all the instinctive wisdom and mercy of their womanhood made vain, and the glory of their pure consciences warped into fruitless agony concerning questions which the laws of common serviceable life would have either solved for them in an instant, or kept out of their way.  Give such a girl any true work that will make her active in the dawn, and weary at night, with the consciousness that her fellow-creatures have indeed been the better for her day, and the powerless sorrow of her enthusiasm will transform itself into a majesty of radiant and beneficent peace.

So with our youths.  We once taught them to make Latin verses, and called them educated; now we teach them to leap and to row, to hit a ball with a bat, and call them educated.  Can they plough, can they sow, can they plant at the right time, or build with a steady hand?  Is it the effort of their lives to be chaste, knightly, faithful, holy in thought, lovely in word and deed?  Indeed it is, with some, nay with many, and the strength of England is in them, and the hope; but we have to turn their courage from the toil of war to the toil of mercy; and their intellect from dispute of words to discernment of things; and their knighthood from the errantry of adventure to the state and fidelity of a kingly power.  And then, indeed, shall abide, for them, and for us, an incorruptible felicity, and an infallible religion; shall abide for us Faith, no more to be assailed by temptation, no more to be defended by wrath and by fear;—­shall abide with us Hope, no more to be quenched by the years that overwhelm, or made ashamed by the shadows that betray:—­shall abide for us, and with us, the greatest of these; the abiding will, the abiding name of our Father.  For the greatest of these is Charity.[261]

  [230] Isaiah xl, 12.

[231] I have sometimes been asked what this means.  I intended it to set forth the wisdom of men in war contending for kingdoms, and what follows to set forth their wisdom in peace, contending for wealth. [Ruskin.]

  [232] See Wordsworth’s poem, My heart leaps up when I behold.

  [233] See Genesis ii, 15, and the opening lines of the first
  selection in this volume.

  [234] Joshua ix, 21.

  [235] In his Discourses on Art.  Cf. pp. 24 ff. above.

  [236] See The Two Paths, Sec.Sec. 28 et seq. [Ruskin.]

  [237] References mainly to the Irish Land Question, on which Ruskin
  agreed with Mill and Gladstone in advocating the establishment of a
  peasant-proprietorship in Ireland.

  [238] Genesis iii, 19.

  [239] Ecclesiastes ix, 10.

  [240] Hebrews xi, 4.

  [241] During the famine in the Indian province of Orissa.

  [242] Athena, goddess of weaving.

  [243] Proverbs xxxi, 19-22, 24.

  [244] Jeremiah xxxviii, 11.