But there is something unfamiliar about all these names; they do not belong so much to the history of the world as to the curiosities of literature and learning.
The world has not felt their touch upon it; we should scarcely miss them in the galleries of history if their portraits were taken down.
The women who have been really great, whom we could not spare out of their place in history, have not been the student women or the remarkably learned.

The greatest women have taken their place in the life of the world, not in its libraries; their strength has been in their character, their mission civilization in its widest and loftiest sense.

They have ruled not with the "Divine right of kings," but with the Divine right of queens, which is quite a different title, undisputed and secure to them, if they do not abdicate it of themselves or drag it into the field of controversy to be matched and measured against the Divine or human rights of kings.

"The heaven of heavens is the Lord's, but the earth He has given to the children of men," and to woman He seems to have assigned the borderland between the two, to fit the one for the other and weld the links.

Hers are the first steps in training the souls of children, the nurseries of the kingdom of heaven (the mothers of saints would fill a portrait gallery of their own); hers the special missions of peace and reconciliation and encouragement, the hidden germs of such great enterprises as the Propagation of the Faith, and the trust of such great devotions as that of the Blessed Sacrament and the Sacred Heart to be brought within the reach of the faithful.