Anyone who had gone through all S.J.-B.’s papers up to this date with an open mind would have said that the choice really lay between teaching and preaching. All her life she had been more interested in religious subjects than in any others, and her gifts of exposition and of public speaking were far above the average in either sex. In later years, when she was addressing thousands of people, she could make all hear without seeming to raise her voice; it remained full, mellow, easy, perfectly controlled, just as when she sat at the head of her own dinner-table. She might have spent some considerable part of the day in “wishing somebody would shoot her,” but no one would have guessed it when the moment came. “My mind is perfectly at ease when _she_ rises to speak,” said one of her patients in Edinburgh, many years later, “one feels then that humanly speaking nothing can go wrong.” As a matter of fact it was when she was addressing a large audience that she looked most radiantly happy. In many ways, then, she would have made a good minister; we know that she wrote a number of sermons that were appreciated by her colleagues, and she went so far as to preach at Weymouth (Mass.) for the Rev. Olympia Brown. “On seeing Him who is invisible” was the subject she chose, and, judged by ordinary standards, the sermon seems to have been a success. The main reason why she did not follow it up was (as indicated in the last-quoted letter to her Mother) the change that took place in her religious views after she had lived some time in America. In England she had been considered an advanced thinker on religious subjects: in America—the America in which her lot happened to be thrown—she was amazingly orthodox and conservative. For the first time she found herself among people who really _did not care_ about religion as she understood it. “July 2nd. Very nice these people are,” she writes in her diary, “and very nice Mrs. Rogers’ deep clear interest about the poor and wicked,— refuges, etc. Yet is there not in them the sort of un-religiousness which half jars on one in Unitarians? I wonder _why_. I _hope_ I shan’t get into it. ‘_More_ of reverence in us dwell.’ Yet so difficult in throwing off old bonds of sentiment not to lose something of the real feeling,—and, as Miss Cobbe says, if our religion is not a synthesis of _all_ the good and beauty we know, we are less, not more, by rejecting errors.” And again: “A new psychical study in the shape of Mrs. F., who ‘can believe in Providence but not in God,’ and who ‘means to say that there is absolute right and wrong, but _not_ good and bad people. People were born with certain notions and acted accordingly; they did the best they could and could do no more.’