“This increased sensitiveness which we see manifest on the question thus referred to, finds vent in a thousand varied forms. Prisons are no longer places of punishment but of discipline; the birch is no longer the chief factor in imparting ideas to the young--we make the application not to the anatomy, but to the understanding, and if we still believe the child is totally depraved, we are a little ashamed of the belief and say nothing about it. The woman who lolls in her carriage is not quite comfortable, for her mind is alive to the fact that others are trudging, footsore and weary, carrying heavy burdens. Benevolence has become the fashion, and ‘Fresh Air Funds’ are actually talked of on ’Change. On every hand we hear of Societies of Christian Endeavor, the Chautauqua Idea, Ethical Culture, Kindergartens, not for uppertendom, but for the infected district where violence, disease, strife and discord have before reigned. Every preacher of every denomination indulges the larger hope (possibly there are obscure exceptions), and quotes as corroborating his argument the seers, prophets and poets who were before denounced from the very pulpit in which he now preaches. “We are hearing much of heresy just now, but the ‘guilty’ man is not disgraced; on the contrary, his crime places him before a larger audience at double salary; and, if one may be allowed to say it, there is a general belief abroad that some heretics have courted their persecution. Certainly we do not try them for what they said, but the way they said it. A man who was a heretic twenty years ago, now finds himself orthodox, for there is faith plus in both pulpit and pew, and the heretic is generally a man of limitless faith. We believe not only that Jesus Christ was the son of God, but all men are or can be if they claim their heritage; not one day in seven is holy, but all are; not that certain places are consecrated, but all is consecrated ground, and that evil is only perverted good, or absence of good, just as darkness is absence of light. These things we hear from every pulpit without surprise. “Prize fighters use six-ounce gloves, and women endowed with police powers act in behalf of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals and children. Matrons are to be found in jails and station houses, and the maxim that ‘Might makes right’ has been reversed. Never was the tear of pity so near the surface, and the change of which I speak has been brought about largely since 1870. In these twenty-one years the flinty heart of man has been softened more than in the three hundred years preceding. “Now we are approaching the vital question, for I propose to tell you why this change has come; why our faces are now turned toward Zion. The answer I give is not given out off-hand, but after most careful thought and study for many, many years. _The spirit of the time has changed by and through the influence of woman._