Now, this old-fashioned method, which we have adopted in dealing with the girls of the poor, I contend traverses the central and most fundamental facts of a woman’s being.  A woman will never find salvation in being told to take care of herself, and least of all for the purpose of keeping the man, for whom she was created to be a helpmate, at arm’s length.  Gospels of self-culture may take seeming root here and there in the exotic woman; but even in her, at some moment of swift passion or strong emotion, they will crumple up and fall off from her like a withered leaf.  James Hinton knew a woman’s nature but too well when he said that she would respond to the appeal “Lay down your life” more readily and more surely than to the appeal “Take up your rights.”  She certainly has a most divine power of flinging herself away, whether nobly or ignobly, which forms both her strength and her weakness.  But I have never yet known a woman who would not, at any rate to some degree, respond to an appeal to save, not herself, but another:  “Do not let him do this wrong thing, for his sake.  You can do anything you like with a man who loves you.  God has given him body and soul into your hands, and you can lift him up into something of His image and make a true man of him; or you can let his love for you sink him into a selfish beast of prey.  Do not let him do anything that will for ever lower his manhood, but use your power over him to keep him true to all that is best and highest in him.”  I have never yet known the woman who will not be moved by such an appeal as this.  In other words, the central motive force of a woman’s nature, the key of her whole being, is, and must ever be, the mother in her, that divine motherhood which is at the heart of every woman worthy of the name, married or unmarried.  It is this divine motherhood, which all evolution, the whole “process of the suns,” has gone to strengthen, and which Christianity has enshrined at her very heart—­it is this that makes her for ever the Christ factor in the world, the supreme expression of the redeeming Love—­that care of the strong for the weak which even in Nature comes trembling into existence beneath the tender wing of the nesting bird, or forces itself into notice in the fierce lioness’s care for her whelps, and which we believe will work out the ultimate consummation of the “whole creation that groaneth and travaileth in pain until now.”  And I contend that if we are to have in the future such women as Lady Augusta Stanley, round whose lifeless form were united in one common sorrow the Queen on her throne and the poorest of the poor, such women as Browning’s wife and Browning’s mother, of whom he used to say, with a slight tremor in his voice, “She was a divine woman,” it will be by strengthening and appealing to this element of divine motherhood in a woman’s nature.