of Thomas a Kempis at which the
remonstrance found her. Before such an adversary, there is no shame in a
defeat.

It is not that on all points of moral or religious life woman professes
herself above criticism; to the criticisms of her religious teachers,
for instance, we have seen her singularly obsequious. Woman and the
priesthood in fact understand one another perfectly, and a tacit
convention forces woman to submit to censures so long as those censures
are reserved for one topic alone. To religion woman makes the sacrifice
of her dress. It is not that she seriously intends to make the slightest
amendments, or to withdraw before the exhortations of her spiritual
guide into poke bonnets and print muslins. It is a sufficient mark of
self-sacrifice if she listens patiently to a diatribe against butterfly
bonnets, trains, or crinolines, or even thanks her pastor for
describing evening costume as a "propaganda of the devil." The very
minuteness, in fact, of censures such as these, is a flattering proof of
the spiritual importance of even the most trivial details in the life of
woman.

When Father Ignatius informed mankind that the angels bent down from
heaven to weep over the flirtations of Rotten Row, the smallest child on
her pony felt her ride, and her chatter over her palings, invested with
certain celestial importance. Criticisms, too, so strictly reserved for
the outside of the platter, are an immense compliment to the inside, and
it is something to listen to half an hour of spiritual reproof, and to
be able to pass oneself triumphantly as a "Fair Soul" after all. There
is nothing revolutionary in a mere border-skirmish, which leaves the
field of woman's sway not an inch the narrower. It is another matter
when M. Duruy calls on Hermione to come down from her pedestal of
worship, and in the long run to abdicate. For equality of education
would, of course, even if it did nothing else, make mince-meat of the
spiritual pretensions of woman. It would be impossible to preserve a
domestic Papacy with a more than papal weakness for dogmatism and
infallibility, if woman is to come down into school and share the common
training of men.

If women are to be educated precisely as men are educated, they will
share the reasonings, the scepticisms, the critical doubts of men. There
will be no refuge for praying sisters in that world of "simple views"
from which they come forth at present furnished with a social and
domestic de