“Third.—­Hast thou endeavored to perform thy relative duties faithfully; been a tender, loving, yielding wife, where thy own will and pleasure were concerned, a tender yet steady mother with thy children, making thyself quickly and strictly obeyed, but careful in what thou requirest of them; a kind yet honest mistress, telling thy servants their faults, when thou thinkest it for their or thy good, but never unnecessarily worrying thyself or them about trifles, and to everyone endeavoring to do as thou wouldst be done unto?”

A life governed by these principles, and measured by these rules, was not likely to be otherwise than strictly, severely, nervously good.  We use the word “nervously” because here and there, up and down the pages of her journal are scattered numerous passages full of such questions as the above.  None ever peered into their hearts, or searched their lives more relentlessly than she did.  Upright, self-denying, just, pure, charitable, “hoping all things, bearing all things, believing all things,” she judged herself by a stricter law than she judged others; condemning in herself what she allowed to be expedient, if not lawful, in others, and laying bare her inmost heart before her God.  After she had done all that she judged it to be her duty to do, she humbly and tearfully acknowledged herself to be one of the Lord’s most “unprofitable servants.”  It would be useless to endeavor to measure such a life by any rules of worldly polity or fashions.  An extract written at this time, relative to the welfare and treatment of servants, may be of use in showing how she permitted her sound sense and practical daily piety to decide for her in emergencies and anxieties growing out of the “mistress and servant” question.  “At this time there is no set of people I feel so much about as servants; as I do not think they have generally justice done to them.  They are too much considered as another race of beings, and we are apt to forget that the holy injunction holds good with them:  ’As ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.’  I believe in striving to do so we shall not take them out of their station in life, but endeavor to render them happy and contented in it, and be truly their friends, though not their familiars or equals, as to the things of this life.  We have reason to believe that the difference in our stations is ordered by a wiser than ourselves, who directs us how to fill our different places; but we must endeavor never to forget that in the best sense we are all one, and, though our paths may be different, we have all souls equally valuable, and have all the same work to do, which, if properly considered, should lead us to have great sympathy and love, and also a constant care for their welfare, both here and hereafter.  We greatly misunderstand each other (I mean servants and masters in general); I fully believe, partly from our different situations in life, and partly from our different educations, and the way in which each party is apt to view the other.  Masters and mistresses are greatly deficient, I think, in a general way; and so are most servants towards them; it is for both to keep in view strictly to do unto others as they would be done unto, and also to remember that we are indeed all one with God.”