Page:The Higher Education of Women.djvu/13

 repair the ruin of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him,' the language might be taken in a general sense; and when he goes on to define a complete and generous education as 'that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war,' the words might still, perhaps, bear a common interpretation; but as soon as he comes to describing in detail, 'how all this may be done between twelve and one-and-twenty,' it becomes evident that he is thinking of boys only. In the most recent writers, the tendency to regard general theories of education as applying