We overlook the manifold ways in which she is acting on and
changing the state of things around us, just because we are deceived by
the apparent unity with which the whole sex advances toward marriage. We
forget the large margin of those who fail in attaining their end, and we
act as if the great mass of unmarried women simply represented a waste
and lost force. And yet it is just this waste force which tells on
society more powerfully than all.

The energies which fail in finding a human object of domestic adoration
become the devotional energies of the world. The force which would have
made the home makes the Church. It is really amazing to watch, if we
look back through the ages, the silent steady working of this feminine
impulse, and to see how bit by bit it has recovered the ground of which
Christianity robbed Woman. We wonder that no woman poet has ever turned,
like Schiller, to the gods of old.

In every heathen religion of the Western world woman occupied a
prominent place. Priestess or prophetess, she stood in all ministerial
offices on an equality with man. It was only the irruption of religions
from the East, the faiths of Isis or Mithras, which swept woman from the
temple. Christianity shared the Oriental antipathy to the ministerial
service of woman; it banished her from altar and from choir; in darker
times it drove her to the very porch of its shrines. The Church of after
ages dealt with woman as the Empire dealt with its Caesars; it was ready
to grant her apotheosis, but only when she was safely out of the world.
It gave her canonization, and it gives it to her still, but not the
priesthood. No rout could seem more complete, but woman is never greater
than when she is routed.

The newly-instituted parson of to-day, brimming over with apostolic
texts which forbid woman to speak in church, no sooner arrives at his
parish than he finds himself in a spiritual world whose impulse and
guidance is wholly in the hands of woman. Expel woman as you will,
_tamen usque recurrit_. Woman is, in fact, the parish. Within, in her
lowest spiritual form, as the parson's wife, she inspires and sometimes
writes his sermons. Without, as the bulk of his congregation, she
watches over his orthodoxy, verifies his texts, visits his schools, and
harasses his sick. "Ah, Betsy!" said a sick woman to a wealthier sister
the other day, "it's of some use being well off; you won't be obliged
when you die to have a district-lady worriti