ifestations of power, but it will shrink from you as soon as power and greatness are no longer on your side. This is the penalty paid by good people who sacrifice themselves for others. They must live without sympathy; their feelings will be misunderstood; their efforts will be uncomprehended. Like Paul, they will be betrayed by friends; like Christ in the agony of Gethsemane, they must bear their struggle alone.
Our reverence for the reformers of the past is posterity's judgment of them. But to them, what is that now? They have passed into the shadows where neither our voice of praise or of blame disturbs their repose.
This is the hardest lesson the reformer has to learn. When, with soul aglow with the light of a great truth, she, in obedience to the vision, turns to take it to the needy one, instead of finding a world ready to rise up and receive her, she finds it wrapped in the swaddling clothes of error, eagerly seeking to win others to its conditions of slavery. She longs to make humanity free; she listens to their conflicting creeds, and yearns to save them from the misery they endure. She knows that there is no form of slavery more bitter or arrogant than error, that truth alone can make man free, and she longs to bring the heart of the world and the heart of truth together, that the truth may exercise its transforming power over the life of the world. The greatest test of the reformer's courage comes when, with a warm, earnest longing for humanity, she breaks for it the bread of truth and the world turns from this life-giving power and asks instead of bread a stone.
It is just here that so many of God's workmen fail, and themselves need to turn back to the vision as it appeared to them, and to gather fresh courage and new inspiration for the future. This, my sisters, we all must do if we would succeed. The reformer may be inconsistent, she may be stern or even impatient, but if the world feels that she is in earnest she can not fail. Let the truth which she desires to teach first take possession of herself. Every woman who to-day goes out into the world with a truth, who has not herself become possessed of that truth, had far better stay at home.
Who would have dreamed, when at that great anti-slavery meeting in London, some years ago, the arrogance and pride of men excluded the women whom God had moved to lift up their voices in behalf of the baby that was sold by the pound—who would have dreamed that that very exclusion would be the keynote of woman's freedom? That out of the prejudice of that hour God should be able to flash upon the crushed hearts of those excluded the grand vision which we see manifested here to-day? That out of a longing for the liberty of a portion of the race, God should be able to show to women the still larger vision of the freedom of all human kind?
Grand as is this vision which meets us here, it is but the dawning of a new day; and as the first beams of morning light give promise of the radiance which shall envelop the earth when the sun shall have arisen in all its splendor, so there comes to us a prophecy of that glorious day when the vision which we are now beholding,
