In this brief and most incomplete sketch of the origin of one of the distinguishing features of contemporary Christianity--the application of the systematized activity of private Christians--no mention has been made of the corps of "colporteurs," or book-peddlers, employed by religious publication societies, nor of the vastly useful work of laymen employed as city missionaries, nor of the houses and orders of sisters wholly devoted to pious and charitable work. Such work, though the ceremony of ordination may have been omitted, is rather clerical or professional than laical. It is on this account the better suited to the genius of the Catholic Church, whose ages of experience in the conduct of such organizations, and whose fine examples of economy and efficiency in the use of them, have put all American Christendom under obligation. Among Protestant sects the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, and the Methodists have (after the Moravians) shown themselves readiest to profit by the example. But a far more widely beneficent service than that of all the nursing "orders" together, both Catholic and Protestant, and one not less Christian, while it is characteristically American in its method, is that of the annually increasing army of faithful women professionally educated to the work of nursing, at a hundred hospitals, and fulfilling their vocation individually and on business principles. The education of nurses is a sequel of the war and one of the beneficent fruits of it. * * * * *