It is so easy after schooldays are ended to enjoy all the pleasant
things that lie around, to slip into what comes easiest, to wait for
something to turn up, and so really to lose the fruits of past education
because it is not carried into practice or used as a means for further
development.
This is the critical period of a girl's life. For a boy every one
considers the choice of a definite profession imperative; for a girl,
unless necessity compels it, the general idea is that it would be a pity
for her to take to any work, let her at any rate wait a bit and enjoy
herself, then probably something will turn up. This might be all very
well if the waiting time were used for further education, for
preparation for the work of life. But in too many cases studies begun at
school are carried no further, habits of work are lost, and intellectual
development comes to a standstill.
We are seeing increasingly in every department of life how much depends
upon the home and upon the training given by the mother, and yet it does
not seem as if girls as a rule prepared themselves seriously for that
high position. The mother should be the first, the chief religious
teacher of her children, but most women are content to be vaguely
religious themselves whilst hardly knowing what they themselves believe,
and feeling perfectly incapable of teaching others.
[Sidenote: How to Begin]
Yet how are they to fulfil the call which will surely come to them to
teach either their own children or those of others if they have not
troubled to gain religious knowledge for themselves? The Bible, which
becomes each day a more living book because of all the light thrown upon
it by recent research, should be known and studied as the great central
source of teaching on all that concerns the relations between God and
man.
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