and Mrs. Fletcher--the one in the humbler walks of life, the other
a lady of position, education, and refinement--stand forth conspicuously
upon the pages of history, giving evidence that the ministry of
Christian women was honored by God in leading the wicked to forsake
their unrighteous ways. As Methodism became older, like the primitive
Church, it departed from the first usage, and as a consequence, like it,
it lost for the time a powerful agency for doing good. Latterly,
however, women, especially in the United States, are breaking through
the fetters--ecclesiastical as well as civil--which have so long bound
them. In a measure, at least, their day of civil and religious slavery
is drawing to a close. They now very frequently preside and speak at
public religious meetings, and are admitted by candid, well-informed men
to be quite as competent to discharge the duties of a presiding officer,
or to present the ideas they wish to convey in a clear and logical
manner, as any of the learned clergymen or clear-headed laymen in the
same meeting. Some of the most eloquent public advocates of the
missionary enterprise in the United States are earnest Christian women.

In the halcyon days of Queen Victoria, before the sad bereavement came
upon her which has darkened her latter years and caused her to retire as
much as possible from public view--at the time when she read her own
speeches from the throne--she was pronounced, by competent critics, to
be unsurpassed, as a reader, by any elocutionist in Europe.

A thoroughly liberal education, and the practice of conversing with
persons of intelligence, renders material assistance to both men and
women, by enabling them to express their thoughts in the clearest and
most forcible language possible; and the same thing may be remarked of
declamation. In social circles, where men and women of average mental
culture meet together, there is no perceptible difference between the
conversational powers of the sexes. Let the facilities for the education
of men and women once be made equal throughout the civilized world, and
the hackneyed cry of her mental inferiority will be heard of no more,
excepting when mentioned among the other exploded theories of the Dark
Ages and of barbaric times. The cramping of the mental powers of women,
or the attempting to cramp them, lest they might claim equal advantages
with the other half of the race, will be classed--and justly so--with
the cramping of wo