or the episcopate. If a married woman wishes to be a deaconess, and is of suitable age and qualifications, she ought to be ordained as one by the bishop, that she may be a recognized assistant of her pastor wherever she goes. Only, in order to be sure that none but women of the right tact and temper were consecrated, I would have her credentials signed by twelve matrons of the congregation. I give it as my experience, that, though I have been more or less engaged in church work all my life long, it has been always at a conscious disadvantage. Nothing gives any one any right to interest one's self in this, that, or the other, and if one chooses to do so, it is at the cost of being thought officious, forward, or overbearing, or of being obliged to play the complacent, see things go all wrong, yet still say nothing. What is true of the Episcopal Church I suppose to be true of all Protestant churches. The priests of them all more or less, in true masculine fashion, ignore half the human race, while the conventual system of the Romish Church is worse still,—though the Roman Sisters of Charity, were it not for their enforced celibacy and general want of breadth and culture, not to say ignorance, would perfectly represent one of the noblest types of deaconess.
But whether men ever give the few among us official recognition or not, the great fact for us to remember is this: that, in whichever of the countless chapels of the universal cathedral we worship, the majority of us are knit and covenanted together in the fellowship of the body and blood of Christ. Most women are "members" of some church. Publicly, therefore, we have taken Jesus for our Head. Call him God or man, still we are ranged under his leadership, and if we strive to be faithful followers, or, deeper still, true members of his mystical body, our work must grow up with his inspiration. Not one comer of our civilization, simply, should be set aside for a sanctuary, but the whole of it should be the yearning irrepressible, the upgrowth and outgrowth of our devotion to his glad-tidings preached for the renewing of this blind and diseased and suffering human congregation, into an image of the glorious
