The counterbalancing force to the influence of the Church on women is to be found not merely in its acknowledged rivals, intellectual development and the progress of secular knowledge, but in the motive-power of the religious sentiment. It has been justly observed that-- “the clergy of all ages, in concentrating the strength of woman on her religious nature, have summoned up a power that they could not control. When they had once lost the confidence of those ruled by this mighty religious sentiment, it was turned against them. In the Greek and Roman worship women were the most faithful to the altars of the gods; yet when Christianity arose, the foremost martyrs were women. In the Middle Ages women were the best Catholics, but they were afterwards the best Huguenots. It was a woman, not a man, that threw the stool at the offending minister’s head in a Scotch kirk; it was a woman who made the best Quaker martyr on Boston common. And from vixennish Jenny Geddes to high-minded Mary Dyer, the whole range of womanly temperament responds as well to the appeal of religious freedom as of religious slavery.”[35] A French writer in the middle of the present century, describing England during the Ages of Faith, with its surname of the “Isle of Saints,” as “un spectacle digne des anges,” laments its coldness and lack of virtue under Protestantism. In what he styles this materialistic age-- “la femme est loin, bien loin d’être ce qu’elle fut pour l’opinion publique aux époques de foi vive et ardente.” The expression of the religious sentiment has taken a different form. It may be less obvious and definite, but in the opinion of one of our modern thinkers it is the mainspring of all progress-- “Nothing can be more obvious,” writes Mr. Kidd,[36] “as soon as we begin to understand the nature of the process of evolution in progress around us, than that the moving force behind it is not the intellect, and that the development as a whole is not in any true sense an intellectual development. * * * * * “The intellect is employed in developing ground which has been won for it by other forces. But it would appear that it has by itself no power to occupy this ground; it has not even any power to continue to hold it after it has been won, when these forces have spent and exhausted themselves. The evolution which is slowly proceeding in human society is not primarily intellectual, but religious in character.” CHAPTER VII. ALMSGIVING IN OLDEN TIMES. Almsgiving at the monasteries--Charity dispensed by private families--Bequests of ladies for the relief of the poor--Action of the Church--Change in the conception of the duty of almsgiving--Needlework for the poor--Modern gilds--Charity at the present day.