It is not blind imitation of men, nor thoughtless acceptance of whatever may be taught by them that is required, for this would be to endorse the widespread error that the race is men. Our duty is loyalty to right and opposition to wrong, in accordance with the essential principles of our own nature. Now, the great essential fact of woman’s nature is the spiritual power of maternity. We should do miserable injustice to this great fact if, looking at it with semiblind eyes, we only see the shallow material aspect of this remarkable speciality. It is the great spiritual life underlying the physical which gives us our true womanly ideal. What are the spiritual principles necessarily involved in this special creation of one-half the race--principles which lie within the material facts of gestation and the care of infancy and childhood, which constitute the distinctive material domain of women? They are the subordination of self to the welfare of others; the recognition of the claim which helplessness and ignorance make upon the stronger and more intelligent; the joy of creation and bestowal of life; the pity and sympathy which tend to make every woman the born foe of cruelty and injustice; and hope--_i.e._, the realization of the unseen--which foresees the adult in the infant, the future in the present. All these are great moral tendencies, and they are necessarily involved in the mighty potentiality of maternity. They lay upon women the weighty responsibility of becoming more and more the moral guides in life’s journey. Women are called upon very specially to judge all practical action as right or wrong, and to exercise influence for this high morality in whatever direction it can be most powerfully exerted. We see the indication of this providential inherited impulse to moral action, in the great and increasing devotion of women to the relief of social suffering and their sturdy opposition to wrong-doing, which form a distinguishing characteristic of our age. These spiritual mothers of the race are often more truly incarnations of the grand maternal life, than those who are technically mothers in the lower physical sense. With sound intellectual growth the range of moral influence increases. But such sound growth can only take place under the guidance of moral principle; for moral perception becomes reason as the intellectual faculties grow, and reason is the true light for all. It is in this high moral life, enlarged by intelligence, that the ideal of womanhood lies. It is through the moral, guiding the intellectual, that the beneficial influence of woman in any new sphere of activity will be felt.