Mrs.
Ellen Battelle Dietrick in All Soul's Church (Unitarian), and the Rev.
Anna Howard Shaw in Metzerott's Music Hall. At the last named meeting
Mrs. Howe offered the prayer and, at the close, recited her Battle
Hymn of the Republic. Miss Shaw preached from the text, "Let no man
take thy crown."

....Since the beginning of the Christian era those who have
expounded the Scriptures have been principally men, and the
Gospel has been presented to us from the standpoint of men. In
all these interpretations Heaven has been peopled with men, God
has been pictured as a man, and even the earth has been
represented as masculine.

In the beginning this was wise, because people have always been
more impressed by law, order, system and government than by the
spirit of faith. But we have passed the stage of force in nature,
of force in physical life, and have arrived at the age of
spiritual thought and earthly needs when the mother comes to the
front. In the Old World I have seen venerable men, strong men,
and women kneeling together at the shrine of Mary pouring out
their sufferings into the mother heart of the Virgin and rising
refreshed and solaced. What Catholicism has done for its church,
Protestantism must do for Christianity everywhere, by revealing
the mother-life and the mother-spirit of divine nature. In the
lesson of life there is not only a father but a mother-love.

Jesus Christ, we are told, was a man and so were His disciples,
and this is given as the reason why men only should preach the
Gospel, yet the Scriptures tell us that the first
divinely-ordained preacher was a woman. All the way down in the
history of Christianity are found women side by side with men,
always ready and willing to bear the burdens and sorrows of life
in order to better their fellows. In this country every
reformation has been urged by women as well as men. The names of
William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips will go down to
posterity linked with those of Lucretia Mott, Harriet Beecher
Stowe and Susan B. Anthony. In the great temperance movement the
name of Gough will at once bring to mind Frances E. Willard.
There is no name more prominently identified in the effort to
uplift the Indian than that of Helen Hunt Jackson. Wherever there
has been a wrong committed there have a