As to education, the case is much more serious. Certainly, unless women can receive the same solid and extensive training as male theological students (rather more strict and rigid than less so), to make up for what may have been wanting of exactness in their girlish school-room education, the appearance in our pulpits of a number of female heads lightly stored with learning or logic would be to the last degree ill-omened. But is there the smallest necessity why this should be? If the desire of a woman to devote herself to religious work were of any depth or worth consideration, she would not only be willing, but _crave_, to pass through the severest studies, to fit herself to the utmost of her abilities for so high and sacred a task; and it is no longer an hypothesis, but a demonstrated fact, that if women choose to study and have the fair opportunity of doing so, there are not a few of them capable at all events of attaining to those levels whereon men of the learned professions habitually take their stand. If a few fickle or weak-minded women were to enter as students such an institution, let us say, as Manchester New College, they would be very speedily “choked off,” and no more harm would be done than by the scores of youths “plucked” at Oxford and Cambridge, and led to change their programme of life. Those women, on the contrary, who should pass successfully through such an intellectual and moral sieve, might thenceforth be very safely trusted. Again: the fear that Religion itself might come to be deconsidered, as a result of the deconsideration of the sex of its ministers, must prove groundless, if, instead of bringing a fresh element of weakness into preaching and prayer, it should prove that (as I shall hope presently to show) women are likely to pour a new stream of life into what has so often become dry and unprofitable. After all, the inner heart of humanity honors in its very core spiritual graces, over the physical, the intellectual, and even the moral. Not the conquerors, not the philosophers, not even those who have displayed most _virtue_ apart from religion, have been adored and deified among men, but the prophets and saints who have ascended the mountain-peaks of Prayer and thrown open the windows of Heaven.