n any church; for, despite
the pleadings of the most devoted pastors, the church edifices are the
chosen theatres of this display; it would seem rather to be in the
infusion, by a more worthy education, of ideas which would enable woman
to wield religion, morality, and common sense against this burdensome
perversion of her love for the beautiful.

"This would not be to lower the sense of beauty and appropriateness in
costume; thereby would come an aesthetic sense, which would lift our best
women into a sphere of beauty where Parisian grotesque could not be
tolerated; thereby, too, would come, if at all, the strength of
character which would cause woman to cultivate her own taste for simple
beauty in form and color, and to rely on that, rather than on the latest
whim of any foolish woman who happens to be not yet driven out of the
Tuileries or the Breda quarter.

"Still another evil in American women is the want of any general
appreciation of art in its nobler phases. The number of those who visit
the museums of art is wretchedly small, compared with the crowds in the
temples of haberdashery. Even the love of art they have is tainted with
'Parisian fashions.' The painting which makes fortunes is not the worthy
representation of worthy subjects; French boudoir paintings take the
place of representations of what is grand in history or beautiful in
legend; Wilhems and his satin dresses, Bourgereau with his knack at
flesh-color, have driven out of memory the noble treatment of great
themes by Ary Scheffer and Paul Delaroche; Kaulbach is eclipsed by
Meissonier. Art is rapidly becoming merely a means of parlor decoration,
and losing its function as the embodiment of great truths.

"So rapidly evaporates one of the most potent influences for good in a
republic. An education of women, looking to something more than
accomplishments, is necessary to create a healthy reaction against this
tendency.

"Still another part of woman's best and noblest influence has an alloy
which education of a higher sort, under influences calculated to
develop logical thought, might remove. For one of the most decided
obstacles to progress of the best Christian thought and right reason has
arisen from the clinging of women to old abuses, and the fear of new
truths. From Mary Stuart, at the castle of Ambroise, to the last good
woman who has shrieked against science--from the Camarilla which prays
and plots for reaction in every European court down