---

I. WHEREIN IS WOMAN NOT DIFFERENT FROM MAN.

1. Certainly not as a sinner, nor as a sinner saved. Not in the plane which her averaged powers give her.

2. To her as to man belong the superiorities of the intellect, the aspirations of the Holy Ghost, the sublimities of faith or genius, the openings into the realms of prayer.

3. But all these require the human activities as their occasions.

4. Hence it must be that now as once Jesus is best pleased with Mary's, whose activities take higher regions and aim at the better part, than with Martha's, who lose all in the wearying round of petty cares and fitful fashions.

5. Spiritual service being the requirement of growth, and woman having an open sea to those elevations upon the condition of toil, spiritual service is her high privilege.

II. WHEREIN DOES WOMEN DIFFER FROM MAN? There is an unlikeness radical and essential. Man excels in outerness. He is stronger persistently than woman, although in a spasm woman is endowed with greater strength. Man is moral, woman emotional; the one rational, the other affectionate; the one is fibre, flax, and tow, the other silken. Man in method is decisive, woman incisive; what one would do by force the other would do by tact. From man as from Rome, we deduce principles and bring laws; from woman as from Greece we derive nice adaptations and graces; and so from both blending their contributions to the Redeemer's cause we look for a many-sided evangelism. Difference is the law of life.

III. Let us now turn to THE WORK TO BE DONE and ask —

1. What ideals of character does Christianity seek to establish? It seeks to bring into human character faith, liberty, heart purity, heart power, to bring about a reconciliation on the basis of love. Christianity would not break into hearts by mere force.

2. What has Christianity done already? The John the Baptist and purely masculine part of the work. The law of love has been from the beginning, but because of the hardness of heart, the bill of divorcement has seemed to show Christianity with the Christ out.

3. What is the character of the work to be done? After war and its chaos, peace, order, gentleness, conciliation. Lights have been carried by masculine sacrifice and heroism into forty centres of India, it remains for feminine affection and tact to carry them into 10,000,000 Zenanas around each centre.

IV. WOMAN IS PECULIARLY ADAPTED TO THIS PART OF THE WORK OF CHRISTIANIZING THE EARTH. The kind of work on hand calls for those elements which distinguish her. The old question, "would it not be unfeminine to meet mocking crowds and bear severe travel?" lose all their force by the absence of former obstacles.

V. WOMAN'S SPHERES. She does not have to seek them; they come to her.

1. All civil and ecclesiastical organizations grow out of the family. In all the earth mothers hold none but Christ's own. The Millennium is suspended on two hooks.

(1)  Keeping the children.

(2)  Using the spiritual power that is offered us. Woman has marvellous power and privilege in both.

2. Woman pioneered Sunday-school work. Hannah Ball was in the field before Robert Raikes, and now of the teachers in the United States, 84,000 are women, 42,000 men.

3. In the charities of life woman can do more than man, or than Government as a Christianizer: witness Florence Nightingale and the Red Cross sisters, and Grace Darling. What does the Scripture say of their predecessors? That they "were well" reported of," "received strangers," "washed the disciples' feet," "aged women as mothers," "diligently followed good works," "laboured much in the Lord."

4. It was women who led the Holy Crusade against the liquor traffic in America, and it is women who arc doing the most effective Home Mission work among the poor and depraved.

5. As to foreign missions, the testimony is strong that "nothing but the hand of infinite love through the agency of Christian women can work out the full and final redemption of India."

6. But shall women preach? Let the hearers decide. Perhaps woman is needed now in the pulpit to call ministers back to telling "the old, old story."

7. Let but Christ's light fall upon woman's heart and intuition and her "mission" — she will find it — anywhere.

(N. H. Axtell.)

---

---

KJV: Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest.

WEB: Don't you say, 'There are yet four months until the harvest?' Behold, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and look at the fields, that they are white for harvest already.