If it were to please Providence to inspire a woman with any of the gifts of the prophetic or ministerial offices, if ever the promise should be fulfilled to the letter that “your sons and _your daughters_ shall prophesy,” and that the impulse to speak holy words were to seize her in the most natural and appropriate place, to wit, in church, St. Paul is quoted as authority to check any such irregular and unsuitable proceeding: “I suffer not a woman to speak in church.” The result has been that, except among the Quakers (who have coolly set the prohibition aside, and seemingly profited not a little by so doing), Christian rivals to the heroines of Judaism are not producible. During these last eighteen centuries, among all the millions of women in whose hearts the precepts of Christ have been sown and borne rich fruit, there may well have been a few whose eloquence and fervor of piety would have influenced the heart of men as much as a St. Bernard or a Peter the Hermit, and whose words, like those of a Tauler, a Fénelon, or an à Kempis, would have remained a spiritual treasure for all time. But if such have lived and felt and thought, and longed perhaps to speak to their fellow-men out of the abundance of their hearts, their mouths have been effectually stopped. Order has reigned in the Churches so far as they were concerned, and whatever light they might perchance have borne into the dark places of the earth, instead of being set on a candlestick, has been carefully covered up under a bushel. Such are, I venture to think, the bad reasons for the exclusion of women from the ministry. Good ones, however, are certainly forthcoming, if perchance, when weighed in the scale against the arguments in favor of such an innovation, they prove less heavy. They are drawn from circumstances, some of which pertain to the order of nature, and can never be altered; while others might be, or are already in process of change.