he Catholic
Church. God, as Father, and as Son, and as Holy Ghost, might
inspire reverence and dread only in hearts that, at the shrine of
the ever blessed Mary, Mother of God, would kindle into humble,
holy and lasting love. Frances Power Cobbe, though deprecating
the doctrine of "Mariolatry," as she terms the worship of the
Virgin, yet says of it, "The Catholic world has found a great
truth, that love, motherly tenderness and pity is a divine and
holy thing, worthy of adoration.... What does this wide-spread
sentiment regarding this new divinity indicate? It can surely
only point to the fact that there was something lacking in the
elder creed, which, as time went on, became a more and more
sensible deficiency, till at last the instinct of the multitude
filled it up in this amazing manner." When Theodore Parker, in
his morning prayer on a beautiful summer Sunday, addressed the
All-loving as "Our Father and our Mother," he struck a chord
which will one day vibrate through the heart of universal
humanity. It was a thought worth infinitely more than all the
creeds of Christendom.

What if woman should even abuse the use of the ballot at first?
Man has been known to fail at first in a new pursuit. A maker of
microscopes told me that, in a new attempt on a different kind of
object-glass, he failed forty-nine times, but the fiftieth was a
complete success. The poet of Scotland intimates that even
Creative Nature herself improved at a second trial;

"Her 'prentice hand she tried on man;
And then she made the lasses, o!"

Must we be told that woman herself does not ask the ballot? Then
I submit to such, if such there be, the question is not one of
privilege, but of duty--of solemn responsibility. If woman does
not desire the ballot, demand it, take it, she sins against her
own nature and all the holiest instincts of humanity, and can not
too soon repent. After all, the question of suffrage is one of
justice and right. Unless human government be in itself an
unnatural and impious usurpation, whoever renders it support and
submission has a natural right to an equal voice in enacting and
executing the laws. Nor can one man, or millions on millions of
men acquire or possess the power to withhold that right from the
humblest human