to see the sign from heaven, which should mark out Jesus the triumphant. The women were won by the tears, which they saw him shed at the grave of Lazarus, in sympathy with the afflicted sisters; but the men, who were standing by, were dissatisfied, for, said they, Could he not have caused that Lazarus should not have died? and when Jesus, the wonder and glory of Judea, the suffering prince, casts his last look from his cross down on the fainting Mary, and says to John, with his last breath, Behold thy mother! is it to be wondered at, that the women, who stood by and heard it, should have begged this body, and embalmed this corpse, from which a spirit so affectionate had just taken its flight?

This regard for the founder of our faith they seem to have continued to the apostles; for the christian communities, in the first ages, were distinguished by an order of women, who ministered to the necessities of the saints, who brought up children, who lodged strangers, who washed the saints' feet, who relieved the afflicted, and diligently followed every good work, thus embalming anew the remains of their Lord in the fragrance of their charities towards the church, which is his body.

I fancy myself standing in the presence of their successors, who have not forfeited the religious character of the friends of Jesus, and who yet feel the unimpaired influence of his affectionate religion. Do not imagine, that we disparage the glory, or that we lightly esteem the power of christianity, when we say, it is the only religion for the female sex; for, though it was introduced for the good of the whole world, it produces much of this good by its effects on their condition, and its power on their hearts.

When we find, upon opening the gospels, such language as this, Blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are the meek, the merciful, the peace-makers, the calumniated, is it surprising, that the most fond and

faithful votaries of such a religion should be found among a sex, destined, by their very constitution, to the exercise of the passive, the quiet, the secret, the gentle and humble virtues? Is it surprising, that— while the self-styled lords of the creation are absorbed in the pursuits of wealth and ambition, distracted in the game of war and politics, or kept by business or pleasure out of the knowledge of that care and obscurity, to which their female partners are separated by the customs of society-is it surprising, that the dependent, solitary female, in looking round for a bosom, where she may pour out her secrets, or assuage her anxieties, should resort with peculiar tenderness and confidence to that invisible parent, who is always present to her aid; and thus acquire a habit of devotion and communion with God, unknown to our more presumptuous sex?

You will not be offended by the suggestion, that, accustomed, as you are, to feel, oftener than to reason, the portions of our religion, which are addressed to the imagination, affect you with singular force. Accustomed more to retirement, than to active life, you have more leisure, and consequent disposition, for religious contemplations. It is, also, infinitely honourable to your character, that you ever feel a secret sympathy with a religion, which unlocks all the sources of benevolent affection, which smiles on eyery exercise of compassion, and every act of kindness. We may say too, perhaps, that your hearts, not hardened by the possession of power, the pains of avarice, or the emulations of public life, are more alive to the accents of pardon by Jesus Christ, more awake to the glories of the invisible world. The gospel came to throw a charm over domestic life; and, in retirement, the first objects, which it found, were mothers and their children. It came to bind up the broken hearted; and for that office woman was always best prepared. It came to heal the sick;

and woman was already waiting at their couches. It came to open the gates of life on the languid eye of the dying penitent; and woman was every where to be seen, softly tending at the pillow, and closing the eyes of the departing.

With this superiour susceptibility of religious impression and aptitude to the practical duties of the gospel, I know, there are evils associated, against which it is sometimes difficult to guard. Sensibility degenerates into weakness, and religious awe into superstition, in your sex, oftener, perhaps, than in ours; yet, with all these dangers and inconveniencies, 1 believe, that if christianity should be compelled to flee from the mansions of the great, the academies of the philosophers, the halls of legislators, or the throng of busy men, we should find her last and purest retreat with woman at the fireside; her last altar would be the female heart; her last audience would be the children gathered round the knees of a mother; her last sacrifice, the secret prayer escaping, in silence, from her lips, and heard, perhaps, only at the throne of God.

But enough of the religious character of the female sex. To say more, perhaps, would be invidious; and to have said less would hardly have been just to those meek spirits, who have, in every age, given a charm and mild lustre to the gospel, which they first hailed, as it dawned over the hills of Palestine. A less delicate and difficult subject remains.

What has christianity done for that sex, to which it seems so well adapted; and what ought they now to do for christianity? These are the remaining heads of our discourse.

1. What has the introduction of christianity done for your sex? This inquiry presents itself with peculiar interest on this occasion, when we are called to appear before an assembly of females, who, under the genial influence of the christian religion, and

of this alone, have founded, and supported, and successfully conducted the institution before us. In former ages, and under any other system of religion, these children, instead of being nourished, as they now are, by the care of christian women, would probably have been exposed, at their birth, to perish under the broad cope of heaven; and you, ladies, instead of assembling with your young and tender orphans to praise the Father of the fatherless, and claiming the respect and the patronage of our sex, would have been crouching under our tyranny, or ministering to our passions, or leading, in obscure apartments assigned to your sex, a selfish, vapid, and unprofitable life.

But, now, wherever this gospel is preached, that, which these women have done, shall be told for a memorial of them, and of their sex. These walls, this service, these orphans, this audience, and all the circumstances, which surround us, proclaim the power and blessedness of the gospel.

In savage life the condition of women is every where nearly the same, varying only in degree of degradation, from the brutal licentiousness of the Otaheitan, to the slavish drudgery of the females of more northern climates. To this state of relative depression there are exceptions, it is said, among the tribes of Indians on our north-west coast, where man appears to have sunk to a lower point of barbarity, than his companion, who seems thus to have mounted a little on his ruins. Perhaps, too, woman, in uncivilized life, retains and exercises more of the peculiar virtues of the sex, than we find, on the whole, in their inactive retreats among the polished nations of antiquity. Of the humanity and kindness of woman in savage life, Ledyard has left a testimony, which will never cease to be read with emotion, while there is an eye left to weep.

It might be previously supposed, that, as the cha. racter of our sex was, in the progress of civilization, refined and exalted, the condition of women would be correspondently meliorated, and their character elevated. No doubt, many are ready to believe, that christianity has done nothing for women, which it had not first done for men; that it has elevated them by raising us. But a very little attention to the private life of the Greeks and Romans, at the summit of their civilization and intellectual culture, will refute this suggestion. If we would find the wives and daughters of the Greeks, in the age of Pericles, we must look for them in the inmost apartments of the houses, where they were condemned to labour in obscurity at the distaff and the loom, in common inanity and eternal ennui. The only women of cultivated minds were then the females, who had thrown off the restraints of decency and domestic life; and the dreary vacanсу of the female understanding is but sadly relieved, among this polished people, with the names of Sappho, Aspasia, and some other courtezans, who have come down to us with the titles of poets and philosophers. You cannot fail to comprehend the condition of your sex, when you read, that Socrates was compelled to resort for female conversation to the feet of Aspasia; and that Thucydides, the most philosophical of Grecian historians, lays it down as a maxim, that the most virtuous woman is she, of whom the least can be said."

If we now pass to Rome, we find little variation in the relative condition or character of the sex, We are attracted by the great actions of some Roman women, in the days of their republican rudeness and severity. We repeat, with the admiration of school boys, the story of the Sabine matrons, and the names of Lucretia, Volumnia, Hortensia, Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, Portia, and Arria, the wife of Pætus; but the occasional deeds of female greatness,