s introduced to her brother
and to The Melbourne Review. She was at that time pastor of the
Unitarian Church in Melbourne. She had during the long illness of the
Rev. Mr. Higginson helped her brother with the services. At first she
wrote sermons for him to deliver, but on some occasions when he was
indisposed she read her own compositions. Fine reader as Mr. H. G.
Turner is he did not come up to her, and especially he could not equal
her in the presentment of her own thoughts. The congregation on the
death of Mr. Higginson asked Miss Turner to accept the pastorate. She
said she could conduct the services, but she absolutely declined to do
the pastoral duties--visiting especially. She was licensed to conduct
marriage services and baptized (or, as we call it, consecrated)
children to the service of Almighty God and to the service of man.
During the absence of our pastor for a long holiday in England Mr. C.
L. Whitham afterwards an education inspector, took his place for two
years, and he arranged for an exchange of three weeks with Miss Turner.
She is the first woman I ever heard in the pulpit. I was thrilled by
her exquisite voice, by her earnestness, and by her reverence. I felt
as I had never felt before that if women are excluded from the
Christian pulpit you shut out more than half of the devoutness that is
in the world. Reading George Eliot's description of Dinah Morris
preaching Methodisim on the green at Hayslope had prepared me in a
measure, but when I heard a highly educated and exceptionally able
woman conducting the services all through, and especially reading the
Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments with so much intelligence that
they seemed to take on new meaning, I felt how much the world had been
losing for so many centuries. She twice exchanged with Adelaide--the
second time when Mr. Woods had returned--and it was the beginning to me
of a close friendship.

Imitation, they say, is the sincerest flattery; and when a similar
opportunity was offered to me during an illness of Mr. Woods, when no
layman was available, I was first asked to read a sermon of Martineau's
and then I suggested that I might give something of my own. My first
original sermon was on "Enoch and Columbus," and my second on "Content,
discontent, and uncontent." I suppose I have preached more than a
hundred times, in my life, mostly in the Wakefield Street pulpit; but
in Melbourne and Sydney I am always asked for help; and when I went