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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