ON THE MEANS OF SECURING PERSONAL INFLUENCE.
The qualities which seem more especially needful in a character which is to influence others, are, consistency, simplicity, and benevolence, or love.
By consistency of character, I mean consistency of action with principle, of manner with thought, of _self_ with _self_. The want of this quality is a failing with which our sex is often charged, and justly; but are we to blame? Our hearts are warm, our nerves irritable, and we have seen how little there is, in existing systems of female education, calculated to give wide, lofty, self-devoted principles of action. Without such principles, there can be no consistency of conduct; and without consistency of conduct, there can be no available moral influence.
The peculiar evil arising from want of consistency, is the want of trust or faith which it engenders. This is felt in the common intercourse with the world. In our relations with inconsistent persons, we are like mariners at sea without a compass. On the other hand, intercourse with consistent persons gives to the mind a sort of tranquillity, peculiarly favourable to happiness and to virtue. It is like the effect produced by the perception of an immutable truth, which, from the very force of contrast, is peculiarly grateful to the inhabitants of so changeable a world as this. It is moral repose.
This sort of moral repose is most peculiarly advantageous to children, because it allows ample scope for the development of their mental and moral faculties; banishing from their minds all that chaotic bewilderment into which dependence on inconsistent persons throws them. It is advantageous to them in another, and more important way,--it prepares them for a belief in virtue; a trust in others, which it is easy to train up into a veneration for the source of all virtue; a trust in the origin of all truth. There can be no clearness of moral perception in the governed, where there is no manifestation of a moral rule of right in the governor. In speaking of moral perception, I do not mean to say that children have, properly speaking, a moral perception of inconsistency; but it affects their comfort and well-being, nevertheless. There is, in the nature of man, as great a perception of moral, as of physical order and proportion; and the absence of the moral produces pain and disgust to the soul, as the absence of the physical does to the senses. This state of pain and disgust is felt, though it can never be expressed, by children, who are under the management of inconsistent persons,--that is, persons whose conduct is guided solely by feeling, (good or bad,) by caprice, or impulse; and how injurious it is to them, we may easily conceive. If, however, their present comfort only were endangered by it, the evil would be of comparatively small magnitude; but it affects their character for life. They cease to trust, and they cease to venerate; now, trust is the root of faith, and veneration of piety:--and when the root is destroyed, how can the plant flourish? Perhaps we may remark that the effect here produced upon children is the same as that which long intercourse with the world produces in men: only that the effect differs in proportion to their differing intellectual faculties. The child is annoyed, and knows not the cause of annoyance; the man is annoyed, and endeavours to lose the sense of discomfort in a universal skepticism as to human virtue, and a resolving of all actions into one principle, self-interest. He thus seeks to create a principle possessing the stability which he desires, but seeks in vain to find; for, be it remembered, our love of moral stability is precisely as great as our love of physical change;--another of the mysteries of our being. The effects on the man are the same as on the child,--he ceases to believe, and he ceases to venerate; and the end is the most degrading of all conditions,--the abnegation of all abstract virtue, generosity, or love. Now, into this state children are brought by the inconsistency of parents,--that is, these young and innocent creatures are placed in a condition, moral and intellectual, which we consider an evil, even when produced by long contact with a selfish and unkind world. And thus they enter upon life, prepared for vice in all its forms,--and skepticism, in all its heart-withering tendencies. How can parents bear this responsibility? There is something so touching in the simple faith of childhood,--its utter dependence,--its willingness to believe in the perfection of those to whom it looks for protection--that to betray that faith, to shake that dependence, seems almost akin to irreligion.