YOUNG MEN ARE FOND OF YOUR COMPANY

and of paying you every polite attention, and you, as a right-minded woman, are well pleased to be so treated. It is due to you as a woman. Now, each of them is, or ought to be, looking out for a wife, and it is well that you should know this. It is, too, more important than you perhaps are aware, that you should be carefully making your own observations, so that when the time arrives for one of them to ask you to become his wife you may not be taken by surprise, but may know how to act on the occasion.

Let me caution you here against a failing that is common among young women. I mean that of making themselves too cheap. They feel flattered by the attentions paid to them, and are not sufficiently aware that many young men are fond of indulging in flattery; and such, if they find a young woman weak enough to be pleased with it, will perhaps play upon her feelings and gain her affections without having any honorable intentions towards her.


As a protection against such, I recommend you to have a proper respect for yourself, and to consider with what object or purpose you receive their attentions. If you respond without an object, you may be doing them wrong; if you accept them when they have no right intentions, you allow them to wrong you. For this purpose consider well what you are—a human being intended for an eternity of bliss. God has made you a woman; and, believe me, as there is no fairer, so there is no nobler creature than woman. She is formed to be her husband's helpmate and the mother of his children, and the all-important work of training these for heaven depends mainly upon her. Great, then, is her responsibility; but God has given her the requisite love and power to do her duty with satisfaction and delight. He has placed you in this beautiful world that by doing your duty as a daughter, sister, wife, mother, and friend, you may become fitted to enter His heavenly kingdom.

During your courtship let me entreat you to be very careful and circumspect. There is no period of life that can compare with this delightful season. It is, or should be, full of sunshine and sparkling with the poetry of life; but alas! to many it is the opposite. A want of judgment—a momentary indiscretion—has not only blotted out this beautiful springtime of life, but has marred, darkened, and blighted the whole of the after lifetime.

No maiden can, under any circumstances, place her character in the hands of any man before marriage. No matter how sincere the love, how ardent the protestations, how earnest or plausible the pleadings, you must not, you cannot, surrender your honor. You must preserve your prudence and virtue; it is only by possession of these that you can keep.