The chimes on the Christian Science temple in Boston played “All hail the power of Jesus’ name,” on the morning of the dedication.  We did not attend, but we learn that the name of Christ is nowhere spoken with more reverence than it was during those services, and that he is set forth as the power of God for righteousness and the express image of God for love.

* * * * *

[The New Century, Boston, February, 1895]

ONE POINT OF VIEW—­THE NEW WOMAN

We all know her—­she is simply the woman of the past with an added grace—­a newer charm.  Some of her dearest ones call her “selfish” because she thinks so much of herself she spends her whole time helping others.  She represents the composite beauty, sweetness, and nobility of all those who scorn self for the sake of love and her handmaiden duty—­of all those who seek the brightness of truth not as the moth to be destroyed thereby, but as the lark who soars and sings to the great sun.  She is of those who have so much to give they want no time to take, and their name is legion.  She is as full of beautiful possibilities as a perfect harp, and she realizes that all the harmonies of the universe are in herself, while her own soul plays upon magic strings the unwritten anthems of love.  She is the apostle of the true, the beautiful, the good, commissioned to complete all that the twelve have left undone.  Hers is the mission of missions—­the highest of all—­to make the body not the prison, but the palace of the soul, with the brain for its great white throne.

When she comes like the south wind into the cold haunts of sin and sorrow, her words are smiles and her smiles are the sunlight which heals the stricken soul.  Her hand is tender—­but steel tempered with holy resolve, and as one whom her love had glorified once said—­she is soft and gentle, but you could no more turn her from her course than winter could stop the coming of spring.  She has long learned with patience, and to-day she knows many things dear to the soul far better than her teachers.  In olden times the Jews claimed to be the conservators of the world’s morals—­they treated woman as a chattel, and said that because she was created after man, she was created solely for man.  Too many still are Jews who never called Abraham “Father,” while the Jews themselves have long acknowledged woman as man’s proper helpmeet.  In those days women had few lawful claims and no one to urge them.  True, there were Miriam and Esther, but they sang and sacrificed for their people, not for their sex.