thing thou seekest is already with thee, ’here, or nowhere,’ couldst thou only see.”

When you examine the above assertions by the light of Scripture, can you contradict their truth?