The days in which Rizpah lived were dark and gloomy days.  The words of Samuel to Agag may stand as their memorial, “As thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women.”  Let us be thankful that we see no such direful scenes, and let us act worthy of our higher lot.  Let us remember also that there is a destruction of life more terrible even than that which Rizpah witnessed—­the destruction of the soul.  If the mother’s love within us prompts us to half the care of the spiritual life of our children, which she bestowed on the decaying forms of her loved ones, He who rewards faithfulness will not suffer us to labor in vain.

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Each day is a new life; regard it therefore, as an epitome of the world.  Frugality is a fair fortune, and industry a good estate.  Small faults indulged, are little thieves to let in greater.

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Original.

FEMALE EDUCATION—­INTELLECTUAL TRAINING.

BY REV.  S. W. FISHER.

Let us now enter upon the second part of the field of education, the training of the intellect.  It is obvious that we have in this, a much higher subject to deal with than that on which we have just dwelt.  The physical form in a few years develops itself, and soon reaches its utmost limits of growth.  It is then an instrument whose powers we seek to maintain but cannot increase.  As time advances, indeed, those powers gradually yield to the influence of disease or age, until the senses begin to neglect their office, the brain declines in vigor, while the tongue, the eye, the hand, forget their accustomed work in the imbecility wrought by the approach of death.  But no such limitation is manifest to us in the growth and future life of the intellect.  Dependent upon the body for a healthful home in this world, and so far limited by the conditions of mortality, it yet seems to have in itself no absolute limitation bounding its prospective and possible attainments, save as the finite never can fully attain to the infinite.  Granting it a congenial home, a fitting position, with full opportunity for progress, and there is scarcely a height this side infinity which in the ascent of ages it seems not capable of reaching.  All creatures are finite, and as such, limited; but the horizon around the soul is so amazingly expansive, and the capacities of the mind for progress so immense, that to us, in our present state, it is almost as if there were no limitations at all.

The power of the intellect to acquire facts and relations, and from them to ascend to the laws which control; its power to advance in a daily ascending path into the region of intuition, where masses of things, once isolated or chaotic, range themselves into harmony, and move in numbers most musical; its power thus to rise into an enlarging vision of truths now latent, and behold directly laws, relations and facts which