he services of
religion has been deftly avenged by the subjugation of the usurpers.
Expelled from the temple, woman has simply put her priesthood into
commission, and discharges her ministerial duties by proxy." Woman is
the mainspring and the chief support of Ritualism. Things were at
a dead lock and stand still, until the so-called devotion gave an
impetus to the movement. The medieval church have glorified the
devotion of woman; but once become a devotee, it had locked her in the
cloister. As far as action in the world without was concerned, the
veil served simply as a species of suicide, and the impulses of woman,
after all the crowns and pretty speeches of her religious counsellors,
found themselves bottled up within stout stone walls, and as inactive
as before. From this strait woman released herself by the organization
of charity. The Sisters of Charity at once became a power. They
discovered 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."

"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 resumed. She received confessions, she imposed
penances, she drew up offices of devotion. If the clergyman of
the parish ventured an 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 persons.
She kept her own tame chaplain, and she kept him in a very edifying
subjugation. From a realm completely her own, the influence of woman
began to tell upon the world without. Little colonies of Sisters,
planted here and there, annexed parish after parish. Astonished
congregations saw their church blossom its purple and red, and frontal
and hanging told of the silent energy of the group of Sisters. The
parson found himself nowhere, in his own parish: every detail managed
for him, every care removed, and all independence g