life whenever the influence of women may be brought to bear directly and largely on the religious feelings of the community. Lastly, and chiefly. It is a truism to say that the character of our religion depends on our idea of God; but who has taken note of this familiar fact sufficiently to recognize that all the _traditional_ part of that solemn idea has come to us uniformly in a way deplorably one-sided, and that side the least lovable? I do not overestimate the importance of _any_ idea of God which comes to us through our fellow-men. It seems to me that, from the first dawn of the religious life, the child has a dim sense (apart from his teacher’s lessons) of some beneficent and righteous Power around and within him; and that when the Sun rises on any soul in the awful hour which saints have likened to a new birth, there is obtained, even through all the mists of earth, a direct vision of the ineffable glory, which evermore causes the words of other mortals, and even the man’s own attempt to render in language his sense of that great Love and Holiness, to seem unreal and worse than inadequate. When _that_ stage is reached, it is probably of little consequence what a man’s pastor may tell him about God’s character. All he says is only like a book which describes a person we ourselves have known or a place we have visited. Nobody can make the man believe (at least so long as his own living faith and open vision endure) that the Being whom he meets in the hour of prayer is less than All-good, unutterably Holy, even though the dogmas he accepts practically attribute to him a totally different character. The only injury he can suffer is a negative one: he is denied the help and sympathy which he needs, and which it is the proper office of his minister to supply to him. But at an earlier stage, when all religious experience is yet vague and dim, when faith must of necessity be provisional and taken on trust at second hand,--at that period there can be no question of the misfortune of receiving cold, hard, narrow notions about God, instilled by teachers who themselves have little love or no direct spiritual knowledge, and have chiefly borrowed their ideas from the confessedly imperfect rendering, age after age, of other men’s experience. How is a young soul ever to turn to God, when God is represented to it as One from whom it would far more naturally turn away? And let it be remembered that the attributes of God which call out the spontaneous love and adoration of the heart are precisely those whose meaning is most completely lost and evaporated in the dry formularies of the intellect, and can never be truly conveyed except by one whose own heart responds to them through all its depths. Power, Wisdom, Justice, are divine characteristics, of which the meaning may be indicated by any teacher with a clear head and command of language. But I disbelieve that any one who is not himself full of love and