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 gone.  If it suited the ministering angels to make a legal splash, he found himself landed in the law courts.  If they took it into their heads to seek another field, every one assumed it a matter of course that their pastor would go too.”  It is because of this influence that in certain quarters the ecclesiastical hierarchy are taking, year by year, a more feminine position.  It is not impossible that a church who worships Mary as the Mother of God may be brought to recognize woman as the proper head of the church.  True, as the writer quoted above adds, “she must stoop to conquer heights like these.”  Yet the question has been seriously asked, “Is not the Episcopal office admirably adapted to woman?” Between a priest and a nun there is only the difference of a bonnet in their dress, and we know how easily woman can be persuaded to go without a bonnet, or to exchange it for a hat such as is worn by men.  In England, the curate is sometimes called the first lady of the parish; and what he now is in theory, a century hence may find him in fact.  “It would be difficult, even now, to detect any difference of sex in the triviality of purpose, the love of gossip, the petty interests, the feeble talk, the ignorance, the vanity, the love