" To govern the tongue in this manner must
require great address indeed; and it is too much practised both by
men and women. Out of the abundance of the heart how few speak!
So few, that I, who love simplicity, would gladly give up
politeness for a quarter of the virtue that has been sacrificed to
an equivocal quality, which, at best, should only be the polish of
virtue.
But to complete the sketch. "It is easy to be conceived, that if
male children be not in a capacity to form any true notions of
religion, those ideas must be greatly above the conception of the
females: it is for this very reason, I would begin to speak to
them the earlier on this subject; for if we were to wait till they
were in a capacity to discuss methodically such profound questions,
we should run a risk of never speaking to them on this subject as
long as they lived. Reason in women is a practical reason,
capacitating them artfully to discover the means of attaining a
known end, but which would never enable them to discover that end
itself. The social relations of the sexes are indeed truly
admirable: from their union there results a moral person, of which
woman may be termed the eyes, and man the hand, with this
dependence on each other, that it is from the man that the woman is
to learn what she is to see, and it is of the woman that man is to
learn what he ought to do. If woman could recur to the first
principles of things as well as man, and man was capacitated to
enter into their minutae as well as woman, always independent of
each other, they would live in perpetual discord, and their union
could not subsist.
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