If we compare the seventeen-year-old girl of to-day with her progenitor living in the middle of the foregoing century, we find that the girl of earlier times was to a larger extent swayed by feeling, and that the modern girl is to a larger extent determined by ideas. The former was directed more to the centre of life, the latter remains often nearer the periphery; the former was warmer, the latter is more intelligent; the former was better balanced, the latter is more interesting. The restlessness, the uncertainty, the feeling of emptiness, the suffering, that is sometimes experienced by the young woman of to-day, is primarily traceable to the disintegration of religious belief, which gave to the older generation of emancipated women an inner stability, resignation, and self-discipline. Scientific study has deprived many modern women of their belief and those who can create a new one, suited to their needs, are still very few. Thus to the outer homelessness an inner estrangement is added. The woman movement has, it is true, contributed indirectly to this spiritual distress by making the road to man’s culture accessible to woman. For men also suffer in like manner, and suffer above all perhaps because our culture is unstable, aimless, and lacks style, owing to the very fact that it is at present without a religious centre. And even the future can give to mankind no such new centre as the Middle Ages had, for example, in Catholicism. The attainment of individualism has shut out that possibility forever. But _one_ factor in the religion of the past, the adoration of motherhood as divine mystery; _one_ factor in the religion of the Middle Ages, the worship of the Madonna, has meanwhile been given back to the present by the doctrine of evolution, with that universal validity which the thought must possess which seeks to give again to culture a centre. Great, solitary individuals—prophets more often than sibyls—have proclaimed the religion of this generation. But the word will become flesh only when fathers and mothers instil into the blood and soul of children their devout hope for a higher humanity. When women are permeated by this hope, this new devout feeling, then they will recover the piety, the peace, and the harmony which for the present, and partly owing to feminism, have been lost.