To-day all this is changed. Under the guidance of the empress, her husband, reared by his broad-minded mother in the ideas of Strauss and of Renan, has become a strict churchman, and court, nobility, bureaucracy and in fact the middle and lower classes too, have followed suit. Free-thinking and neglect of religious duties are at present considered the acme of bad form in Germany. Everybody professes the most profound interest in questions and enterprises relating to the church, and a large number of daughters of the most illustrious houses of the German nobility have conferred their hands and their hearts upon penniless Lutheran pastors, whose social status has thereby been entirely changed. Moreover, if during the past ten years more churches have been built, particularly in Berlin, than had been the case in the entire previous half-century, this is because every one has become aware that the most facile way of winning the good graces of the empress, and the favor of her consort is by building a church, or endowing some hospital. The empress is ever ready to help in every good work, and her private charities are very great, but she does not approve of the higher education or the emancipation of women, and entertains a holy horror of everything pertaining to the female suffrage movement. Women, according to her views, should remain in their own sphere, and should regard their duties to their husbands, their children, and their homes as their first and foremost obligations; the nursing of the sick, the training of young people, and the organization and direction of charitable institutions, affording plenty of scope for those members of the fair sex who have no domestic tasks to occupy their time. [Illustration: _AUGUSTE VICTORIA EMPRESS OF GERMANY_] _From Life_ She claims that in this way a woman is able to exercise a far more important and beneficial influence than by endeavoring to supplant men in professions essentially masculine, and certainly she herself constitutes a striking illustration of the truth of her contention, for the influence of the present German empress is felt throughout the length and breadth of the land--a gracious womanly influence in every sense of the word.