THOUGH the duties of religion, strictly speaking, are equally binding on
both sexes, yet certain differences in their natural character and
education, render some vices in your sex particularly odious. The
natural hardiness of our hearts, and strength of our passions, inflamed
by the uncontrouled license we are too often indulged with in our youth,
are apt to render our manners more dissolute, and make us less
susceptible of the finer feelings of the heart. Your superior delicacy,
your modesty, and the usual severity of your education, preserve you, in
a great measure, from any temptation to those vices to which we are most
subjected. The natural softness and sensibility of your dispositions
particularly fit you for the practice of those duties where the heart is
chiefly concerned. And this, along with the natural warmth of your
imaginations, renders you peculiarly susceptible of the feelings of
devotion.
THERE are many circumstances in your situation that peculiarly require
the supports of religion to enable you to act in them with spirit and
propriety. Your whole life is often a life of suffering. You cannot
plunge into business, or dissipate yourselves in pleasure and riot, as
men too often do, when under the pressure of misfortunes. You must bear
your sorrows in silence, unknown and unpitied. You must often put on a
face of serenity and cheerfulness, when your hearts are torn with
anguish, or sinking in despair. Then your only resource is in the
consolations of religion. It is chiefly owing to these that you bear
domestic misfortunes better than we do.
BUT you are sometimes in very different circumstances, that equally
require the restraints of religion. The natural vivacity, and perhaps
the natural vanity of your sex, are very apt to lead you into a
dissipated state of life, that deceives you, under the appearance of
innocent pleasure; but which in reality wastes your spirits, impairs
your health, weakens all the superior faculties of your minds, and often
sullies your reputations. Religion by checking this dissipation and rage
for pleasure, enables you to draw more happiness, even from those very
sources of amusement, which when too frequently applied to, are often
productive of satiety and disgust.
RELIGION is rather a matter of sentiment than reasoning. The important
and interesting articles of faith are sufficiently plain. Fix your
attention on these, and do not meddle with controversy. If you get into
that, you plunge into a chaos, from which you will never be able to
extricate yourselves. It spoils the temper, and, I suspect, has no good
effect on the heart.
AVOID all books, and all conversation, that tend to shake your faith on
those great points of religion which should serve to regulate your
conduct, and on which your hopes of future and eternal happiness depend.
NEVER indulge yourselves in ridicule on religious subjects; nor give
countenance to it in others, by seeming diverted with what they say.
This, to people of good-breeding, will be a sufficient check.
I WISH you to go no farther than the Scriptures for your religious
opinions. Embrace those you find clearly revealed. Never perplex
yourselves about such as you do not understand, but treat them with
silent and becoming reverence.—I would advise you to read only such
religious books as are addressed to the heart; such as inspire pious and
devout affections, such as are proper to direct you in your conduct, and
not such as tend to entangle you in the endless maze of opinions and
systems.
BE punctual in the stated performance of your private devotions morning
and evening. If you have any sensibility or imagination, this will
establish such an intercourse between you and the Supreme Being, as will
be of infinite consequence to you in life. It will communicate an
habitual cheerfulness to your tempers; give a firmness and steadiness to
your virtue, and enable you to go through all the vicissitudes of human
life with propriety and dignity.
I WISH you to be regular in your attendance on public worship, and in
receiving the communion. Allow nothing to interrupt your public or
private devotions, except the performance of some active duty in life,
to which they should always give place.—In your behaviour at public
worship, observe an exemplary attention and gravity.
THAT extreme strictness which I recommend to you in these duties, will
be considered by many of your acquaintance as a superstitious attachment
to forms; but in the advice I give you on this and other subjects, I
have an eye to the spirit and manners of the age. There is a levity and
dissipation in the present manners, a coldness and listlessness in
whatever relates to religion, which cannot fail to infect you, unless
you purposely cultivate in your minds a contrary bias, and make the
devotional taste habitual.
AVOID all grimace and ostentation in your religious duties. They are the
usual cloaks of hypocrisy; at least they shew a weak and vain mind.
DO not make religion a subject of common conversation in mixed
companies. When it is introduced, rather seem to decline it. At the same
time, never suffer any person to insult you by any foolish ribaldry on
your religious opinions, but shew the same resentment you would
naturally do on being offered any other personal insult. But the surest
way to avoid this, is by a modest reserve on the subject, and by using
no freedom with others about their religious sentiments.
CULTIVATE an enlarged charity for all mankind, however they may differ
from you in their religious opinions. That difference may probably arise
from causes in which you had no share, and from which you can derive no
merit.
SHEW your regard to religion, by a distinguishing respect to all its
ministers, of whatever persuasion, who do not by their lives dishonour
their profession; but never allow them the direction of your consciences
lest they taint you with the narrow spirit of their party.
THE best effect of your religion will be a diffusive humanity to all in
distress.—Set apart a certain proportion of your income as sacred to
charitable purposes. But in this, as well as in the practice of every
other duty, carefully avoid ostentation. Vanity is always defeating her
own purposes. Fame is one of the natural rewards of virtue. Do not
pursue her, and she will follow you.
DO not confine your charity to giving money. You may have many
opportunities of shewing a tender and compassionate spirit where your
money is not wanted.—There is a false and unnatural refinement in
sensibility, which makes some people shun the sight of every object in
distress. Never indulge this, especially where your friends or
acquaintances are concerned. Let the days of their misfortunes, when the
world forgets or avoids them, be the season for you to exercise your
humanity and friendship. The sight of human misery softens the heart,
and makes it better; it checks the pride of health and prosperity, and
the distress it occasions is amply compensated by the consciousness of
doing your duty, and by the secret endearments which nature has annexed
to all our sympathetic sorrows.
WOMEN are greatly deceived, when they think they recommend themselves to
our sex by their indifference about religion. Even those men who are
themselves unbelievers dislike infidelity in you. Every man who knows
human nature, connects a religious taste in your sex with softness and
sensibility of heart; at least we always consider the want of it as a
proof of that hard and masculine spirit, which of all your faults we
dislike the most. Besides, men consider your religion as one of their
principal securities for that female virtue in which they are most
interested. If a gentleman pretends an attachment to any of you, and
endeavours to shake your religious principles, be assured he is either a
fool, or has designs on you which he dares not openly avow.
YOU will probably wonder at my having educated you in a church different
from my own. The reason was plainly this: I looked on the differences
between our churches to be of no real importance, and that a preference
of one to the other was a mere matter of taste. Your mother was educated
in the church of England, and had an attachment to it, and I had a
prejudice in favour of every thing she liked. It never was her desire
that you should be baptized by a clergyman of the church of England, or
be educated in that church. On the contrary, the delicacy of her regard
to the smallest circumstance that could affect me in the eye of the
world, made her anxiously insist it might be otherwise. But I could not
yield to her in that kind of generality.—When I lost her, I became still
more determined to educate you in that church, as I feel a secret
pleasure in doing every thing that appears to me to express my affection
and veneration for her memory.—I draw but a very faint and imperfect
picture of what your mother was, while I endeavour to point out what you
should be.[2]
Footnote 2:
The reader will remember, that such observations as respect equally
both the sexes are all along as much as possible avoided.