ho airs his emotions to be as
great a bore as the man with a dogma, or the man with a hobby. A sermon,
therefore, from the very necessities of its structure, is the very type
of the sort of talk that revolts men most.

On the other hand, women really enjoy preaching. Mamma's reply to the
natural inquiry as to the goodness of the sermon--"My dear, all sermons
are good"--is something more than a matronly snub, it is the inner
conviction of woman. She likes, not merely a talk, but a good long talk.
She likes being abused. She likes being dogmatized over and
intellectually trampled on. In fact, she has very little belief in the
intellect. But then she has an immense faith in the heart. She lives in
a world of affections and sympathies. She has her little tale of passion
in the past that she tells over to herself in the dusk of the autumn
evening. She believes that the world at large is moved by those impulses
of love and dislike that play so great a part in her own. And then, too,
she has her practical house-keeping side, and likes her religion done up
in neat little parcels of "heads" and "considerations" and
"applications," and handed over the counter for immediate use. And so
while papa quarrels with the rector's forty minutes, his indiscriminate
censure of a world utterly unknown to him, his declamation against Pusey
or Colenso, or while Charlie laughs over his rhetoric and his sentiment,
woman listens a little sadly and wearily, and longs for a golden age
when husbands will love sermons and men understand clergymen.

It is just from this theological deadlock that we are freed by the
Pretty Preacher. If the world laughs at the Reverend Olympia Brown, it
is not because she preaches, but because she prisons herself in a
pulpit. The sure evidence that woman is to become the preacher of the
future is that woman is the only preacher men listen to. It is hard to
imagine any bribe short of the National Debt that would have induced us
to listen through the dog-days of the last few weeks to the panting
rhetoric of Mr. Spurgeon. But it is harder to imagine the bribe that
would have roused us to flight as we lay beneath the plane-tree, and
listened to the cool ripple of the Pretty Preacher. Of course it is a
mere phase in the life of woman, a short interval between the dawn and
the night. There is an exquisite piquancy in the raw, shy epigrams of
the abrupt little dogmatist who is just out of her teens. Her very want
of training