instruction, and to leave it to reading is too indirect and causes the mind to dwell
on it for too long periods. Best of all is individual instruction at the time,
concise, practical, and never, especially in the early years, without a certain
mystic and religious tone which should pervade all and make everything sacred.
This should not be given by male physicians—and indeed most female doctors
would make it too professional, and the maiden teacher must forever lack
reverence for it—but it should come from one whose soul and body are full of
wifehood and motherhood and who is old enough to know and is not without the
necessary technical knowledge.
Another principle should be to broaden by retarding; to keep the purely mental
back and by every method to bring the intuitions to the front; appeals to tact and
taste should be incessant; a purely intellectual man is no doubt biologically a
deformity, but a purely intellectual woman is far more so. Bookishness is
probably a bad sign in a girl; it suggests artificiality, pedantry, the lugging of
dead knowledge. Mere learning is not the ideal, and prodigies of scholarship are
always morbid. The rule should be to keep nothing that is not to become
practical; to open no brain tracts which are not to be highways for the daily
traffic of thought and conduct; not to overburden the soul with the impedimenta
of libraries and records of what is afar off in time or zest, and always to follow
truly the guidance of normal and spontaneous interests wisely interpreted.
Religion will always bold as prominent a place in woman's life as politics does
in man's, and adolescence is still more its seedtime with girls than with boys. Its
roots are the sentiment of awe and reverence, and it is the great agent in the
world for transforming life from its earlier selfish to its only really mature form
of altruism. The tales of the heroes of virtue, duty, devotion, and self-sacrifice
from the Old Testament come naturally first; then perhaps the prophets
paraphrased as in the pedagogic triumph of Kent and Saunders's little series; and
when adolescence is at its height then the chief stress of religious instruction
should be laid upon Jesus's life and work. He should be taught first humanly, and
only later when the limitations of manhood seem exhausted should His Deity be
adduced as welcome surplusage. The supernatural is a reflex of the heart; each
sustains and neither can exist without the other. If the transcendent and supernal
had no objective existence, we should have to invent and teach it or dwarf the
life of feeling and sentiment. Whatever else religion is, therefore, it is the
supremest poetry of the soul, reflecting like nothing else all that is deepest, most
generic and racial in it. Theology should be reduced to a minimum, but nothing
denied where wanted. Paul and his works and ways should be for the most part