Thus, then, two arguments at least against admitting women to the ministry rest on natural and inevitable grounds: some women are physically, some other women mentally, incapable of adequately fulfilling its duties. And to these adverse reasons others are added by the actual though not inevitable conditions of society. Women, up to the present time, have been almost indefinitely less well educated than men, and only their superior quickness and tact prevented this inequality from telling disastrously in common life; while nothing could hinder it from doing so, were they to undertake the office of public teachers. By hook or crook, with little teaching (and that teaching generally fourth or fifth rate of its kind), women have managed pretty generally to scrape together and store up in their memories in a happy-go-lucky way a certain quantity of knowledge, useful and ornamental enough to pass muster. Women’s culture, when women are cultivated, sometimes (perhaps we may say often) possesses rather more breadth than that of men, and includes a good many topics rarely included in the masculine curriculum. It is therefore well suited to furnish pleasure to the possessor and entertainment to her acquaintance and readers; but the accuracy and definiteness of knowledge which men obtain, thanks to their much abused classical and mathematical training, are what every ordinarily educated woman with a grain of sense sighed for, till the day when the great movement for the Higher Education of Women reared a more fortunate generation. Now, it is clearly highly desirable, if not absolutely indispensable, that a person who may be called upon to treat publicly and didactically, if not controversially--and let us hope and pray that women will not generally take to controversy!--almost every subject in the range of the higher interests of man, who at least ought not to regard any such interest as foreign ground, should possess not merely wide, but accurate information, and be as far as possible above the liability to commit any gross blunders. This is of course viewing the subject apart from any special theological training such as the older Churches have deemed almost the first qualification for the ministerial office. Even the poor Capuccini preaching friars, whose astounding ignorance of profane history and science affords inexhaustible tales of merriment in Italy, who talk of “the great St. Augustine of Hippo, who crowned King Alfred, who signed Magna Charta,” and are wont to indulge in such figures of rhetoric as imaginary sniffs round the pulpit at the smell of the roasting flesh of St. Lawrence on his gridiron,--even these poor old fellows have received adequate instruction in the doctrines, the legends, and the moral and penitential systems of their Church. Proverbially ignorant as are the Greek Popes and the Nestorian, Coptic, and Maronite priests, they, too, are perfectly well “up” in all those