“’She who never answers till her husband cools,
  Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules;
  Charms by accepting, by submission sways,
  Yet has her humor most when she obeys.’”

[Footnote A:  Woman’s Sphere and Work, by Rev. Wm. Landels, D.D., London.]

2.  Woman’s mission is social as well as domestic.  The domestic part of her life is the garden, in which the seed is planted, which brings forth the flower of social joy.  A woman who is the soul of a beautiful home is a power in society.  No matter what her talents may be, let it be known that she is a slattern at home, and she is without influence.  The pen may serve as a feather to adorn her social life, but it looks mean when the use of it causes the neglect of the needle.

Woman may be a secret power in the home.  She may make home attractive to the refined and cultured, and thus prove to be the magnet attracting to herself and to her fireside those gifted sons and daughters, the scintillations of whose genius and the dissemination of whose beautiful thoughts make the home luminous with a light which is inextinguishable.  The influence of such a woman over her children and over the young cannot be overestimated.

“Such a sphere, so far from being insufficient to satisfy a true woman’s ambition, is well fitted, by its tremendous responsibilities, to excite her fears.  There is not one, perhaps, which a human being can occupy, on which hang more stupendous issues.  Though less public, it is still more potential than man’s.”

The influence of a true woman cannot be confined to the home.  Home is the fountain, and the world gladly furnishes channels for the diffusion of her influence.  In promoting the cause of reform, in alleviating the woes of the unfortunate, in carrying forward the cause of temperance, in ministering to the sick, either as a nurse or a physician, in using her pen to delight and guide the thoughts of the young and old along the garden paths of her own loving life, thick with the blossoms of hope, and made glorious by deeds of charity,—­in these, and in numberless other ways, woman, finding her throne in the house, is welcomed as a ruler in the world.

For woman there is a felt a necessity which should send her forth as a missionary to those like herself in everything but blessings.  Think of our large factory towns, where women are congregated by hundreds and thousands.  Let it be remembered that there is something unnatural in all this.  Woman was made for man, for home, for love.  Separate her from them all, herd her with her kind, subtract from her the incentive to endeavor, leave her mind to brood in fancy, to welcome unholy aspirations and degrading thoughts to her soul, and you leave her to prey upon herself.  Let woman see to it that reading-rooms for women be established in our factory towns, that their boarding-houses be warmed and rendered inviting, that the talented be encouraged to exertion, and that tidiness and neatness be made an incentive for all, and woman will do a work of immeasurable importance,—­a work on which God’s blessing will rest,—­and those who toil to accomplish it will obtain an abundant reward from Him who declares, “Inasmuch as ye did it to one of the least of these, ye did it unto me.”