Page:The Daughters of England.djvu/197

186 in infancy and youth, has a most beneficial effect upon the mind, in the bias it gives towards the feeling and expression of gratitude in general, not only as confined to the intercourse of social life, or the interchange of kindness amongst our fellow-creatures; but with regard to the higher obligations of gratitude, which every child of sin and sorrow must feel, on being admitted to participation in the promises of the gospel, and the glorious hopes which the gospel was sent to inspire.

I have said, that women, above all created beings, have cause for gratitude. Deprived of the benefits of the Christian dispensation, woman has ever been, and will be ever the most abject, and the most degraded of creatures, oppressed in proportion to her weakness, and miserable in proportion to her capability of suffering. Yet, under the Christian dispensation, she who was the first in sin, is raised to an equality with man, and made his fellow-heir in the blessings of eternal life. Nor is this all, A dispensation which had permitted her merely to creep, and grovel through this life, so as to purchase by her patient sufferings a title to the next, would have been unworthy of that law of love by which pardon was offered to a guilty world. In accordance with the ineffable beneficence of this law, woman was therefore raised to a moral, as well as a spiritual equality with man; and from being first his tempter, and then his slave, she has become his helpmate, his counsellor, his friend, the object of his most affectionate solicitude, the sharer of his dignity, and the partaker in his highest enjoyments.

When we compare the situation of woman, too, in our privileged land, with what it is even now in countries where the Christian religion less universally prevails, we cannot help exclaiming, that of all women upon earth, those who live under the salutary influence of British laws and