resolution to _do_ it when known, is of a piece with the indifference of all the churches to moral heresies of the most soul-debasing kind, while they punish to the utmost of their powers the faintest divergence from theological orthodoxy. I cannot but think that, if women now enter the pulpit, a great many more sermons will be preached dealing with these points of practical ethics. The concrete and the personal will probably always possess keener interest for the majority of women than the abstract, the vague and the universal; and there is, moreover, if I mistake not, a very distinct superiority in the womanly propensity to translate ideas into action, over the man-of-the-world habit of admitting high and rigid principles in theory, while practising quite other rules in commerce, politics, and social affairs. A very eminent thinker and scholar, a leader of thought at Oxford, once remarked to me with characteristic simplicity, “I do not know how to account for the fact, but I notice that, when a good woman is convinced that something is true or right, she tries immediately in some way to square her beliefs and conduct accordingly; whereas when I have, perhaps by infinite labor, succeeded in convincing a man of the same thing, he goes on just as he did before, without altering his behavior a jot, and as if nothing had happened!” Now, I think this practical tendency of the feminine nature (though it will perhaps be less marked hereafter when women submit more generally to the friction of contact with many minds) will inevitably show itself in a preference for the inculcation of definite duties rather than for the vague declamations about repentance and regeneration which so often leave their hearers perfectly undisturbed and on the high way (as they think) to heaven, leading lives of odious selfishness, and combining profit and piety after the fashion of the celebrated grocer, “Sand the sugar, John--and then come in to prayers.” It has been often remarked that the most profound difference between modern and classical civilization lies in the contrast between the value attached by each to private morals. The virtue of the individual was of old treated as altogether subordinate in importance to the interests of the State. In our time, we have almost come to recognize that states and churches--nay, society itself--exist for the sake of building up individual souls to their perfection; and there is every reason to expect that this sense of the supreme importance of morals over every other human concern will rather increase than dwindle through all time to come.