The functions of a minister of religion, as understood in modern times (apart from priestly claims to administer sacraments by special divine commission, with which we need not concern ourselves here), are, roughly speaking, twofold: 1st, public prayer and preaching; and, 2d, pastoral ministrations in the homes of the members of the congregation. Regarding the first, women labor under several disadvantages, sometimes amounting to disabilities. Though women’s voices, _when good_, reach farther than those of men, a considerable number are deficient in the physical vocal power indispensable to make themselves heard in an assembly numbering above one or two hundred persons. Nothing would be more pitiable and ridiculous than for one of these ladies, whatever might be her mental gifts, to mount a pulpit and, with feeble voice rising only to crack in an occasional screech, to attempt to pour forth exhortations which three-fourths of her audience could not hear, and under which the remainder would writhe in an auditorial purgatory. Secondly, there can be no question that the average female intellect is below the average male intellect, and consequently that there are fewer women than men up to the mark of intellectual competence, below which preaching, however well intended, and even inspired by genuine and true feeling, is apt rather to “give occasion to the enemy to blaspheme” than to tend to edifying. If the foolish things of the world often confound the wise, the foolish people in it provoke and distract them; and, even to their humblest hearers, many such well-meaning silly ones would be little else than the blind leading the blind into a ditch. Lamentable as it would be to hear a shrill feminine squeak delivering from the desk the majestic periods of Job and Isaiah, it would be doubly deplorable to listen to a thin and only too distinctly audible soprano enouncing alternately from the pulpit platitudes, ineptitudes, and blunders, such as memory recalls only too keenly to many of us as among the severest trials of the domestic circle. A special peril in this matter also lies in the ill-omened circumstance that the greater the folly of the woman, so much greater, alas! is generally to be found her propensity to preach in private, and therefore, it may presumably be dreaded, her proclivity to extend to a larger sphere the benefit of her exhortations. It has been the observation of the present writer, through a long experience, that masculine and feminine folly usually differ in this essential particular. A man fool dimly perceives he is a fool, and holds his tongue accordingly; or (if the vanity of his sex prevent him from arriving consciously at any such conviction or conclusion) he deems that as prudence is the better part of valor, so is silence the proper garb of wisdom, and that the less he wastes on an ungrateful world the precious jewels of his ideas, the more credit shall he have for those supposed to remain in the casket of his mind.