The Young Lady's Mentor

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It is, perhaps, only the young who can be very hopefully addressed on the present subject. A few years hence, and your habits of mind will be unalterably formed; a few years hence, and your struggle against a discontented spirit, even should you be given grace to attempt it, would be a perpetually wearisome and discouraging one. The penalty of past sin will pursue you until the end, not only in the pain caused by a discontented habit of mind, but also in the consciousness of its exceeding sinfulness.

Every thought that rebels against the law of God involves its own punishment in itself, by contributing to the establishment of habits that increase tenfold the difficulties to which a sinful nature exposes us.

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Such reflections, memories, and imaginations must, however, be carefully guarded, lest, instead of reconciling you to the apparent uselessness of your present life, they should contribute to increase your discontent. This they might easily do, even though such reflections and memories related only to trials and difficulties, instead of contemplating the pleasures and the importance of responsibilities. To an ardent nature like yours, trials themselves, even severe ones, which would exercise the powers of your mind and the energies of your character, would be more welcome than the tame, uniform life you at present lead.

The considerations above recommended can, therefore, be only safely indulged in connection with, and secondary to, a most vigilant and conscientious examination into the truth of one of your principal complaints, viz. that you have to do, like the Duke's wife, "nothing at all."5 You may be "seeking great things" to do, and consequently neglecting those small charities which "soothe, and heal, and bless." Listen to the words of a great teacher of our own day: "The situation that has not duty, its ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, pampered, despised actual, wherein thou even now standest, here, or nowhere, is thy ideal; work it out, therefore, and, working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the ideal is in thyself; the impediment, too, is in thyself: thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same ideal out of—what matters whether the stuff be of this sort or of that, so the form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth,—the thing thou seekest is already with thee, 'here, or nowhere,' couldst thou only see."

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