Let us now turn to the other side of the shield. Having discussed the validity of the arguments against the admission of women to the ministry, let us see what is to be said directly in favor of such an innovation. In the first place, it is obvious that women have certain special aptitudes and qualifications (as well as the above-named inaptitudes) for such an office. We have been hitherto speaking as if the work of a minister lay almost exclusively in the pulpit and reading-desk; but we must remember that a very large and very important part of it lies also in the homes of the members of the congregation, in the hour of their sorrows and difficulties, their sicknesses, doubts, repentances, death. Can any one doubt that the tender and ready sympathies of women, and their superior tact and discernment of character, their natural tendency to soothe and exhort rather than to upbraid or threaten, are qualities more valuable for such service than any which men, however pious, well-meaning, and learned in casuistry, usually bring to such tasks? As a matter of fact, women do, instinctively, perform the office of ministering angels on these occasions all over the land, without waiting for any license or consecration; while many of the best of the clergy either suffer all their days from unconquerable shyness and the sense of their own want of tact, or run speedily into the ruts of professional consolations and exhortations in formal phraseology, meaning little or nothing to speaker or hearer. Of all the irritating--I might say maddening--things in human life, there is nothing worse than to be addressed in the hour of mortal agony and despair, when our hearts, riven to the core, could scarcely bear an angel’s touch, by a smug, self-satisfied personage, who inflicts on us his cut-and-dried consolations and exhortations to perfect quiescence and cheerful resignation; all the time revealing, by every word and gesture, how utterly incapable he is of comprehending even the shadow of our grief. It would be difficult to estimate how many people (especially the intelligent men of the humbler classes, who are the principal victims of these tormentors),--men who would have suffered themselves to be led with childlike submission by any wise and loving hand, even through the wicket-gate of prayer and repentance, to the heavenly way,--have been, on the contrary, goaded by tactless parsons into hardness and rebellion. It is real, genuine, spontaneous _sympathy_ which alone can authorize any one to approach the sacred borders of a great sorrow. Can any one doubt that women would, as a general rule, feel this more tenderly, more genuinely than men? The fear would be that the strain on the heart of a good woman, minister of a large congregation, would be so great as very sensibly to tell upon health and life.