field. If a layman wishes to
help in a parish he finds himself lost in a world of women. It is only
those semi-clerical beings who seem to unite with a singular grace all
the weaknesses of both the sexes who persist in the attempt. Then, too,
all the ideas of the parochial world become feminine; the parish buzzes
with woman's hatred of the Poor-laws, and contempt for economic
principles and hard-hearted statisticians.

Mendicancy flies from the workhouse and the stone-yard to entrench
itself against Guardians and relieving-officers among the soup-kitchens
and the coal-tickets of feminine almsgiving. The parson, after a faint
protest of common sense, surrenders at discretion, and flings all
experience to the winds. One wife turns her husband into a fount of
begging letters. Another forces him to set up manufactories for all the
lucifer-match girls of the parish. Woman's imaginativeness, woman's
fancy, woman's indifference to fact exhausts itself in "sensational
cases," and revels in starvation and death. But we must turn to a
brighter side of her activity. Ritualism is the great modern result of
the parson's wife, though, with a base ingratitude to the rock from
which they were hewn, Ritualists hoist the standard of clerical
celibacy. Woman has long since made her parson; now (as of old with her
doll) her pleasure is to dress him. A new religious atmosphere surrounds
her life when the very work of her hands becomes hallowed in its
purpose. The old crotchet and insertion--we use words to us more
mysterious than intelligible--become flat, stale, and unprofitable by
the side of the book-marker and the colored stole; and a flutter of
excitement stirs even the stillness of a life which is sometimes
offensively still at the sight of the new chasuble with "aunt's real
lace, you know, dear," sewn about it.

However gray an existence may be, and the tones of a life like this are
naturally subdued, it still cherishes within a warmth and poetry of its
own; and the poetry of the parson's wife breaks out in vestments and
decorations. Nothing brings out more vividly the fact that Mrs. Proudie
_is_ the Church of England than that her reaction against the prose of
existence is shaking--so the Protestant Alliance tells us--the Church of
England to its foundations. The real disturber of the Church peace, the
real assertor of Catholic principles, or (for those who prefer a middle
phrase to either of these contending statements) the real d