Messiah's work, there was a stronger expectation of his speedy coming, and a truer comprehension of the necessity of God's special interposition to fulfill his promises.

The Hebrew, therefore (not particularly at Jerusalem, but wherever he might be), at the time of Herod,-in Asia Minor or Babylon, Alexandria or Cyprus,-was made ready by his past history of national dispersion and disgrace, and by his present position of increased numbers and diminished pretension, to receive a Saviour, under any conditions that would spiritually fulfill the promises of the sacred books.

And the Jews did receive Christ. Jews were his first disciples; Jews preached the gospel among all nations; Jews in the synagogues of Asia and Persia and Rome received the gospel; Jews were among the early martyrs; Alexandrian Jews were the supporters of Christianity in Egypt at the beginning of the Christian era. But had Christ come as a lowly personage at the time of the captivity, how many of the Jews, so far as we can see, would have been ready to receive him? Had he come at the time of Alexander's conquest, as he did come at last, poor and lowly, how many Jews would have been prepared to listen to his words a moment? Had he appeared when the Maccabees seemed about to restore the kingdom to its pristine splendor, would he not have been hooted from the city, with not a single Jew to follow his retreating footsteps as a disciple?

Neither would the heathen world, before this fulness of time, have given him a hearing. The dispersion and long exile of the Jews, prepared not only Jews but Gentiles for his reception. The Gentiles had learned something of the true God and the need of salvation, from the pious Jews among them, of whom the Lord always preserved a remnant in every land. The final overthrow of the Temple ritual made the Hebrew faith less distasteful to the Gentiles, and the Jews more accessible to the preaching of Christ's sacrificial offering once for all; and synagogues in every city offered convenient and familiar outposts for preaching and explaining the new faith to Greeks and Jews, Arabians, and Medes. The Greek tongue, spoken by Jew and Gentile everywhere, offered all the same chance to hear; and the final conquest by the Romans

left the known earth open to the message of redeeming grace. The settlement of the Jews under every civil government and among every race, established a basis for the new fruit of the old faith-and Jew and Gentile were thus made a field worldwide for the triumphs of the Cross.

An epistle is written to the Hebrews, and Hebrew synagogues are turned into Christian churches from the rising to the setting sun. Beginning with the Jews, the gospel spreads to the remotest bounds. The great mass of the Jews remain Jews, and are Jews in a modified sense to the present day; but by Jews and by them alone could Christianity have been promulgated at first. They alone had the principles of true religion in their history and their books; and the blessed "remnant" so often spoken of in prophecy, were the blessed few who believed on the Messiah and became the instruments of initiating his reign, by which all nations were to be blest in him. It may seem a long, long time for bringing this end about—a thousand years of schooling under Moses and the prophets; and five hundred sad and dreary years of discipline under Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome, without a single ray of inspiration to illumine the mysteries of the later Hebrew prophecies. Why not before? Why not save the chosen people so much sorrow, and give the nations Christ, ten centuries before? Why not, you might as well inquire, give Christ instead of Moses at the very first? Why have a course of training? Why have the stage of preparation for the glorious result? You forget that the human heart, in its ignorance and obstinacy, delayed the consumma tion. You forget that man, not God, kept back the blessed day of Christ, and you forget that although God was always ready, the race was never ready, till by long preparation it was made willing in the day of God's power! Not very willing then, ye Pharisees and Scribes! but just willing enough for God to say that the time had come! Rejoice then ye nations that God's mercy to a fallen race could no longer delay; and that to the remnant of Israel, Jesus at last could come a welcome Guest!

ARTICLE VI.-WOMAN'S RIGHT TO PUBLIC FORMS OF USEFULNESS IN THE CHURCH.

THE course of thought pursued in this Article will cover the following points of special interest:

I. General views of the subject, sustaining the ultimate conclusion reached.

II. A brief historical sketch of woman's slowly progressive, social recognition, hitherto.

III. A general exegesis, historical and critical, of scriptural language upon this subject, and especially of Paul's imaginary interdict upon the public, religious usefulness of women. Whatever seeming existence there was of such a ban upon the sex was a matter of mere temporary conformity to adverse social usages, for the better security and progress of the new faith, then just introduced among the Greeks.

