In the second place the work of the Church of God is a work that ought to appeal to all women and a work that any woman can help in.  All women can help the spiritual progress of the Church by meditating upon the life of Blessed Mary and fashioning their lives upon her example.  We are all tremendously affected by example, and that is especially true of young girls.  Their supreme terror seems to be that they should be caught doing or saying something different from what all other girls say or do or wear.  Their opinions are as imitative as their clothes.  Hence the need of the pressure of a strong Christian example, which would result most readily in the union of Christian women in a single ideal.  Our present difficulty is that so many of our women who are devout members of the Church in their private capacity, so far succumb to the group-mind in their social relations that they are possessed by the same terror as the young girl in the face of the possibility of being different.  Therefore are they careful to hide their real feeling for religion and their devotion to spiritual things under the mask of worldly conformity which evacuates their example of much of the power that it might have.  I am quite convinced that fear of the world is about as strong an impulse toward evil as love of the world.

We need that women should clear their ideals and realise their public responsibility for the presentation of them.  We need terribly at this moment insistence on the purity and simplicity of the Holy Mother of God.  One is stunned at the abandonment of the ideal of reserve and modesty that the last few years have seen.  Women seem to take it quite gaily:  men, one notes, take it much more seriously.  I have been consulted by more than one father during the past year as to the possibility of sending a boy to a school where he would be kept out of the society of half-naked girls.  Have mothers no longer any sense of the value of purity?  Or have they simply abandoned all responsibility that normally goes with being a mother?  One recognises how helpless a man is under the circumstances, that his intervention in such matters simply casts him for the part of family tyrant; but why should a mother abandon her duty simply because her daughter says:  “You don’t understand.  Girls are not as they were when you were young.  All the girls do this.  No other mother takes the line that you do.  You are not modern.”

One knows, of course, that the whole matter of decline in manners and morals is but a part of the world-wide revolt against the morality of Jesus Christ that we are witnessing everywhere.  Social and religious teachers, students of history and social movements have seen the approach of this revolt for a long time, have been watching its rise and growth.  When they have pointed out the end of the path that we have been travelling, they have been disposed of by calling them pessimists.  These “pessimists” pointed out long ago that the denial of the obligation