In a sermon recently delivered by one of the most popular preachers of New York, and reported in the columns of a widely-read journal, occur the following words, which are a singular corroboration of what we have just said: “There is nothing more dangerous than an educated community with nothing to do. There are thousands of educated women who do not work.... I do not wonder the bold, eagle-like natures fret in their limits and detest life, or that the great hearts dash themselves out in waste. There must be outlet for these immense forces, or society will go on getting worse and worse to the end.” A few days after these words were spoken, the following appeared in a letter referring to the attempt made by a woman to drop her vote in the ballot-box, at the New York City election of the 7th of November, 1871. She gives a lamentable account of woman’s world, as it has grown to be under the shade of Protestantism. “The condition of involuntary servitude is favorable to the cultivation of all the vices of secrecy and deceit. As women, we have been schooled in hypocrisy and duplicity, until our deep souls revolt against the oppression that so compels us to belie our sincere and earnest natures. The most docile wife has that latent fire in her heart which only needs the air of freedom to fan into a flame. Many seemingly contented wives would almost risk the salvation of their souls to make their masters feel for one day the humiliation they have endured uncomplainingly for years. If this is true of the favorites of fortune, what may not be said of the great crowd of women who rush into every folly, or are doomed to severest trial by stringent laws and the oppressive customs growing out of them--laws and customs that disfranchise them, prescribe their pleasures, limit their fields of labor, and curtail their wages, all on the plea of sex? We have, gentlemen, very generally arrived at the knowledge that sex is a crime punishable by law.” The writer of this subscribes herself “Mary Leland,” and is, no doubt, a fair representative of the indignant champions of indiscriminate equality between men and women. If the slumbering volcano she describes is really hidden beneath the frivolous life of ordinary women, what a fearful responsibility lies at the door of the system whose effect it is! This spirit of rebellion can only exist as a reaction against the forced inactivity of woman’s mind and will, and against the torpor induced by the delicate flattery of those who would make her a sultana, or the brutality of those who would fain turn her into a beast of burden. Both alike are forms of slavery; both alike are anti-Christian; both are contradictions against nature, and will inevitably bear their evil fruit. Since their true rights have been denied them by the spirit of the Reformation; since the education of their children is taken out of their hands by the state; since nothing but a savory meal and a pleasant face are expected from them--what wonder that the displaced pendulum of their mind should sway violently aside, and thus come in rude contact with the more arduous sphere of man?