THE END OF FEMALE EDUCATION.

The chief end to be proposed in cultivating the understandings of women, is to qualify them for the practical purposes of life. Their knowledge is not often, like the learning of men, to be reproduced in some literary composition, and never in any learned profession; but it is to come out in conduct: it is to be exhibited in life and manners. A lady studies, not that she may qualify herself to become an orator or a pleader; not that she may learn to debate, but to act. She is to read the best books, not so much to enable her to talk of them, as to bring the improvement which they furnish to the rectification of her principles and the formation of her habits. The great uses of study to a woman are to enable her to regulate her own mind, and to be instrumental to the good of others.

She

To woman, therefore, whatever be her rank, I would recommend a predominance of those more sober studies, which, not having display for their object, may make her wise without vanity, happy without witnesses, and content without panegyrists; the exercise of which may not bring celebrity, but will improve usefulness. should pursue every kind of study which will teach her to elicit truth; which will lead her to be intent upon realities, will give precision to her ideas, will make an exact mind. She should cultivate every study which, instead of stimulating her sensibility, will chastise it; which will neither create an excessive nor a false refinement; which will give her definite notions; will bring the imagination under dominion; will lead her to think, to compare, to combine, to methodize; which will confer such a power of discrimination, that her judgment shall learn to reject what is dazzling, if it be not solid; and to prefer, not what is striking, or bright, or new, but what is just. That kind of knowledge which is rather fitted for home consumption than foreign exportation, is peculiarly adapted to women.1

There have not been wanting ill-judging females, who have affected to establish an unnatural separation between talents and usefulness, instead of bearing in mind that talents are the great appointed instruments of usefulness: who have acted as if knowledge were to confer on woman a kind of fantastic sovereignty, which should exonerate her from the discharge of female duties; whereas, it is only meant the more eminently to qualify her for the performance of them. A woman of real sense will never forget that, while the greater part of her proper duties are such as the most moderately gifted may fulfil with credit-since Providence never makes that

1 May I be allowed to strengthen my own opinion with the authority of Dr. Johnson, that a woman cannot have too much arithmetic? It is a solid, practical acquirement, in which there is much use and little display; it is a quiet, sober kind of knowledge, which she acquires for herself and her family, sud not for the world.-II. M.

to be very difficult which is generally necessary; yet that the most highly endowed are equally bound to fulfil them; and let her remember that the humblest of these offices, performed on Christian principles, are wholesome for the minds even of the most enlightened, as they tend to the casting down of those "high imaginations" which women of genius are too much tempted to indulge.

For instance, ladies whose natural vanity has been aggravated by a false education, may look down on economy as a vulgar attainment, unworthy of the attention of a highly cultivated intellect; but this is the false estimate of a shallow mind. Economy, such as a woman of fortune is called on to practise, is not merely the petty detail of small daily expenses, the shabby curtailments and stinted parsimony of a little mind, operating on little concerns; but it is the exercise of a sound judgment exerted in the comprehensive outline of order, of arrangement, of distribution; of regulations by which alone well-governed societies, great and small, subsist. She who has the best-regulated mind will, other things being equal, have the best-regulated family. As, in the superintendence of the universe, wisdom is seen in its effects; and as, in the visible works of Providence, that which goes on with such beautiful regularity is the result not of chance, but of design; so that management which seems the most easy is commonly the consequence of the best-concerted plan; and a well-concerted plan is seldom the offspring of an ordinary mind. A sound economy is a sound understanding brought into action; it is calculation realized; it is the doctrine of proportion reduced to practice; it is foreseeing consequences, and guarding against them; it is expecting contingencies, and being prepared for them.

The truth is, women who are so puffed up with the conceit of talents as to neglect the plain duties of life, will not frequently be found to be women of the best abilities. And here may the author be allowed the gratification of observing, that those women of real genius and extensive knowledge, whose friendship has conferred honor and happiness on her own life, have been, in general, eminent for economy and the practice of domestic virtues; and have risen superior to the poor affectation of neglecting the duties and despising the knowledge of common life, with which literary women have been frequently, and not always unjustly, accused.

GOD RULES THE NATIONS, AND EDUCES GOOD FROM ILL.

That reader looks to little purpose over the eventful page of his tory, who does not accustom himself to mark therein the finger of the Almighty, governing kings and kingdoms; prolonging or contracting the duration of empires; tracing out beforehand, in the

unimpeachable page of the prophet Daniel, an outline of successive empires, which subsequent events have realized with the most critical exactness; and describing their eventual subservience to the spiritual kingdom of the Messiah, with a circumstantial accuracy which the well-informed Christian, who is versed in Scripture language, and whose heart is interested in the subject, reads with unutterable and never-ceasing astonishment. It is, in fact, this wonderful correspondence which gives its highest value to the more ancient half of the historic series. What would it profit us, at this day, to learn from Xenophon that the Assyrian monarch had subjugated all those countries, with the exception of Media, which spread eastward from the Mediterranean, if it were not that, by this statement, he confirms that important portion of sacred and prophetic history? And to what solidly useful purpose would the same historian's detail of the taking of Babylon be applicable, if it did not forcibly, as well as minutely illustrate the almost equally detailed denunciations of the prophet Isaiah? It was partly for the purpose of elucidating this correspondence between sacred prophecy and ancient history, and showing by how regular a providential chain the successive empires of the ancient world were connected with each other, and ultimately with Christianity, that the excellent Rollin composed his well-known work; and the impression which his researches left upon his own mind may be seen in those sublimely pious remarks with which his last volume is concluded.

