So thinking, you will
constantly support your own unworthiness, and easily
forgive the failings of your friend. Nay, you will be
wisely glad that you retain the sense of blemishes; for the
faults of married people continually spur up each of them,
hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love upon a
higher ground. And ever, between the failures, there will
come glimpses of kind virtues to encourage and console.
*
But it is the object of a liberal education not only to
obscure the knowledge of one sex by another, but to magnify
the natural differences between the two. Man is a creature
who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by
catchwords; and the little rift between the sexes is
astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of
catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. To the
first, there is shown but a very small field of experience,
and taught a very trenchant principle for judgment and
action; to the other, the world of life is more largely
displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally
widened. They are taught to follow different virtues, to
hate different vices, to place their ideal, even for each
other, in different achievements. What should be the
result of such a course? When a horse has run away, and
the two flustered people in the gig have each possessed
themselves of a rein, we know the end of that conveyance
will be in the ditch.
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