Woman's mission.

Date:
1842
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Woman's mission. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the ideal. He seems to take pleasure in asserting the superiority of his works, by not allowing its noblest and purest reflections of himself to be obscured by intervening shadows. It is the fashion to sneer at those ideas, for which men in different ages have suffered toil, pain, privation, death: the object might be wild—the recovery of a shrine; weak—the love of a woman ; untrue, (if we are to believe the infidel,) the announcement of a world beyond the grave; be it so: poor victims of idio- syncracy; they sacrificed all tangible and solid benefits for a vapour. But who are they, at whose names the eye flashes and the cheek colours, whose memories leave behind them a train of light, like a glorious departing orb? The successful speculator; the luxurious epicurean; the wealthy; the worldly? no—the oppressed but dauntless victim of tyranny; the devoted, though perhaps mistaken, sufferer for fantastic loyalty; the agonized martyr to truth. And for personal happiness, let one of the foremost of these victims of idiosyncracy speak for himself, in his own noble words,—“ We are troubled on every side, but not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyedand contrast them with the mournful confession of him, who, having exhausted all that this world has to bestow,— glory, honour, power, wealth,—bequeathed to us,