It places a thousand little obstacles in his way, the well-calculated effect of which is to keep him alive in impotent insignificance. In those ages of weaker malevolence the heretic is quietly but carefully excluded from the best educational and social advantages, from public office, from political power. Wherever he turns, whatever he desires to do, he feels the presence of a mysterious invisible force that quietly pushes him aside or keeps him in shadow. Well, in this milder, more coldly cruel form of wrong, vast numbers of the gentlest and most amiable women have always been ready to acquiesce.[15] I willingly pass from this part of the subject, but it was impossible not to make one sad reference to it, for of all the sorrowful things in the history of the world I see none more sorrowful than this,--that the enormous influence of women should not have been more on the side of justice. It is perhaps too much to expect that they should have placed themselves in advance of their age, but they have been innocent abettors and perpetuators of the worst abuses, and all from their proneness to support any authority, however corrupt, if only it can succeed in confounding itself with goodness. As the representatives of a Deity who tenderly cares for every one of His creatures, the clergy themselves are bound to cultivate all their own powers and gifts of sympathy. The best of them do this with the important result that after some years spent in the exercise of their profession they become really and unaffectedly more sympathetic than laymen generally are. The power of sympathy is a great power everywhere, but it is so particularly in those countries where the laity are not much in the habit of cultivating the sympathetic feelings, and timidly shrink from the expression of them even when they exist. I remember going with a French gentleman to visit a lady who had very recently lost her father; and my friend made her a little speech in which he said no more than what he felt, but he said it so elegantly, so delicately, so appropriately, and in such feeling terms, that I envied him the talent of expressing condolence in that way. I never knew an English layman who could have got through such an expression of feeling, but I have known English clergymen who could have done it. Here is a very great and real superiority over us, and especially with women, because women are exquisitely alive to everything in which the feelings are concerned, and we often seem to them dead in feeling when we are only awkward, and dumb by reason of our awkwardness.