so that we cannot have Sisters of Charity without accepting also an infallible pope, transubstantiation, the immaculate conception, and Heaven knows what besides, the terror and abomination of our evangelicals? Surely it is an injury to the cause of religious freedom and human progress, an insult to their own peculiar form of faith, for any sect to acknowledge that what they allow to be good and desirable, and even necessary in itself, is inextricable from what they believe to be false and ensnaring. These views are every day driving distinguished, and gifted, and enthusiastic women, into the pale of that Church, which stretches out its arms, and says, "Come unto me, ye who are troubled, ye who are idle, and I will give you rest and work, and, with these, sympathy, and reverence, the religious sanction, direction, and control!" Can we find nothing of all this for our women? Why should they thus go out from among us? I, for my part, do not understand it.

In England it is not the form of Christiani

In the earlier times

ty we profess which is against such an organization of feminine aid in good works as I would advocate; - God forbid! Yet some of our greatest difficulties may be ascribed to the deep-rooted puritanic prejudices bequeathed to us by our ancestors. It is worth considering that the first effect of the Calvinistic reaction against the dominant Church, and against the errors, and exaggerations, and gross materialism which had been connected with the worship of the Virgin Mother, was not favorable to women. of the Christian Church, whenever certain women distinguished themselves by particular sanctity or charity, or exercised any especial moral or intellectual influence, the Church absorbed them, claimed them, held them up to reverence during life, and canonized them after death; and still their beautiful images shine upon us from our cathedral windows, or stand out in sculptured forms in all the dignity of their hallowed office and venerable religious attributes. But after these fair superstitions had been abrogated by the severity of the early reformers, and were succeeded by

the strongest prejudice against women exercising any kind of open and authorized religious or spiritual influence, still there were women who did exercise such influence, the natural power of strong intellect, or strong enthusiasm. The superiority could not be denied; but as it could no longer be referred to a larger measure of heavenly gifts, it must be derived from demoniac power. Men had repudiated angels and saints, but they still devoutly believed in devils and witches. The benign miracles of female charity were the inventions and impositions of a lying priesthood; but woe unto him who doubted in the power of an old woman to ride on a broomstick, or of a young woman to entertain Satan as her emissary in mischief! All the women who perished by judicial condemnation for heresy in the days of the inquisition did not equal the number of women condemned judicially as witches,— hanged, tortured, burned, drowned like mad dogs,-in the first century of the Reformed Church; and these horrors were enacted in the most civilized countries in Europe, by grave magistrates and ecclesi

astics, who were proud of having thrown off the Roman yoke, and of reading their Bibles, where apparently they found as many texts in favor of burning witches as ever did the Inquisitors in favor of burning heretics. It was characteristic of the two diverging superstitions, that in the former age Dante conceived his Beatrice as the type of loving, wise, and spiritual womanhood, leading her lover into Paradise; while Milton's type of female attraction was Eve, the temptress to sin and death. The time is come, let us hope, when men have found out what we may truly be to them, not worshipping us as saints, or apostrophizing us as angels, or persecuting us as witches, or crushing us as slaves; revering us for that power we are allowed to possess, not jealous of it, nor throwing it into some indirect or unhealthy form; profiting by our tenderness, not oppressing us because of it; taking us to themselves as helpers in all social good, not leaving our undirected energies to wear away our own lives, and sometimes trouble theirs.

It is better than a dozen sermons on toleration, to count up the women who, during this half-century, have left the strongest and most durable impress on society, -on the minds and the hearts of their generation. First, there is Mrs. Fry, the Quakeress, to whom we owe the cleansing of our prisons, and in part the reform of our criminal code; Caroline Chisholm, the Roman Catholic, with her strong common sense, her decision and independence of character, who may be said to have reformed the system of emigration; Mary Carpenter, the Dissenter, who has become an authority in all that concerns the treatment of juvenile delinquents; and Florence Nightingale, the Churchwoman, who in our time has opened a new path for female charity and female energy. And let us remember that there is not one of these four admirable women who has not been assailed in turn by the bitterest animosity, by the most vulgar, so-called religious abuse from those who differed from them in their religious tenets, or from those who contemned them, and would have put them