Frederick Robertson glowingly expatiates on the glory of womanhood, as surely one which, if woman rightly comprehended her place on earth, might enable her to accept its apparent humiliation unrepiningly; the glory, as he defines it, of unsensualizing coarse and common things, sensual things, the objects of mere sense, meat and drink and household cares, elevating them by the spirit in which she ministers them, into something transfigured and sublime. “The humblest mother of a poor family, who is cumbered with much serving, or watching over a hospitality which she is too poor to delegate to others, or toiling for love’s sake in household work, needs no emancipation in God’s sight. It is the prerogative and the glory of her womanhood to consecrate the meanest things by a ministry which is not for self.” What hundreds and thousands of female invalids have felt, and almost in the same words said, with Lucy Aikin, when enfeebled with age and other ailments, “The thought which sits heavy on my mind is that of my own inutility. Alas! what important end of existence do I fulfil? To whom is it of any real consequence whether or not I continue to fill a place in the world? I hope that involuntary uselessness will not be imputed, and that we may say, ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’” A fellow-worker of the same sex, but made of sterner stuff, in the dedication of a book written in illness, tells her friend, “You know, as well as I, how withering would be the sense of our own nothingness, if we tried to take comfort from our own dignity and usefulness.” And she goes on to say how ridiculous, if it were not shocking, would be any complacency on the ground of having followed the instincts of her nature to work, while work was possible,—the issues of such divinely appointed instrumentality being wholly brought out and directed by Him who framed and actuated her. To apply the words of Aurora Leigh:— ... “Though we fail indeed,— You, I, a score of such weak-workers,—He Fails never. If He cannot work by us, He will work over us. Does He want a man, Much less a woman, think you? Every time The star winks there, so many souls are born, Who all shall work too. Let our own be calm: We should be ashamed to sit beneath those stars, Impatient that we’re nothing.” So Mrs. Browning. And pitched in the self-same key is this stanza of her husband’s:— “All service ranks the same with God: If now, as formerly He trod Paradise, His presence fills Our earth, each only as God wills Can work—God’s puppets, best and worst, Are we; there is no last nor first.”