A careful perusal of the historical and prophetical parts of Scripture will prepare us for reading profane history with great advantage. In the former, we are admitted within the vail, we are informed how the vices of nations drew down on them the wrath of the Almighty; and how some neighboring potentate was employed as the instrument of divine vengeance; how his ambition, his courage, and military skill, were but the means of fulfilling the divine prediction, or of inflicting the divine punishment; how, when the mighty conqueror, the executioner of the sentence of Heaven, had performed his assigned task, he was put aside, and was himself, perhaps, in his turn, humbled and laid low. Such are the familiar incidents of historic and prophetic Scripture.

Do we then mean to admit that the Almighty approves of these excesses in individuals, by which his wisdom often works for the general benefit? God forbid! Nothing, surely, could be less ap

The parts of the book of Daniel chiefly alluded to are Nebuchadnezzar's dream, and Daniel's interpretation of it in the second chapter; and his own vision of the four beasts, in the eighth. These two passages alone, preserved, as they have been, by the most inveterate enemies of Christianity, amount to an irrefragable demonstration that our religion is divine. One of the most ancient and most learned opposers of Revelation is said to have denied the Dossibility of these prophecies having existed before the events; but we know they did exist, and no modern infidel dares to dispute it. But. in admitting this, however they may take refuge in their own inconsequence of mind, they inevitably, though indirectly, allow the truth of Christianity.

proved by him than the licentiousness and cruelty of our eighth Henry, though he overruled those enormities for the advantage of the community, and employed them, as his instruments, for restoring good government, and for introducing, and at length establishing, the Reformation. England enjoys the inestimable blessing, but the monarch is not the less responsible personally for his crimes. We are equally certain that God did not approve of the insatiable ambition of Alexander, or of his incredible acquisition of territory by means of unjust wars. Yet, from that ambition, those wars and those conquests, how much may the condition of mankind have been meliorated? The natural humanity of this hero, which he had improved by the study of philosophy, under one of the greatest masters in the world, disposed him to turn his conquests to the benefit of mankind. He founded seventy cities, says his historian, so situated as to promote commerce and diffuse civilization. Plutarch observes that, had those nations not been conquered, Egypt would have had no Alexandria; Mesopotamia no Seleucia. He also informs us that Alexander introduced marriage into one conquered country, and agriculture into another; that one barbarous nation, which used to eat their parents, was led by him to reverence and maintain them; that he taught the Persians to respect, and not to marry, their mothers-the Scythians to bury, and not to eat, their dead.

To adduce one or two instances more, where thousands might be adduced. Did the Almighty approve those frantic wars which arrogated to themselves the name of holy? Yet, with all the extravagance of the enterprise, and the ruinous failure which attended its execution, many beneficial consequences, as has been already intimated, were permitted, incidentally, to grow out of them. The Crusaders, as their historians demonstrate,1 beheld in their march countries in which civilization had made a greater progress than in their own. They saw foreign manufactures in a state of improvement to which they had not been accustomed at home. They perceived remains of knowledge in the East, of which Europe had almost lost sight. Their native prejudices were diminished in witnessing improvements to which the state of their own country presented comparative barbarity. The first faint gleam of light dawned on them, the first perceptions of taste and elegance were awakened, and the first rudiments of many an art were communicated to them by this personal acquaintance with more polished countries. Their views of commerce were improved, and their means of extending it were enlarged.

It is scarcely necessary to add that the excess to which the popes carried their usurpation, and the Romish clergy their corruptions,

See especially Robertson's State of Europe.

was, by the providence of God, the immediate cause of the Reformation. The taking of Constantinople by the Turks, though, in itself, a most deplorable scene of crimes and calamities, became the occasion of most important benefits to other countries, by compelling the only accomplished scholars then in the world to seek an asylum in the western parts of Europe. To these countries they carried with them the Greek language, which ere long proved one of the providential means of introducing the most important event that has occurred since the first establishment of Christianity.

If, therefore, God often "educes good from ill," yet man has no right to count upon his always doing it, in the same degree in which he appoints that good shall be productive of good. To resume the illustration, therefore, from a few of the instances already adducedwhat an extensive blessing might Alexander, had he acted with other views and to other ends, have proved to that world whose happiness he impaired by his ambition, and whose morals he corrupted by his example! How much more effectually, and immediately, might the Reformation have been promoted, had Henry, laying aside the blindness of prejudice, and subduing the turbulence of passion, been the zealous and consistent supporter of the Protestant cause; the virtuous husband of one virtuous wife, and the parent of children all educated in the sound principles of the Reformation! Again, had the popes effectually reformed themselves, how might the unity of the church have been promoted; and even the schisms, which have arisen in Protestant communities, been diminished! It would be superfluous to recapitulate other instances; these, it is presumed, being abundantly sufficient to obviate any charge of the most distant approach toward the fatal doctrine of Necessity.

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE, 1759-1833.

This renowned philanthropist was born at Hull, on the 24th of August, 1759. His father, a merchant of that town, died before his son had completed his tenth year, and he was committed to the care of a paternal uncle, on whose death the ample patrimony inherited from his father was largely increased. This uncle's wife was a very pious woman, and a great admirer of Whitfield's preaching; and under her care he acquired a familiarity with the sacred writings, and a habit of devotion of which the results were perceptible throughout the whole of his mature life. While at school, he gave a remarkable indication of the character by which his future life was to be distinguished, he sent a letter to the editor of the York paper, "in condemnation of the odious traffic in human flesh." From school he was transferred, at the age of seventeen, to St. John's College, Cambridge, of