excellences, beyond those which characterize the religious feelings of men,—while fully appreciating all the sympathy and power of heroic endurance manifested by Christian Women, and fully recognizing the general truth, that Religion thrives far better in the soil of a susceptible heart than in that of a powerful understanding,—we must yet grant that the female type of piety has a weak side,—the side, namely, of a morbid sentimentalism. Now this side may be expected to exhibit itself in high relief in our Sisterhoods, where the sentiments of devout Women constitute the religious atmosphere of the place. And as the tone of the disciple insensibly reacts upon the tone of the teacher, and what the first is eager to receive the second is usually prompt to supply, it is likely enough that the spiritual pastors and guides of such communities will (with perfectly pure intention and without dreaming of evil) pander to a style of religion very much out of keeping (to say the least of it) with the sobriety of Holy Scripture, and with the staid and dignified tone of the Book of Common Prayer. Those who have read the Spiritual Letters of St. Francis de Sales, and have observed the difference of tone between the generality of them which are addressed to women, and the few in which his correspondents are men, will immediately recognize what I mean. Souls should be dealt with on the same principles, whatever souls they be; the same fervour, the same unction, should be manifested in the guidance of either sex; but in the direction of his female disciples, this saintly man displays now and then a tincture of sentimentalism which can hardly be called healthy. Madame de Chantal and the others craved for something of that sort, and he, as their director, with the utmost artlessness, supplied it. There may be the truest unction in religion without unctuousness. Our Litany is an instance of this.