and perfect allegiance of each to the other, no less than a fall from the intimate communion of both with the Father of spirits. And a thicker darkness rests over the means whereby the institution of marriage may be rescued from its degradation, and man and woman be reinstated in the loyalty they owe to each other, than over the means by which the creature may make himself acceptable to the offended Creator; inasmuch as the former is left, without any special revelation, to the slow process of thought among men, to the workings of experience and the results of observation. And these laws are age-long in their evolutions. But when men and women have learned to look within themselves, have turned an intelligent eye upon the necessities of their threefold being, and when they recognize the God-made laws regulating these necessities, and have begun to mate themselves accordingly, the world will have received a powerful impulse toward its promised millennial epoch. Such, then, being, in brief, the relation of woman to man, it is necessary to inquire, as pertinent to my subject, not so much whether man gives her all the rights within his own sphere which she may beneficially claim, but whether she has yet understood the weight and significance of her own position in the scale of being, and has exercised all the rights consequent therefrom. To know is far easier than to live according to knowledge. It is to be feared that women themselves have but a poor appreciation of the ideal of true womanhood. Oh, is it not time this ideal should be worthily understood? Has not poor suffering humanity borne the burden of its woes long enough, and will not woman help to lift it from the tired, stooping shoulders? For she may. How? Simply by working out her own divinely appointed mission. And is this not broad and absorbing enough? See what are some of its objects of influence and endeavors. First, here are the very faintest beginnings of intelligent existence to impress and mould--the embryos of character to stamp. And who knows how important this moulding and stamping may be? To go farther back still: Who knows what indelible constitution may be, is, fixed upon the individual organism, for better, for worse, by the authors of its life, that, if evil, no training, no education, no work of grace, not even omnipotence, can expunge or alter? This motherhood of woman, in its awful sanctity and mystery, in its bearings upon the immortality of personal identity, is a fearful dignity. Therein consists the first and chief claim of Woman to honor and reverence. She who has been a mother has measured the profoundest as well as the most exalted experience of which humanity is susceptible. Let her see to it that she honor herself.