womanhood, and early Christian antiquity is full of traces of the tender and beautiful affection felt for her, before superstition seized upon the lovely sentiment and hardened it into a priestly dogma. Yet under the dogma, the true feeling has never been wholly lost sight of, and with many who are called idolatrous, the homage to St. Mary is but an exalted form of reverence to a moral loveliness, now in heaven. Our own Germanic ancestors shared more deeply in the sentiment probably than any other people, as they came from their cold homes in northern Europe--received the gospel of Christ from the missionaries of the church, and rejoiced to find their national feeling of chivalrous respect for woman confirmed and spiritualized by the honors paid to her, whom angels hailed as full of grace, and whose name all Christendom spoke with blessing. This high sentiment, somewhat sobered by our Protestant faith and our household utilities, has come to us with our religion and our homes. * * * * * It is becoming a somewhat practical, and in both hemispheres, an agitating question, how far the accepted Christian idea of true womanhood should be enlarged or amended to meet the demands of our own age. The voice of Mary Wolstoncroft, claiming masculine freedom for sex, has found a thousand echoes, and assemblies of women, no strangers to Christian culture, clamor for a new day of social and political emancipation. Their demands are not to be treated with ridicule, for under all their extravagance lurk truths of momentous import. Who can think of the thousands and hundreds of thousands of the sex, whose utmost labors hardly keep off cold and starvation--of the wretched notions of education and life, which so enfeeble the poor and corrupt the affluent--of the false social system which is so ready to smile upon the destroyer of innocence, and curse the victim of his arts; who can think of the scenes in the hovels of innocent poverty, the dens of loathsome vice, and the gilded saloons of painted misery, upon which the shadows of this blessed eve are now falling, and not be willing to pardon some thing to the spirit of mercy, even if its tones seem to us too shrill for gentle lips? Who is not willing to remember, moreover, that if they assert a folly, who claim for woman the political offices that must rob the home of her fidelity; they assert, and actually are diffusing a more dangerous error, who in more silken speech brand the household virtues as servile drudgery, and whose lives are a continued and studious round of elegant and jewelled vagrancy from the sacred uses and blessed companionships of their own fireside; nay, whose eyes seem only to open when the lights of the theatre and ball-room blaze, and whose pulses really beat only in exciting assemblies under the delirium of the wine-cup and the voluptuous dance. From both errors the true idea of womanhood may save our time, and, nevertheless, confer upon