Their minds are turned as much to the care of beauty and dress, and the indulgence of vain desires, as in the present case, without having such rules of devotion to stand against it. So that if solid piety is much wanted in that sex, it is the plain and natural consequence of a vain and corrupt education. If they are often too ready to receive the first fops, beaux, and fine dancers for their husbands; it is no wonder they should like that in men, which they have been taught to admire in themselves. And if they are often seen to lose that little regard to religion, that they were taught in their youth, it is no more to be wondered at, than to see a little flower choaked and killed amongst rank weeds.
Personal pride, affectation, a delight in beauty, and fondness of finery, are tempers that must kill all religion in the soul, or be killed by it; they can no more thrive together than health and sickness.
But how possible it is to bring up daughters in a more excellent way, let the following character declare.
_Eusebia_ is a pious widow, well born, and well bred, and has a good estate for five daughters, whom she loves not only as her natural, but also as her spiritual children; and they reverence her as their spiritual mother, with an affection equal to that of the fondest friends.
“My children, (says she) your dear father was an humble, watchful, truly devout man. Whilst his sickness would suffer him to talk with me, his discourse was chiefly about your education. He knew the ruins that a wrong education made in our sex; and therefore conjured me with the tenderest expressions, to renounce the _fashionable ways_ of educating daughters, and to bring you all up in the most unaffected instances of a truly christian and devout life.
When your father died, I was much pitied by my friends, as having all the care of a family, and the management of an estate fallen upon me. But my own grief was founded on another principle; I was grieved to see myself deprived of so faithful a friend, and that such an eminent example of real devotion, should be taken from the eyes of his children, before they were of an age to love and follow it. But as to worldly cares, which my friends thought lay so heavy upon me, they are most of them of our own making, and fall away as soon as we begin to _know ourselves_.
For this reason, all my discourse with you, has been to acquaint you with yourselves, and to accustom you to such books of devotion, as may best instruct you in this greatest of all knowledge.
You would think it hard, not to know the family into which you was born, what ancestors you were descended from, and what estate was to come to you. But, my children, you may know all this with exactness, and yet be as ignorant of yourselves, as a man that should take himself to be wax, and therefore dared not to let the sun shine upon him.
In order to know yourselves aright, you must consider yourselves as so many fallen embodied spirits, conceived and born in sin, and that your lives began in a state of corruption and disorder, full of tempers and passions, that blind and darken the reason of your minds, and incline you to that which is hurtful.
Your bodies are not only poor and perishing like your cloaths, but they are as _infected cloaths_, that fill you with ill distempers, which oppress the soul with sickly appetites, and vain envyings.
Hence all of us are like two beings, that have as it were two hearts within us: with the one, we see, taste, and admire reason, purity, and holiness; with the other we incline to pride, vanity, and sensual delights.
This internal war we always feel within us more or less; and if you would know the one thing necessary to you and all the world, it is this, to preserve, strengthen, and perfect all that is rational, holy, and divine in our nature, and by the assistance of the blessed Spirit of GOD, to mortify and subdue all that vanity, pride, and sensuality, which springs from the corruption of our state.
Whilst you live thus, you live like yourselves, and what is more, like christians; but whenever you are more intent upon adorning your persons, than upon perfecting your souls, you are much more beside yourselves, than he, that had rather have a laced coat, than an healthful body.
Never consider yourselves, therefore, as persons that are to be seen, admired, and courted by men; but as _poor sinners_, that are to be washed in the blood of the Lamb of GOD, and accepted through his all-sufficient righteousness, received by faith, and to be saved from the follies of a miserable world, and made meet for heaven by the powerful operations of his blessed Spirit.