of millinery, chandlery, and upholstery, and the thoroughly base and materialistic ideas which have come in along with them! Secondly, among the bad reasons for the exclusion of women from the pulpit, we have referred to St. Paul’s dictum, “I suffer not a woman to speak in church.” Whatever high degree of human wisdom we must all attribute to the greatest of the apostles, or even divine authority, as the orthodox hypothesis of inspiration would give to his words, there is absolutely no ground at all for the assumption that, _because_ he forbade women to affront public opprobrium by preaching when women lived habitually shut up, each in her _gynaeceum_, he would, likewise have forbidden them to offer religious exhortations in a sacred place, when public sentiment has become reconciled to their appearance in the streets, on the stage, in the lecture-room, and even on the platform. The coolness, indeed, wherewith the most orthodox persons always _do_ practically take for granted that Scriptural precepts, however rigid in form and seemingly intended by their authors for perpetual observance, are to be set aside without scruple, as applying to a bygone state of things, when they do _not_ chime in with their own inclinations and prejudices, is only to be paralleled by the tenacity wherewith they maintain their authority under every vicissitude, when they happen to coincide with them. Let any one who quotes St. Paul’s incidental remark about women speaking in church be called on to avow how far he has taken to heart the solemn decree issued in the Encyclical Letter of the one great Council of the assembled apostles, in the awfully mysterious words, “It seemed good unto the Holy Ghost _and to us_” (as if these were two separate opinions) “to lay upon you (the Gentile world) no greater burden than these necessary things,--to abstain from meats offered to idols, ... and from things strangled, and from blood.” Lives there a modern Christian whose conscience would in the smallest degree be troubled by taking the rice and ghee from a Hindu temple, eating a rabbit strangled in a snare, or partaking of a black-pudding or a Bologna sausage? Passing now to the more reasonable reasons against admitting women to the ministry,--the natural and incurable disabilities, physical and mental, under which not a few of them labor,--the answer comes at once to hand. Those among them who are unfitted for the office must not undertake it, any more than dumb or stuttering or imbecile men. There is no more difficulty in exclusion in one case than in the other, though there may be a few more persons necessarily excluded.