There is another aspect of this matter also, which fairly deserves consideration. Many good Christians have remarked that, while they would fain take Jesus Christ as their “Great Exemplar,” they find nothing in his life indicating what his example would have been in the very closest and most important of human relations of husband or father. Surely there is no less reason for women to be conscious of a lacune in their moral instructions, when they are received exclusively either from mothers and governesses who may be utterly unfit for such an office, and who often merely pass on traditional moral heresies, or else from masculine pastors whose whole moral parallax is necessarily different from that of a woman, and who practically know next to nothing of the trials, temptations, and duties of her lot. We have had of recent years in many of our churches, and notably in St. Paul’s Cathedral, courses of sermons addressed by various clergymen to men alone, from which women have been rigidly excluded. Would it be too much to hope that some time or other, in some humble chapel (since no one would dream of devoting the national religious edifices to the exclusive use of women for a single hour), women may enjoy the privilege of being especially addressed by pastors of their own sex, who may talk to them at once with cultured minds and experienced hearts? And, lastly, besides the Intellectual and the Moral classes of thoughts to be offered from the pulpit, there is a third,--of which, alas! we know far too little,--the Spiritual. The store of this latter class of thoughts is probably extremely small even in minds of richest experience. They seem rather to distil slowly in precious drops from the wounds in the tree of life than to be capable of manufacture by the help of culture and reflection. They are the thoughts which concern the baseness, the loathsomeness, the misery of sin (felt and considered as _Sin_, not as Error or Vice), the glory and beauty and joy of Holiness, felt as _Holiness_, not as Prudence or Virtue. They teach the laws of our spiritual existence; the hygienics of the soul; the “Way toward the Blessed Life.” In some sense, sermons which contain thoughts like these may be called Moral Discourses; for they touch the very springs of our moral nature, and send us forth heart-smitten for the past, heart-strengthened with resolutions for the future. They are the most powerful moral levers which human agency ever applies to our souls. But they are the reverse of didactic, ethical disquisitions, or expositions of the detailed code of virtue. They lie in another region of feeling and appeal to another class of our faculties than the ratiocinative. We do not sit and judge them, but they come from above and judge us. When they strike us most forcibly, we never feel the temptation (as we are so often inclined to do at the best bits in the critical or the moral discourse) to express our approbation by the familiar tokens of public applause.