cal interest: it has an
important bearing on the culture of women in the present day. Women
become superior in France by being admitted to a common fund of ideas, to
common objects of interest with men; and this must ever be the essential
condition at once of true womanly culture and of true social well-being.
We have no faith in feminine conversazioni, where ladies are eloquent on
Apollo and Mars; though we sympathize with the yearning activity of
faculties which, deprived of their proper material, waste themselves in
weaving fabrics out of cobwebs. Let the whole field of reality be laid
open to woman as well as to man, and then that which is peculiar in her
mental modification, instead of being, as it is now, a source of discord
and repulsion between the sexes, will be found to be a necessary
complement to the truth and beauty of life. Then we shall have that
marriage of minds which alone can blend all the hues of thought and
feeling in one lovely rainbow of promise for the harvest of human
happiness.

III. EVANGELICAL TEACHING: DR. CUMMING. {64}

Given, a man with moderate intellect, a moral standard not higher than
the average, some rhetorical affluence and great glibness of speech, what
is the career in which, without the aid of birth or money, he may most
easily attain power and reputation in English society? Where is that
Goshen of mediocrity in which a smattering of science and learning will
pass for profound instruction, where platitudes will be accepted as
wisdom, bigoted narrowness as holy zeal, unctuous egoism as God-given
piety? Let such a man become an evangelical preacher; he will then find
it possible to reconcile small ability with great ambition, superficial
knowledge with the prestige of erudition, a middling morale with a high
reputation for sanctity. Let him shun practical extremes and be ultra
only in what is purely theoretic; let him be stringent on predestination,
but latitudinarian on fasting; unflinching in insisting on the Eternity
of punishment, but diffident of curtailing the substantial comforts of
Time; ardent and imaginative on the pro-millennial advent of Christ, but
cold and cautious toward every other infringement of the _status quo_.
Let him fish for souls not with the bait of inconvenient singularity, but
with the drag-net of comfortable conformity. Let him be hard and literal
in his interpretation only when he wants to hurl texts at the heads of
unbelievers and advers