taught philosophy
and theology! and Laura Bassi who lectured in physics, and Clara von
Schur-man who became proficient in Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldaic
in order to study Scripture "with greater independence and judgment,"
and the Pirk-heimer family of Nuremberg, Caritas and Clara and others,
whose attainments were conspicuous in their day. But there is something
unfamiliar about all these names; they do not belong so much to the
history of the world as to the curiosities of literature and learning.
The world has not felt their touch upon it; we should scarcely miss them
in the galleries of history if their portraits were taken down.

The women who have been really great, whom we could not spare out of
their place in history, have not been the student women or the
remarkably learned. The greatest women have taken their place in the
life of the world, not in its libraries; their strength has been in
their character, their mission civilization in its widest and loftiest
sense. They have ruled not with the "Divine right of kings," but with
the Divine right of queens, which is quite a different title, undisputed
and secure to them, if they do not abdicate it of themselves or drag it
into the field of controversy to be matched and measured against the
Divine or human rights of kings. "The heaven of heavens is the Lord's,
but the earth He has given to the children of men," and to woman He
seems to have assigned the borderland between the two, to fit the one
for the other and weld the links. Hers are the first steps in training
the souls of children, the nurseries of the kingdom of heaven (the
mothers of saints would fill a portrait gallery of their own); hers the
special missions of peace and reconciliation and encouragement, the
hidden germs of such great enterprises as the Propagation of the Faith,
and the trust of such great devotions as that of the Blessed Sacrament
and the Sacred Heart to be brought within the reach of the faithful. The
names of Matilda of Tuscany, of St. Catherine of Siena, of Blessed Joan
of Arc, of Isabella the Catholic, of St. Theresa are representative,
amongst others, of women who have fulfilled public missions for the
service of the Church, and of Christian people, and for the realization
of religious ideals: true queens of the borderland between both worlds.
Others have reigned in their own spheres, in families or solitudes, or
cloistered enclosures--as the two Saints Elizabeth, Paula and Eu