particular rank, age, or station, but is the
privilege of all Eve's daughters, and that any employment sanctified by
devotion and fervor and earnest desire to do good is essentially womanly
and graceful, and fitting alike to the inheritors of wealth or poverty.

That the absence of feminine influence must tend to materialize, to
sensualize, and to harden, must, we think, be admitted by all the
thoughtful. Woman is instituted by God the guardian of the heart as man
is of the mind. How many husbands, sons, and brothers, driven and
driving, through life in the absorbing excitement of a professional or
mercantile career, can testify to the arresting, reposeful, humanizing
atmosphere of a home where the wife, mother, or sister exerts her kindly
sway; and it is as necessary to the immaterial interests of a nation, to
the prevention of the legislative mind and executive hands being
completely swallowed up in the actual, the present, the mechanical, the
sensible, that some counteracting influence should be allowed and
encouraged similar to that of woman in her home.

To show the influence for good of associations of women for charitable
ends, Mrs. Jameson, in "Sisters of Charity at Home and Abroad," has
collected accounts from history and biography of many Romanist orders of
sisters, besides vindicating and putting forward Miss Nightingale and
her companions as examples. She would not for the world that the woman
should aspire to be the man, and aim at a masculine independence for
which she was never meant; and we thank the noble champion of Protestant
sisterhoods for disclaiming connection with any who want her to take
part in the public and prominent life of society, so to speak. It is
co-operation that is insisted upon--the ministering influence of the
woman with the business tact of the man. In prisons, hospitals,
work-houses, and lunatic asylums the influence of well-trained women, to
soften rigor, charm routine, beguile poverty, and tranquilize
distraction is often wanted; not so much to talk as to think, feel, and
do.

It may be said that there can not be the same need in a Protestant
country as in Roman Catholic countries of communities of single women,
where they are doubtless called for, if only in opposition to the
immense bodies of the higher and lower clergy; but, besides the fact of
there always being a greater number of women in a country in proportion
to the number of men, our commerce requires many sailors, n