irreverent sentimentality of Churchwomen who gratify soft inclinations by their mode of contemplating the Jesus who was crucified. These forget that the virgins-wise and foolish--who waited for their period of service on the Bridegroom, were but light-bearers of the procession conducting to the marriage feast, and that the mystical bride to whom the Bridegroom is to be united is the Church at large-even the "blessed company of all faithful people."

Profanity and the grosser raptures assuredly found no place in the worship of Christina Rossetti. Yet there were tendencies in her nature and in her faith that in Churchwomen less informed, and wanting the poetic faculty that keeps symbols in their proper place, might have resulted in coarse ideas of God and lower modes of adoration of the Saviour. These tendencies, sublimated and restrained by chaste diction, are to be discerned in After Communion. Yet one would be a goth and an infidel to cavil at the beauty and reverence of the words:

"Why should I call Thee Lord, Who art my God?

Why should I call Thee Friend, Who art my Love?
Or King, Who art my very Spouse above?

Or call Thy Sceptre on my heart Thy rod?
Lo, now Thy banner over me is love,
All heaven flies open to me at Thy nod:
For Thou hast lit Thy flame in me a clod,

Made me a nest for dwelling of Thy Dove.
What wilt Thou call me in our home above,
Who now hast called me friend? how will it be
When Thou for good wine settest forth the best?
Now Thou dost bid me come and sup with Thee,

Now Thou dost make me lean upon Thy breast,
How will it be with me in time of love?"

Christina Georgina Rossetti died in 1876, and a tablet to her memory was recently unveiled in the church in London in which she long had worshipped.

A present writer of verse of a more directly devotional kind, and moreover of verse that has no pretence at all to the quality of poetry, is Mrs. Streatfield. Her manuals are popular. Unfortunately they have the tendency of personifying the Adored and the adorer in a way which is neither

scriptural nor truly Catholic. In her Voices from the Cross a short verse is indicative of the tone which worshippers of her school impart to worship.

"Alone, in weariness and pain—
For me that bitter cry;

Still wert Thou pleading for my soul
As the long hours rolled by.
Take me, and hide me from myself,
Hide me from all my sin;

Thy Broken Heart invites me still,
O let me enter in. Amen."

A still stronger note of foreign sentimentality, and one that induces sensuous ideas of God, is to be heard in the same writer's monody on the word I thirst. After fixing the image of living waters by describing the rivers of paradise that went through Eden to water the garden and from thence parted into four heads, Mrs. Streatfield ecstasizes:

"O blessed Cross of Jesus! Here alone may we look for the living waters! Each limb of the Cross is a stream of life for the sinner, for there we behold the Blood of JESUS, and if we dare raise our eyes still farther, those four sacred outlets of a SAVIOUR's love are leading us to the centre of all, even the Sacred Heart which is pierced and bleeding to give us life. Here then is a pure River, clear as crystal, the streams whereof make glad the City of God; and it issues from the Throne, for is not the Heart of JESUS the height, the centre of all our adoration ?"

Is this scriptural? Is it Catholic? The altar of the Sacred Heart is not the high altar even in Roman churches. Word-pictures of this kind bear the same relation to true Catholic devotion as do the bedizened statues of the Saviour, the Virgin Mary, the saints and the rest, that point with painted fingers to the hole in their sky-blue vestures, wherein is hung the horrible jewel of a lacerated vermilion heart. There may have been a time when the bloody effect in art, so fascinating to Latins of debased ideals, and to the ignorant and the brutal of all races, was of use in the Church to stir up rough consciences to

a sense of real passion suffered. But it is demoralizing now to invoke such sights in the house of God.

Yet the extreme High Church party has not the monopoly of this tendency. The hymns of revivalists err greatly in this direction. Such effusions as Hold Thou my hand, In the secret of Thy presence, and May I come in? though irreverently intimate, are being constantly used by Churchwomen in Bible-class and other work, and are better discarded than employed. These lucubrations are not the invention of Churchwomen, yet for their tone and tendency Churchwomen have responsibility. Frances Ridley Havergal was not blameless in this respect, though by her personal self-denials and the high intention of her work she proved herself incapable of designing the unworthy. Even as incapable of conscious irreverence is, one feels sure, the authoress of Voices from the Cross. But the virtue of restraint in religion and in art is a great virtue. It is not for the good of the Church that sentimental expressions of religious feeling, which have long been considered peculiar to foreign books of devotion, should be multiplied in manuals and hymn-books. Neither is it advisable for Churchwomen to reproduce the ecstasies of the extreme Evangelicals. It is not every one that can write an epithalamium in which only the utmost severity can detect irreverence and an undue emotionalism, though Frances Ridley Havergal came near accomplishing the task in Thou art coming, O my Saviour, Thou art coming, O my King.

R

CHAPTER IX

SISTERHOODS, DEACONESSES, NURSES, PAROCHIAL WORKERS, CLERGYMEN

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE, SISTER DORA," HARRIET MONSELL, LYDIA SELLON, CATHERINE STANLEY, MARIA HARE, CATHARINE TAIT, BLANCHE TEMPLE, LOUISE CREIGHTON

IN the year 1845 a community of women desirous of devoting their lives to good works was founded upon the initiative of Dr. Pusey and Lord John Manners afterwards Duke of Rutland. This small sisterhood began work in a house in Osnaburgh Street, Regent's Park, London, their chief employment being the nursing of the sick.

This outcome of the Oxford Movement may be considered as the first introduction into the English Church, since the Reformation, of a definite community life. The monastic family life of the Ferrars family in the times of James I. and Charles I. cannot be reckoned a sisterhood in the ordinary sense. Nicholas Ferrar and his mother formulated for the "Nuns of Gidding," who were Mrs. Ferrar's granddaughters, a simple and effective plan of communal life which included much service of the sanctuary. But their methods were too idiosyncratic to be regarded as truly conventual. When, late in the seventeenth century, Mary Astell, with the sympathy and help of the Lady Elizabeth Hastings, desired to found a nunnery strictly on Church of England lines, Bishop Burnet opposed her design. He said it would provoke the idea that the Church was turning Romeward, and, although Mrs. Astell contended, as was a fact, that her plan was rather academical than monastic, she abandoned it rather than give occasion for stumbling.

Upon the outbreak of the Crimean War, many of the