r the other. Now, the question is, not
whether the Jews are converted, or whether the Gospel ever reaches the
islands, but, Does the agent flourish? Is his post profitable? And
does woman beg and stitch faithfully for his support and for the
promotion of his _glorious mission?_

Now, I ask women with all seriousness, considering that we have little
to give, had we not better bestow our own charities with our own
hands? And instead of sending our benevolent outgushings in steamers
to parts unknown, had we not better let them flow in streams whose
length and breadth we can survey at pleasure, knowing their source
and where they empty themselves? Instead of any further efforts in
behalf of a pin-cushion ministry, I conjure my countrywomen to devote
themselves from this hour to the education, elevation, and
enfranchisement of their own sex. If the same amount of devotion and
self-sacrifice could be given in this direction now poured out on the
churches, another generation would give us a nobler type of womanhood
than any yet molded by any Bishop, Priest, or Pope.

Woman in her present ignorance is made to rest in the most distorted
views of God and the Bible and the laws of her being; and like the
poor slave "Uncle Tom," her religion, instead of making her noble and
free, and impelling her to flee from all gross surroundings, by the
false lessons of her spiritual teachers, by the wrong application of
great principles of right and justice, has made her bondage but more
certain and lasting, her degradation more helpless and complete.

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON.

GLOUCESTER, MASS., _August 24, 1852_.

_To Mrs. Paulina W. Davis:_

DEAR MADAM:...--I have never questioned what I understand to be the
central principle of the reform in which you are engaged. I believe
that every mature soul is responsible directly to God, not only for
its faith and opinions, but for the details of its life in the world.
In every crisis of duty there can be consultation, at last, only
between one spirit and its Creator. The assertion that woman is
responsible to man for her belief or conduct, in any other sense than
man is responsible to woman, I reject, not as a believer in any theory
of "Woman's Rights," but as a believer in that religion which knows
neither male nor female, in its imperative demand upon the individual
conscience.

This being true, I know not by w