In my defense I was careful not to advocate the ordination of women to the ministry in the Presbyterian Church, or their installation in the pastorate. I contended that as our confession of faith was silent on the subject, and that as godly women in the early church were active in the promotion of Christianity (one of them named Anna having publicly proclaimed the coming Messiah), and that as the ministry of my excellent friend, the Quakeress, had for many years been attended by the abundant blessings of the Holy Spirit, my act was rather to be commended than condemned. The discussion before the Presbytery lasted for two days and produced a wide and rather sensational interest over the country. The final vote of the Presbytery, while withholding any censure of my course under the circumstances, was adverse to the practice of permitting women to address "promiscuous audiences" in our churches. Two or three years afterwards, a case similar to mine was appealed to the General Assembly and that body wisely decided that such questions should be left to the judgment and conscience of the pastors and church sessions. When the news of this action of the assembly reached us, the old sexton of the Lafayette Avenue Church hoisted (to the great amusement of our people) the stars and stripes on the church tower as a token of victory. It has now become quite customary to invite female missionaries, and other godly women, to address audiences composed of both sexes in our churches; the padlock has been taken off the tongue of any consecrated Christian woman who has a message from the Master. I invited Miss Willard and Lady Henry Somerset to advocate the Christian grace of temperance from my pulpit; and if I were still a pastor I should rejoice to invite that good angel of beneficence, Miss Helen M. Gould, to deliver there such an address as she lately made in the splendid building she has erected for the "Naval Christian Association." Foreign missions were in their early and vigorous growth eighty years ago. I rode in our family carriage to church with Sheldon Dibble and Reuben Tinker, who were just leaving Auburn Theological Seminary to go out as our pioneer missionaries to the Sandwich Islands. The _Missionary Herald_ was taken in a great number of families and read with great avidity. Many of the readers were people who not only devoutly prayed "Thy Kingdom come," but who were willing to stick to a rag carpet, and deny themselves a "Brussels," in order to contribute more to the spread of that Kingdom. Wealth has increased to a prodigious and perilous extent; but the percentage of money given to foreign missions is very far from what it was in the day of my childhood. It is a growing custom for ministers to utter a prayer over the contribution boxes when they are brought back to the platform before the pulpit; I suspect that it in too many cases should be one of penitential confession.