Page:Wives and mothers in the olden time.djvu/10

vi value of time, and the need of employing every moment of it for eternity?

The keynote of their lives was the love of God, and its fruit was love to all around them, but especially to the poor.

I do not say that there are not such women now, but I say that their number is lamentably small, and that I see very few young women willing to follow in their steps. Pleasure, dress, and luxury absorb their days and nights ; they have no thought for the suffering they could relieve, the sorrows they could soothe, the sickness they could alleviate ; even their ordinary home duties are looked upon as irksome. Then they marry, and the same round of self-pleasing begins; the same want of energy and self-denial, the same frivolity and waste of time, even if nothing worse. How can such women influence the society about them for good? For in all ages it is women who have regenerated society or degraded it, debased or raised it. Men, writes a clever author, are what women make them.

Let them see their mothers, wives, or sisters absorbed in interests worthy of the name: in the supervision of their households and their homes; in the temporal and spiritual welfare of the perishing millions around them; in the care of the sick, the