In all that has been written until now, I have simply tried to outline the new horizon opened up to the gentler sex as the supreme outgrowth of that civilization which He introduced, of whom history records the significant fact that women were “last at his cross, first at his sepulchre.” To attempt some delineation of the landscape enclosed by that far-reaching horizon is my more difficult task in the chapters now to follow. Many letters have come to me as a result of the articles thus far; they bristle with questions and are eloquent with aspiration. Later on I may ask space for a “symposium” with these “inquiring friends” in the genial pages of our tolerant CHAUTAUQUAN. One speaking with authority exhorts me to “Be practical—that’s what we want!” As if I hadn’t been! But every mind is the prisoner of its own material and method. I can but give of such things as I have; can only tell what life has told to me. According to my own habits of thought, the sequence seems logical, when I turn for a while from the presentation of the modern outlook for women, with its opportunity and hope, to the _rationale_ of this new horizon stretching so far away. Let us note the pathway that has led up to this more hopeful point of view, asking the inevitable question, “Why does that seem natural and fitting for a young woman to do and to aspire to now, which would have been no less improper than impossible, a hundred years ago?” Sweet friends, it is because _the ideal of woman’s place in the world is changing in the average mind_. For as the artist’s ideal precedes his picture, so the ideal woman must be transformed before the actual one can be. In an age of brute force, the warrior galloping away to his adventures waved his mailed hand to the lady fair who was enclosed for safe keeping in a grim castle with moat and drawbridge. But to-day, when spirit force grows regnant, a woman can circumnavigate the globe alone, without danger of an uncivil word, much less of violence. We shall never span a wider chasm than this change implies. All our inventions have led up to it, and have in nothing else wrought out beneficence so great as they have accomplished here, purely by indirection. In brief, the barriers that have hedged women into one pathway and men into another, altogether different, are growing thin, as physical strength plays a less determining part in our life drama. All through the vegetable and animal kingdoms the fact of sex does not widely differentiate the broader fact of life, its environment and its pursuits. Hence, the immense separateness which sex is called in to explain when we reach the plane of humanity, is to be accounted for largely on other purely artificial grounds. In Eden it did not exist, nor in the original plan of creation, as stated in these just and fatherly words: “And God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, after our own likeness. Let them have dominion.’ … So God created man in his own image, in the image