stochium
and all their group of friends, the great Abbesses Hildegarde, Hilda,
Gertrude and others, and the chosen line of foundresses of religious
orders--these too have ruled the borderland, and their influence, direct
or indirect, has all been in the same direction, for pacification and
not for strife, for high aspiration and heavenly-mindedness, for faith
and hope and love and self-devotion, and all those things for want of
which the world is sick to death.

But the kingdom of woman is on that borderland, and if she comes down to
earth to claim its lowland provinces she exposes herself to lose both
worlds, not securing real freedom or permanent equality in one, and
losing hold of some of the highest prerogatives of the other. These may
seem to be cloudy and visionary views, and this does not in any sense
pretend to be a controversial defence of them, but only a suggestion
that both history and present experience have something to say on this
side of the question, a suggestion also that there are two spheres of
influence, requiring different qualities for their perfect use, as there
are two forces in a planetary system. If these forces attempted to work
on one line the result would be the wreck of the whole, but in their
balance one against the other, apparently contrary, in reality at one,
the equilibrium of the whole is secured. One is for motor force and the
other for central control; both working in concert establish the harmony
of planetary motion and give permanent conditions of unity. Here, as
elsewhere, uniformity tends to ultimate loosening of unity; diversity
establishes that balance which combines freedom with stability.

Once more it must be said that only the Catholic Church can give perfect
adjustment to the two forces, as she holds up on both sides ideals which
make for unity. And when the higher education of women has flowered
under Catholic influence, it has had a strong basis of moral worth, of
discipline and control to sustain the expansion of intellectual life;
and without the Church the higher education of women has tended to
one-sidedness, to nonconformity of manners, of character, and of mind,
to extremes, to want of balance, and to loss of equilibrium in the
social order, by straining after uniformity of rights and aims and
occupations.

So with regard to the general question of women's higher education may
it be suggested that the moral training, the strengthening of character,
is the side