RELIGION.

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 hardness of our hearts, and strength of our passions, inflamed

by the uncontrolled licence 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 imagination, 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, is 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 further 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 advices 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 show 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 show 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.

Show 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 showing 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 endearment 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

difference 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 baptised 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 generosity.--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[A].

[A] The reader will remember, that such observations as respect

equally both the sexes, are all along as much as possible

avoided.