calogue whose sacredness it is impious to doubt or to
dispute. In other words, the power which woman now exercises will simply
crumble to dust. Whether she might gain a power higher and more
beneficial to the world and to herself, is a matter which we are not now
discussing. What is perfectly certain is that such a power would not be
the power she exercises now. The moral censorship of woman over woman,
for example, would at once pass away. It rests on the belief that women
have higher moral faculties than other beings, and that their treason to
this higher form of moral humanity which is exhibited in womanhood is a
treason of deeper dye than an offence against morality itself.

An erring sister sins against something greater than goodness--she sins
against the theory of woman, against the faith that woman is a creature
who soars high above the weaknesses of man and the common nature of man.
Long ages of self-assertion have penetrated woman with the conviction of
her worth; she is the object of her own especial worship, and the sharp
stinging justice she deals out to social offenders is not merely a proof
of the spiritual nature of her rule, but the vindication of her
self-idolatry. Again, she would forfeit the peculiar influence which she
is every day exerting in a greater degree on the course of religion and
the Church. The hypothesis of a superior spiritual nature in woman lies
at the root, for instance, of the great modern institution of
sisterhoods, and of the peculiar relation which is slowly attaching his
Paula and his Eustochium to every Jerome of our day.

But the main loss of power would lie in the family itself. It would be
no longer possible to front the political dogmatist of the hearth-rug
with a social and religious dogmatism as brusque and unreasonable as his
own. The balance of power which woman has slowly built up in home would
be roughly disturbed, and new forms of social and domestic life would
emerge from the chaos of such a revolution. From sweeping changes of
this sort the very temper of woman, her innate conservatism, her want of
originative power, turns her away. It is more comfortable to bask in the
glow of Papal sunshine, to figure in Allocutions from the Vatican as
"the pure and shining light of the house, the glory of her husband, the
education of her family, a bond of peace, an emblem of piety;" and to
let Monsieur Duruy and his insidious Professors alone.

MODERN MOTHERS.

No hu