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 passion, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom &hellip; There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in health the mind is presently seen again, its overarching vault bright with galaxies of unmutable lights, and the warm loves and fear which swept over us as clouds, must lose their finite character, and blend with God to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose anything by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end."

On our own hypothesis, the unmarried woman who is modified in the direction of general activity "has interests and occupations of her own"—"she has an extended sphere of public usefulness." The causes of liberty, of purity, of temperance, education, the liberation of the slaves in America, the reform of the laws in England, the progress of Liberty in Europe are to a man so many abstract political principles which he may endeavour to further from different motives, and to clothe with life as far as he can—to a woman they mean various expressions of the principle of good, and their obstruction represents to her human suffering in the concrete, which appeals to her with a keenness and urgency that takes no denial. But it is indignantly insisted that such interests as these do not bring out the lovelier side of a woman's nature. Now we are told that a mother's greatest usefulness is in securing better conditions of life to her children than would otherwise fall to their lot, and that the tie between husband and wife, or mother and child, is not in its highest aspect the merely physical one, but that its highest expression is found in the continuous and tender service rendered by each to the other, and in the need that each has of the love of the other.

It certainly is a noble work to improve the condition of the lives of children, but to do this it is not necessary to marry or to be a mother. An unmarried woman is able to secure better conditions of life to a nation of children who are neglected or abandoned, by devoting herself to public duties, to furthering their education, or to enlightening the public on the laws affecting them. Their happiness and welfare become hers, their improved condition is essentially the product of her life, as a mother a woman may benefit two or three, as a single woman she benefits thousands.

If this is the purest and holiest meaning of the love of mother and child, it is also the true meaning of that love and pity for suffering that inspires a woman to give her life for those