daughters of the Lord Almighty, men would within a twelvemonth, seat us beside themselves upon the thrones of government in church and state, ruling the world jointly, as He meant we should, when, as the Bible says, "He gave to them dominion."

Truly we have what we take the most pains for, and women must be up and doing if they expect the co-operation and fealty of men in politics, ecclesiastical or secular. It also seems to me we should, at this convention, provide for White Ribbon deaconesses to be trained in our Evangelistic Department, taught to be skilled nurses at our National Temperance Hospital, and employed by our local unions in preaching, teaching and visiting the sick and poor. I am confident that there are men of the best standing in the pulpit, who will not hesitate to set them apart to this sacred office and ministry in accordance with the custom of the early church. There are thousands of women, young and old, whose hearts the Lord hath touched and who would rejoice to find a vocation so sacred and so full of help within the sheltering fold of the W. C. T. U.

"She spoke of justice, truth and love,
How soft her words distilled;

She spoke of God, and all the place

Was with His presence filled."

Of how many a sweet soul within our borders those words are true? What hindereth that they be set apart with every guarantee and safeguard that can emphasize their gospel ministry? Of them how long has it been said, as of Christ's early servants, "the people magnify them,” and “the common people hear them gladly."

Rev. Dr. Black, of Mississippi, says in his new book:

"The offices of deaconesses formed a part of the machinery of the Church for many centuries. The deaconess received ordination by the imposition of hands. The ordination ritual is given in the Apostolical Constitutions, from which we extract the following prayer of the officiating bishop: Eternal God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Creator of man and of woman, thou who didst fill with thy spirit Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, and Huldah, thou who didst vouchsafe to a woman the birth of the only begotten Son, thou who didst in the tabernacle, and in the temple, place female keepers of thy holy gates, look down now also upon this thy handmaid, and bestow on her the Holy Ghost, that she may worthily perform the work committed to her to thy honor and the glory of Christ.'"

What a practical element the deaconesses would introduce into religion. Doubtless, in early days, when the conflict was between idolatry and the worship of God, "divine service" may have rightly consisted largely in sermon, song, and prayer, but to call that "service" now, as is universally done, seems to me a mockery. That is a delight, a coveted and blessed means of growth; but "service" now is to our fellow-men, and he whose purse and work are not invested there knows nothing about "divine service," and might well name his place of Sunday lounging and æsthetics the "Church of the Divine Emptiness," or the "Church of the Celestial Sugar Plum,"

What the world most needs is mothering, and most of all in the spirit's natural home, the church, and on the Sabbath day. It needs the tender sweetness of the alto voice, the jubilant good-will of the soprano, in sermon as in psalm; tenor and bass become monotonous at last, and the full diapason of power and inspiration is impossible except we listen to the full chorus of humanity. God hasten that great chorus, in church and state alike, with its deep-hearted love and its celestial hope!

The sine qua non of our success is mutual faith and fellowship. We must "have fervent charity among ourselves."

It is not uncharitable to judge an act as good or bad, but we should be very slow to judge the actor bad. Only by rising to the sublime sense of our sacred sisterhood with every woman that breathes, be she good or bad, foreign or native, bond or free, shall we find our individual pettiness covered and flooded out of sight by the most inexorable force of all the universe, the force of Love.

If I could have my wish for all of us, it would be that in our measure we might merit what was said of that seraphic woman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It is an ideal that we shall all delight to share:

"Persons were never her theme, unless public characters were under discussion, or friends were to be praised, which kind office she frequently took upon herself. One never dreamed of frivolities in her presence, and gossip felt itself out of place. Books and humanity, great deeds, and, above all, politics, which include all the grand questions of the day, were foremost in her thoughts, and therefore, oftenest on her lips. I speak not of religion, for with her everything was religion. Her Christianity was not confined to the church and rubric; it meant civilization.”

Envy and jealousy light the intensest fires that ever burn in human hearts; gossip and scandal are the smoke emitted by them. If, as has been said, these passions could, like some modern chimneys, be consumers of their own smoke, a purer and a better atmosphere would then prevail.

In all the battle of opinion that rages, and must rage until a better equilibrium is reached in this great nation, be it ours, beloved sisters, to remember that "when either side grows warm in argument, the wiser man gives over first."

