The attitude of the Church of the eighteenth century toward women is hardly one of record, as there was not enough animation or interest displayed in social conditions--or, indeed, during a part of the century, enough of intellectual comprehension--to serve the Church for any discrimination as to women's status. When the change of attitude of the Church in respect to its indifference toward that element of its body which before the Reformation, and continuously since then, has been so serviceably employed by the Roman Catholic Church did occur, it was the High Church party which brought it about, and so preserved for English Protestantism the work of women. Although the Church was indifferent to the great mission that lay before it in the eighteenth century,--a mission that had to be met by the raising up from the laity of men and women who should stand for the spiritual rights of the lower orders of society especially,--there was a notable band of Christian philanthropic women who brightened the close of the century. By harnessing human compassion to social needs, the distressed classes of society came to be lifted to that position of betterment which is theirs to-day, largely through agencies that owe their beginnings to the More sisters, Elizabeth Fry, and Harriet Martineau. It is always a pleasing task to turn to such women as these, exemplifying as they do the attainments of the sex in those peculiar and special ways which so well represent the adaptations of women. The greatest woman who graced the annals of helpfulness of the last half of the eighteenth century in England was Hannah More. The beautiful devotion of her long and honorable life to the cause of teaching, and the widespread interest which, by her writings, she attracted to the subject both in Europe and America, place her at the source of one of the mighty streams of pervasive influence that have ever permeated human society. So great was her appreciation of the character and the position of woman, that she was able to forecast well-nigh everything that has been enunciated in modern times with regard to the place of the sex in education and in society.