pers,
whose pleasure and privilege it is to be able to instruct us in all the
secrets of high life, have given us recently to understand that, for
some time back, Her Majesty has been hard at work on the Emperor's soul.
Every thoughtful woman likes to be at work on her husband's soul. Young
ladies enjoy the prospect before they are married, and no novel is so
thoroughly popular among them as one in which beauty is the instrument
in the hands of Providence for the conversion of unbelief. And it is
partly because the Empress Eugenie is discharging this high missionary
duty, that she is an object of particular admiration just at this
moment. When Englishwomen hear that she is very active in favor of the
Pope, and couple this news with the fact that the Emperor's soul is
uneasy, they sniff--if we may be forgiven the expression--the battle
from afar. Their education in respect of theology and religious opinion
is very different from that of men.

They have been brought up to believe strongly and heartily what they
have been told, and they do not understand the half-sceptical way of
regarding such things which is the result of larger views and more
liberal education. It appears to them a terrible thing that the men they
care for should be hesitating and doubtful about subjects where they
themselves have been trained only to believe one view possible. And they
set to work in the true temper of missionaries, with profound eagerness
and energy, and narrowness of grasp. Many genuine prayers and tears are
worthily spent in the effort to tether some truant husband or a son to a
family theological peg, and to prevent him from roving. And, up to a
certain point, men continually give in. They find it easier and more
comfortable to lower their arms, and not always to be maintaining a
barren controversy. They have not the slightest wish to convince their
affectionate feminine disputant, to take from her the sincere and
positive dogmas on which her happiness is built, and to substitute for
these a phase of doubt and difficulty for which her past intellectual
life has not fitted her. Accordingly, they indulge in a thousand little
hypocrisies of a more or less harmless kind.

So long as women's education continues to differ from that of men as
widely as it does in England, this flexibility on the part of the latter
under the influence of the former is not always amiss. It is better that
the husband should be yielding than that he should h