I have referred to the age of the Roman Catholic Church. Lord Macaulay, in accounting for her astonishing longevity as compared with other institutions, turns with felicitous insight to female influence as one of the principal causes. In her system, he says, she assigns to devout women spiritual functions, dignities, and even magistracies. In England, if a pious and devout woman enter the cells of a prison to pray with the most unhappy and degraded of her sex, she does so without any authority from the Church. Indeed, the Protestant Church places the ban of its reprobation on any such irregularity. "At Rome, the Countess of Huntingdon would have a place in the calendar as St. Selina, and Mrs. Fry would be Foundress and First Superior of the Blessed Order of Sisters of the Jails." But even Macaulay overlooks another element of power and permanence in the economy of the Catholic Church. God, as Father, and as Son, and as Holy Ghost, might inspire reverence and dread only in hearts that, at the shrine of the ever blessed Mary, Mother of God, would kindle into humble, holy and lasting love. Frances Power Cobbe, though deprecating the doctrine of "Mariolatry," as she terms the worship of the Virgin, yet says of it, "The Catholic world has found a great truth, that love, motherly tenderness and pity is a divine and holy thing, worthy of adoration.... What does this wide-spread sentiment regarding this new divinity indicate? It can surely only point to the fact that there was something lacking in the elder creed, which, as time went on, became a more and more sensible deficiency, till at last the instinct of the multitude filled it up in this amazing manner." When Theodore Parker, in his morning prayer on a beautiful summer Sunday, addressed the All-loving as "Our Father and our Mother," he struck a chord which will one day vibrate through the heart of universal humanity. It was a thought worth infinitely more than all the creeds of Christendom. What if woman should even abuse the use of the ballot at first? Man has been known to fail at first in a new pursuit. A maker of microscopes told me that, in a new attempt on a different kind of object-glass, he failed forty-nine times, but the fiftieth was a complete success. The poet of Scotland intimates that even Creative Nature herself improved at a second trial; "Her 'prentice hand she tried on man; And then she made the lasses, o!"