has been described as a ministering angel
when pain and anguish wring the brow; and it was in her capacity of
ministering angel that she now placed herself at the Church movement and
advanced upon the world. It was impossible to lock these beneficent
beings up, for the whole scope of their existence lay in the outer
world; but every day, as it developed their ecclesiastical position,
made even their admirers recognise the wise discretion of the middle
ages. Long before the Ritualists themselves, they, with a feminine
instinct, had discerned the value of costume. The district visitor, whom
nobody had paid the smallest attention to in the common vestments of the
world, became a sacred being as she donned the crape and hideous bonnet
of the "Sister."

Within the new establishment there was all the excitement of a perfectly
novel existence, of time broken up as women like it to be broken up in
perpetual services and minute obligation of rules, the dramatic change
of name, and the romantic self-abnegation of obedience. The "Mother
Superior" took the place of the tyrant of another sex who had hitherto
claimed the submission of woman, but she was something more to her
"children" than the husband or father whom they had left in the world
without. In all matters, ecclesiastical as well as civil, she claimed
within her dominions to be supreme. The quasi-sacerdotal dignity, the
pure religious ministration which ages have stolen from her, was quietly
reassumed. She received confessions, she imposed penances, she drew up
offices of devotion. Wherever the community settled, it settled as a new
spiritual power.

If the clergyman of the parish ventured on advice or suggestion, he was
told that the Sisterhood must preserve its own independence of action,
and was snubbed home again for his pains. The Mother Superior, in fact,
soon towered into a greatness far beyond the reach of ordinary parsons.
She kept her own tame chaplain, and she kept him in very edifying
subjection. From a realm completely her own, the influence of woman
began now to tell upon the world without. Little colonies of Sisters
planted here and there annexed parish after parish. Sometimes the
parson was worried into submission by incessant calls of the most
justifiable nature on his time and patience. Sometimes he was bribed
into submission by the removal from his shoulders of the burden of alms.
It was only when he was thoroughly tamed that he was rewarded by pretty