IV. The conformableness of the views expressed with the whole spirit of the Bible, and of practical Christianity, and with the genius of modern civilization, and of general human progress. It will be shown that the idea of putting woman under a social ban, in church or state, is of oriental and heathenish origin, and that the whole spirit and teaching of the Bible are of an entirely contrary kind. Paul will be seen to have neither said nor done anything, as an ambassador from Christ to mankind, which can legitimately make a woman feel that she must stand back from the public service of God; or that she may innocently do so, as a prevailing habit, with any capabilities of personal usefulness that she may possess. The new means and measures that are needful for the world's speedy conquest to Christ, lie far more largely, it is believed, than most mem bers of the church seem to realize, in the keeping of the earnest religious women of each and every community; and they lie there sadly unemployed as yet to any great degree.

NOTE. For the suggestions made in this Article on 1 Cor. xiv, 34, 35, its author is, of course, alone responsible.-EDS. NEW ENGLANDER.

I.

What is truest and best is surely ascertainable upon this subject; and some of the greatest practical interests of the church in the future are involved in its right determination. It is one of the deepest convictions of the hour in many Christian hearts, that woman's full coöperative agency in some of the higher forms of public religious effort is absolutely necessary to the rapid furtherance of the world's redemption; and that the neglect of its earnest use has been one of the most signal mistakes of the church in the past. Woman's nature craves opportunities for generous helpfulness, in whatever way is possible, to those in need, and nowhere so profoundly, as in respect to the chief moral interests of life. The church of Christ on earth is the one spot where the freest possible vent, "the freedom of the sons of God," is afforded for every noble aspiration and effort as such; and the question at once arises, in the hearts of those who long for the speediest possible conquest of the world to truth and righteousness; can this then, possibly, be the one only and exact spot, where feminine excellence and energy are to be interdicted, for all time, by an unrelenting decree from above, or by perpetuated social prescription, from any large and free exercise for good. She who feels, when in her higher moods of Christian experience, that she must have unfettered opportunity to be faithful and fruitful in every good word and work for her Master, and to speak, if modestly yet also persuasively, to any who have ears to hear, of the wonderful love of God in Christ-is she to be kept dumb against her will, fervid with zeal to serve God and man, by ecclesiastical or doctrinal enforcement, where all others, young or old, learned or unlearned, are, if only of the male sex, entirely untrammeled?

In reference to the question, what is woman's highest place, and what her highest work, in promoting the world's progressive evangelization, no ideas, gathered simply from the dead past, can be justly allowed to suppress free inquiry and independent judgment here. Is woman then doomed, or, is she not, as woman, by a true philosophy of social facts and forces, doomed by God her Maker, and therefore by man her equal, doomed both by her own nature within, and by the actual

combined needs in all directions of the world without, to be forever silent as a speaker in the public service of God? The mere statement of the question would seem sufficient to insure, at once, the utter repudiation of such an idea. If she must wait mutely, however wishfully, in a corner, when full of desire to honor the Saviour of the world, and especially of her own sex, and if she must stand behind a veil and speak only in a whisper, as if by stealth :-the fact of the existence of so special and repressive a law against her, for her sex, from her Maker's ordaining hand, must be substantiated by the clearest and strongest of evidence. How different would such a state of things be from the expectations naturally suggested by the intellectual and moral resources of educated womanhood, especially when moved to speech and action by the inspirations of divine grace in the soul. The seal, which is to be put upon her lips in this holiest of all causes, must be put there, unmistakably, if at all, by the divine hand itself. Nothing but a moral compulsion of feeling, so ordered and executed, could be adequate to suppress worthy opposition to such a feeble conception of woman's proper vantage-ground, as an earnest worker for Christ.

Three-fourths of the membership of the church consist of females; and it seems to many to have been one of the chief master-strokes of satanic cunning, to have succeeded, by the force of false theories, and traditions, and social prejudices, in keeping them, hitherto, as a class, in a state of prescriptive silence and inaction. Female education has, until within a very recent period, been modeled entirely according to mere superficial and fashionable ideas. Dress and jewelry and an attractive mien and bearing, and an outward polish of manners, and education enough to spell, and read, and write, and converse fairly, well, with such random additions of moderate excellence in music, painting, and embroidery, as could be secured by a few years of hurried attention to them, in time ill-spared from more important pursuits, have largely constituted, whenever they could be obtained by a favored few, the round of accomplishments most coveted by parents for their daughters, as their appropriate outfit for life. A young woman thus taught from the first, at home and in school, to give up