women in America than among men, and that, while there are no men in
the Northern States who are not ashamed of living a merely idle life
of pleasure, there are many women who make a boast of helplessness and
ignorance in woman's family duties which any man would be ashamed to
make with regard to man's duties, as if such helplessness and
ignorance were a grace and a charm.

"There are women who contentedly live on, year after year, a life of
idleness, while the husband and father is straining every nerve,
growing prematurely old and gray, abridged of almost every form of
recreation or pleasure,--all that he may keep them in a state of
careless ease and festivity. It may be very fine, very generous, very
knightly, in the man who thus toils at the oar that his princesses may
enjoy their painted voyages; but what is it for the women?

"A woman is a moral being--an immortal soul--before she is a woman;
and as such she is charged by her Maker with some share of the great
burden of work which lies on the world.

"Self-denial, the bearing of the cross, are stated by Christ as
indispensable conditions to the entrance into his kingdom, and no
exception is made for man or woman. Some task, some burden, some
cross, each one must carry; and there must be something done in every
true and worthy life, not as amusement, but as duty,--not as play, but
as earnest work,--and no human being can attain to the Christian
standard without this.

"When Jesus Christ took a towel and girded himself, poured water into
a basin, and washed his disciples' feet, he performed a significant
and sacramental act, which no man or woman should ever forget. If
wealth and rank and power absolve from the services of life, then
certainly were Jesus Christ absolved, as he says: 'Ye call me Master,
and Lord. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye
also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an
example, that ye should do as I have done to you.'

"Let a man who seeks to make a terrestrial paradise for the woman of
his heart,--to absolve her from all care, from all labor, to teach her
to accept and to receive the labor of others without any attempt to
offer labor in return,--consider whether he is not thus going directly
against the fundamental idea of Christianity; taking the direct way to
make his idol selfish and exacting, to rob her of the highest and
noblest beauty of womanhood.

"In that chapter of the Bible where the