Good-breeding has been called "the apotheosis of self-restraint." But the higher evolution is not to need restraining, but to have that inward quietness which, when God giveth it, "who then can make trouble?" All strife in manner, word and deed, grows out of worldliness, and to this there is but just one antidote, and that is, OTHER Worldliness.

One look into the silent heavens, and all our earthly jargons seem unworthy; one deep tone of the forest's mystical æolian, and our deeper hearts respond in tenderness; one solemn strain out of the sea's unutterable anthem. and the soul hears in it that "something greater" that speaks to the heart alone.

All true souls know that this is true. "Let my soul calm itself, O God, in Thee," sings the stormy spirit of St. Augustine. "Live without

father and mother, but not without God," cries Count Tolstoi from Russia, that center of the world's unrest.

'We should fill the hours with the sweetest things,
If we had but a day.

We should drink alone at the purest springs,
In our upward way,

We should love with a life-time's love in an hour
If the hours were but few,"

are the sweet lines of our own Mary Lowe Dickinson.

And these are the words of a great but unnamed saint: "The strongest Christians are those who, from daily habit, hasten with everything to God."

CHAPTER IX.

AIMS AND METHODS OF THE W. C. T. U.

Thus have I tried to set forth the sequel of that modern Pentecost called the "Woman's Crusade." That women should thus dare was the wonder after they had so long endured, while the manner of their doing left us who looked on, bewildered between laughter and tears. Woman-like, they took their knitting, their zephyr work or their embroidery, and simply swarmed into the drink-shops, seated themselves, and watched the proceedings. Usually they came in a long procession from their rendezvous at some church where they had held morning prayermeeting; entered the saloon with kind faces, and the sweet songs of church and home upon their lips, while some Madonna-like leader with the Gospel in her looks, took her stand beside the bar, and gently asked if she might read God's word and offer prayer.

Women gave of their best during the two months of that wonderful uprising. All other engagements were laid aside; elegant women of society walked beside quiet women of home, school and shop, in the strange processions that soon lined the chief streets, not only of nearly every town and village in the state that was its birthplace, but of leading cities there and elsewhere; and voices trained in Paris and Berlin sang "Rock of Ages, cleft for me," in the malodorous air of liquor-rooms and beer-halls. Meanwhile, where were the men who patronized these places? Thousands of them signed the piedge these women brought, and accepted their invitation to go back with them to the churches, whose doors, for once, stood open all day long; others slunk out of sight, and a few cursed the women openly; but even of these it might be said, that those who came to curse remained to pray. Soon the saloon-keepers surrendered in large numbers, the statement being made by a well-known observer that

the liquor traffic was temporarily driven out of two hundred and fifty towns and villages in Ohio and the adjoining states, to which the Temperance Crusade extended. There are photographs extant representing the stirring scenes when, amid the ringing of church-bells, the contents of every barrel, cask and bottle in a saloon were sent gurgling into the gutter, the owner insisting that women's hands alone should do this work, perhaps with some dim thought in his muddled head of the poetic justice due to the Nemesis he thus invoked. And so it came about that soft and often jeweled hands grasped axe and hammer, while the whole town assembled to rejoice in this new fashion of exorcising the evil spirits. In Cincinnati, a city long dominated by the liquor trade, a procession of women, including the wives of leading pastors, was arrested and locked up in jail; in Cleveland, dogs were set on the crusaders, and in a single instance, a blunderbuss was pointed at them, while in several places, they were smoked out, or had the hose turned on them. But the arrested women marched through the streets singing, and held a temperance meeting in the prison; the one assailed by dogs laid her hands upon their heads and prayed; and the group menaced by a gun marched up to its mouth singing, "Never be afraid to work for Jesus." The annals of heroism have few pages so bright as the annals of that strange crusade, spreading as if by magic, through all the Northern States, across the sea and to the Orient itself. Everywhere it went, the attendance at church increased incalculably, and the crime record was in like manner shortened. Men say there was a spirit in the air such as they never knew before; a sense of God and of human brotherhood.

But after fifty days or more, all this seemed to pass away. The women could not keep up such work; it took them too much from their homes; saloons re-opened; men gathered as before behind their sheltering screens, and swore "those silly women had done more harm than good," while with ribald words they drank the health of "the defunct crusade."

Perhaps the most significant outcome of this movement was the knowledge of their own power gained by the conservative women of the churches. They had never even seen a "woman's rights convention," and had been held aloof from the "suffragists" by fears as to their orthodoxy; but now there were women