In spite of the bitter words of warning which John Ruskin has thought it his duty to speak to such women as enter upon theological studies, a good many women in Great Britain and this country have engaged in what is properly the work of the Christian ministry. The only ordained minister whose work has come under our notice since the marriage of Antoinette Blackwell is the Rev. Olympia Brown, settled over the Universalist Society at Weymouth Landing, Mass., and lately called to Newburgh in New York. Her ministry has been highly successful, and is to be mentioned here chiefly on account of a legal decision to which it has given rise. The church at Weymouth Landing made an appeal to the Legislature, last winter, as to the legality of marriages solemnized by her. The Legislature gave the same general construction to the masculine relatives in the enactment which the English law gave to the old Latin word in the charter of Apothecaries' Hall; deciding that marriages so solemnized are legal, and no further legislation necessary. Mention, too, should be made of Rev. Lydia A. Jenkins, who has been a successful preacher among the Universalists for the last eight or ten years, and is now settled at Binghamton, N.Y. Very recently, during the illness of her husband, the minister at Bethesda Chapel, Newcastle, England, a Mrs. Booth occupied the pulpit, to the great interest and profit of the congregation. Among the Methodists and "Christians,"[50] as well as among the Quakers, women have always been received as preachers. In October, 1866, I found a Mrs. Timmins settled as the pastor of Ebenezer Church, three miles from Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she had been for three years. Ann Rexford is mentioned as an effective preacher among the Christians. Her preaching attracted large crowds in the State of New Jersey, some thirty years ago. But the most remarkable record, if we except those to be found among the Quakers, of any single woman's work in the ministry, is that of Abigail Hoag Roberts, who was the settled minister of a church built for her at Milford, N.J., and who died in 1841, at the age of forty-nine.