tenderness has ever, since the world began, yet transmitted to another soul the truth that God is Love. There is little to wonder at, after all, in the mournful fact that the religion which as it rose from the heart of Christ was supremely the religion of Divine Love became, as the centuries went by, colder and harder and more cruel, till the irony was complete, and the doctrine of the Mount of Galilee was illustrated by the fires of the Spanish Inquisition. _Who_, we may ask, were the teachers of Christianity during the intervening ages? Who were they through whose lips and writings the lessons gathered from the lilies and the sparrows, and the story of the Prodigal, were transmitted to each new-born generation? They were _men_, exclusively men; nay, men who, in taking their office, renounced those ties of natural affection through which the Author of Nature has caused the human heart to grow tender, and to be taught the practice of unselfishness. To fit themselves to convey to the hearts of their brethren the gospel of the Fatherhood of God, they began by renouncing the experience of human fatherhood for themselves. The Apostolic Succession, of which the great Churches still boast, was for fifteen centuries a school for the transmission of ideas about a Divine Parent down a long chain of childless celibates. We Protestants have corrected this mistake, and the men who tell to _us_ the story of the Prodigal are at least able to speak out of the abundance of their hearts when they say that, “like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord hath mercy on them that fear Him.” But is there not one step even further to be taken? Is not the compassion of “a mother for the son of her womb” a still profounder image of the Divine Love than the father’s pity? Ought it not also to be brought home to our comprehensions (if in any measure human words may so bring it) through the lips of mothers and motherly-hearted women?