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ng you with a chapter." But the district-lady has others to "worrit" in life besides the sick. Mrs. Hannah More tells us exultantly in her journal how successful were her raids upon the parsons, and in what dread all unspiritual ministers stood of her visitations. And the same rigid censorship prevails in many quarters still. The preacher who thunders so defiantly against spiritual foes is trembling all the time beneath the critical eye that is watching him from the dim recesses of an unworldly bonnet, and the critical finger which follows him with so merciless an accuracy in his texts. Impelled, guided, censured by woman, we can hardly wonder if in nine cases out of ten the parson turns woman himself, and if the usurpation of woman's rights in the services of religion has been deftly avenged by the subjugation of the usurpers. Expelled from the Temple, woman has simply put her priesthood into commission, and discharges her ministerial duties by deputy. It was impossible for woman to remain permanently content with a position like this; but it is only of late that a favorable conjuncture of affairs has enabled her to quit it for a more obtrusive one. The great Church movement which the _Apologia_ has made so familiar to us in its earlier progress came some ten years ago to a stand. Some of its most eminent leaders had seceded to another communion, it had been weakened by the Gorham decision, and by its own internal dissensions. Whether on the side of dogma or ritual, it seemed to have lost for the moment its old impulse--to have lost heart and life. It was in this emergency that woman came to the front. She claimed to revive the old religious position which had been assigned to her by the monasticism of the middle ages, but to revive it under different conditions and with a different end. The mediaeval Church had, indeed, glorified, as much as words could glorify, the devotion of woman; but once become a devotee, it had locked her in the cloister. As far as action on the world without was concerned, the veil served simply as a species of suicide, and the impulses of woman, after all the crowns and pretty speeches of her religious counsellors, found themselves bottled up within stout stone walls and as inactive as before. From this strait, woman, at the time we speak of, delivered herself by the organization of charity. In lines of a certain beauty, though somewhat difficult in their grammatical construction, she
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