On the contrary, it is our own breasts we are fain to beat; while, if our lips move, it is to murmur the prayer of the publican. Will women preach sermons of this order and filled with thoughts like these? It is impossible to foretell with certainty; yet here, if anywhere, may we expect to find the special gifts of women brought out at last from their hidden treasuries. It has been said of almost every great spiritual teacher that there has been something feminine in his nature, something more of tenderness and purity, more of insight into and sympathy with others, than belongs to lesser men. In Jesus Christ, the ideal characters of both sexes seem almost equally blended. Of course there are other qualities besides the characteristically feminine ones needed to form the highest kind of religious teacher; but the sterner qualities are no more invariably deficient in women than are the softer ones always lacking in men, and it seems the reverse of improbable that women may arise uniting both in hitherto almost unexampled degree. Let us remember that, after all, the one great Force of the spiritual world--its correlated Gravitation, Light, Electricity, Magnetism, and Vital Force, all in one--is pure Divine LOVE. This alone, radiating from the Sun of Love in the heavens, moves and vivifies the soul; and to it alone it responds as the flower to the orb of day--we know not how. The human spirit which receives from on high the largest influx of this divine light and warmth thereby becomes a focus of reflected power and fervor for all those who can be brought into spiritual contact with it. It is the “love of God shed abroad” in the heart,--the love of that goodness which God is, and for which man is made, whose germs even now the illumined eye of love discerns deep-latent in every human soul,--in a word, the love of God and love of man, in whose might all spiritual miracles are done, all leprous souls cleansed, all demon passions cast out, all blind eyes opened, all maimed and crippled faculties made whole. If we could but find the most profoundly-loving, the most unselfishly, nobly, purely loving of men or women now living upon earth, and set him or her in the midst of us to be our teacher, our friend, our guide into the ways of peace and blessedness, we should have gained a help better than all the philosophers and theologians, the monks and the hermits, could ever give. I will not take on myself to affirm that such most loving heart beats in a woman’s breast. It may well be that there are men as tender in feeling as any mother whose spirit ever yearned over her infant’s cradle. But there is at least an equal chance of a woman’s supremacy, and almost a certainty that, on a secondary level of loving-kindness and unselfishness, we should find many more women than men. It is quite impossible, I think, that this difference should not make itself felt, and a new impulse be made to flow through all the channels of spiritual