A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development | Page 3

they saw, the picture of the Virgin hanging in her cell smiling
on her as she prayed; yea, and have wept many a tear as she repeated
her sins over to her confessor, or as she stood by the bed-side of some
poor sufferer, while those gentle Christian hands smoothed the dying
pillow. Rest in peace, soul sainted and dear! The tears thou didst once
shed, are wiped away now forever; the sins thou didst once bewail, are
all forgiven now, for thou hast loved much!
But the day of nuns has gone forever. A higher development must be
sought for. The nun becomes impossible when we train the _intellect_;
Devotion says, Worship; the Mind adds, The Lord thy God. The
Conscience says, Do right; the Intellect shows what is right. The Heart
says, Love thy fellow-men; the Intellect tells the right way of loving
them. Piety and charity! these are glorious! these are the two angels
from Heaven which prompt us to help our brothers who need our help;
but intellect must show us the way to do it. To take a single instance.

Piety and charity cannot show us how to drain and ventilate and rebuild
the hovels of the poor in New York. No, every spade, every saw, every
hammer employed in that most righteous undertaking must be directed
by intellect, by science. Piety and charity may prompt, but intellect
must guide.
I know full well that many a woman's heart, guided only by her sacred
instinct of loving, acts out the law of right without any conscious
questioning of the intellect; that a thousand tender feet carry the gospel
of Christ along the alleys of New York and London, or along the
corridors of the Crimean hospital, though even there also woman's wit
has to aid woman's heart. The noble heart, the Christian love of
Florence Nightingale took her to those eastern shores; this made the
voice tender and the hand gentle. But whoso reads the account of what
she did, will see that beside these, wit and wisdom, keen discerning of
means to ends, ability to see what ought to be done, intellect, reason in
short, was necessary in order to make a Florence Nightingale possible,
together with an exhaustless fund of bodily endurance, fortitude and
stoicism.
Thus, then, we find that devotion, conscience, heart, and intellect are all
necessary to each other in the harmonious development of Human
Nature. Will they be found sufficient for a perfect life?
Put together a strong soul, a tender conscience, a woman's heart, and a
man's intellect, and we have a Charlotte Bronté,--surely one of the best
types of the modern mind. Will she find these four noble parts of
Human Nature sufficient for the task of living?
Let Charlotte Bronté answer, walking painfully across the moor with
hand held hard to beating side, sitting now and then upon a stone to
keep herself from falling, wondering why the daylight blinds her so,
obliged to give up Villette owing to the terrible headaches which it
brings on. Let Charlotte Bronté answer, dying before her time at
thirty-nine years of age, when the path of fame was just beginning to be
bright before her, and the world was just beginning to know how much
it wanted her. Charlotte Bronté, the gifted and the feeble, the lynx-eyed
and the blind, so full of glorious strength and pitiable weakness!
Charlotte Bronté, who feels the pressure of every-day life to be as hard
as a giant's grasp upon her throat! Charlotte Bronté cannot tell why she
is so unhappy, why she feels like a prisoner in the world,--why earth,

our beautiful earth, is like a charnel house to her. And yet we think that
the most ordinary passerby could see very satisfactory reasons why
Charlotte Bronté was what she was, and felt what she felt. Hollow
cheek and faded eye, teach their wisdom to their possessor last of all.
The pale-eyed school-girl, who never played along with the other
children, never ran and laughed and shouted with the rest, little knew
what days and hours and years of dulness, of pain and agony, she was
laying up for the future, what a premature grave she was digging for
herself. Peace be with her, her toil is over; it is now three years since
Heaven received in Charlotte Bronté one angel more.
Intellect, then, needs body. Come, then, and see me build a Man! A
calm, silent devotion, a conscience pure and reverent, a heart manful
and true, an intellect clear and keen, a frame of iron,--with these will
we dower our hero, and call him Washington!
From me Washington needs no eulogy. Free America is at once his
eulogy and his monument! It is useless to say more. Every one here
feels in his