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HANNAH MORE

(1745-1833)

ANNAH MORE, perhaps the most influential of all female moralists, was born in Gloucestershire, England, February 2d, 1745. Her father, Jacob More, was a schoolmaster, who educated her carefully, and she began life as a teacher in a boarding school for young ladies, established by herself and sisters, at Bristol, in 1757. It was for the young ladies of this school that her first play, "The Search for Happiness," was written. Her writings attracted the attention of Garrick and she became a favorite with him and his friends, including Doctor Johnson himself. After writing plays, poems, essays, and tales, she began (1795-98) writing "tracts" for circulation among the working classes. By this work she hoped to check the growth of infidelity, and she so far succeeded that she may be called one of the chief inventors of the modern tract society's system of work. It is said that two million of her sketches written for this purpose were circulated in a single year.

She lived to be eighty-seven years old, dying at Clifton, September 7th, 1833. Among the most noted of her stories are "The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain" and "Colebs in Search of a Wife." Her "Moriana » is a series of short essays and epigrammatic sayings arranged alphabetically by title. They represent her at her best as an essayist.

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"MORIANA»

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

T Is superfluous to decorate woman highly for early youth; youth is itself a decoration. We mistakingly adorn most that part of life which least requires it, and neglect to provide for that which will want it most. It is for that sober period, when life has lost its freshness, the passions their intenseness, and the spirits their hilarity, that we should be preparing. Our wisdom would be, to anticipate the wants of middle life, to lay in a store of notions, ideas, principles, and habits, which may preserve, or transfer to the mind, that affection which was at first partly attracted by the person. But to add a vacant mind to a

form which has ceased to please, to provide no subsidiary aid to beauty while it lasts, and especially no substitute when it is. departed, is to render life comfortless, and marriage dreary.

Let such women as are disposed to be vain of their comparatively petty attainments look up with admiration to those two contemporary shining examples, the venerable Elizabeth Carter and the blooming Elizabeth Smith. I knew them both, and to know was to revere them. In them let our young ladies contemplate profound and various learning, chastised by true Christian humility. In them let them venerate acquirements which would have been distinguished in a university, meekly softened and beautifully shaded by the gentle exertion of every domestic virtue, by the unaffected exercise of every feminine employment. Complete.

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APPLAUSE

UMAN applause is, by a worldly man, reckoned not only among the luxuries of life, but among articles of the first necessity. An undue desire to obtain it has certainly its foundation in vanity, and it is one of our grand errors to reckon vanity a trivial fault. An over-estimation of character, and an anxious wish to conciliate all suffrages, is an infirmity from which even worthy men are not exempt; nay, it is a weakness from which, if they are not governed by a strict religious principle, worthy men are in most danger. Reputation being in itself so very desirable a good, those who actually possess it, and in some sense deserve to possess it, are apt to make it their standard, and to rest in it as their supreme aim and end.

We are as fond of the applauses even of the upper gallery as the dramatic poet. Like him, we affect to despise the mob, considered as individual judges, yet, as a mass, we court their applause. Like him, we feel strengthened by the number of voices in our favor, and are less anxious about the goodness of the work than about the loudness of the acclamation. Success is merit in the eyes of both.

Complete.

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AUTHORS

F WE resolve never to read a work of instruction because the author had faults, Lord Bacon's inexhaustible mine of intellectual wealth might still have been unexplored. Luther, the man to whom the Protestant world owes more than to any other uninspired being, might remain unread, because he is said to have I wanted the meekness of Melanchthon. Even the divine instructions in the book of Ecclesiastes would have been written in vain.

Evil in the man would not invalidate the truths he has been teaching. Balaam, though a bad man, prophesied truly. Erasmus, whose piety is almost as doubtful as his wit and learning were unquestionable, yet, by throwing both into the right scale, was a valuable instrument in effecting the great work in which he was concerned. Erasmus powerfully assisted the Reformation, though it is not quite so clear that the Reformation essentially benefited Erasmus.

If, then, the writer advances unanswerable arguments in the cause of truth, if he impressively enforces its practical importance, his character, even if defective, should not invalidate his reasoning. Though we allow that even to the reader it is far more satisfactory when the life illustrates the writing, yet we must never bring the conduct of the man as any infallible test of the truth of his doctrine. Allow this, and the reverse of the proposition will be pleaded against us. Take the opposite case. Do we ever produce certain moral qualities which Hobbes, Bayle, Hume, and other sober skeptics possessed, as arguments for adopting their opinions? Do we infer, as a necessary consequence, that their sentiments are sound, because their lives were not flagitious?

It would be the highest degree of unfairness to prefer a charge of injustice, hypocrisy, or inconsistency against an author, because his life, in some respects, falls short of the strictness of his writings. It is a disparity almost inseparable from this state of frail mortality. He may have fallen into errors, and yet deserve to have no heavier charges brought against him than he has brought against others. Infirmity of temper, inequality of mind, a heart, though fearing to offend God, yet not sufficiently dead to the world, these are the lingering effects of sin imperfectly subdued, in a heart which yet longs, prays, and labors, for a complete deliverance from all its corruptions.

Of two evils, had not an author better be tedious than superficial? From an overflowing vessel you may gather more, indeed, than you want, but from an empty one you can gather nothing.

Complete.

THE BIBLE

HE sacred volume was composed by a vast variety of writers,

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men of every different rank and condition, of every diversity of character and turn of mind; the monarch and the plebeian, the illiterate and the learned, the foremost in talent and the moderately gifted in natural advantages, the historian and the legislator, the orator and the poet,— each had his immediate vocation, each his peculiar province: some prophets, some apostles, some evangelists, living in ages remote from each other, under different modes of civil government, under different dispensations of the Divine economy, filling a period of time which reached. from the first dawn of heavenly light to its meridian radiance.

The Old Testament and the New, the Law and the Gospel; the prophets predicting events, and the evangelists recording them; the doctrinal yet didactic epistolary writers, and he who closed the sacred canon in the apocalyptic vision; -all these furnished their respective portions, and yet all tally with a dovetailed correspondence: all the different materials are joined with a completeness the most satisfactory, with an agreement the most incontrovertible.

This instance of uniformity without design, of agreement without contrivance; this consistency maintained through a long series of ages, without a possibility of the ordinary methods for conducting such a plan; these unparalleled congruities, these unexampled coincidences-form altogether a species of evidence, of which there is no other instance in the history of all the other books in the world.

Our Divine Teacher does not say Read, but Search the Scriptures. The doctrines of the Bible are of everlasting interest. All the great objects of history lose their value, as through the lapse of time they recede further from us; but those of the book of God are commensurate with the immortality of our nature. All existing circumstances, as they relate to this world merely, lose their importance as they lose their novelty; they even melt in air, as they pass before us.

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