Having alluded to our Roman Catholic friends, allow me to ask leave of them to have the cross surmount all our _Protestant_ churches, unless they have taken out a patent for the same. It is lovely to me, this symbol, as I pass along our streets. It rests my heart to look at it, amid the turmoil, and din, and hurry, and anxious faces, and sorrowful faces, and, worse than all, empty faces, that I meet. I say to myself, there is truth _there_; there is hope and comfort there, and this tangle of life is _not_ the end. When I am a Protestant minister, the dear cross shall be on my church, and nobody shall stay away from it because they are ragged or poor, or because the cushions are too nice. Oh, I like Catholicism for _that_. They are nearer heaven than Protestants on this point.
I am very glad for the Protestant noonday prayer-meetings, wheresoever held. One may have a great spiritual need on other days than Sunday. One may happen in here--if such things ever _happen_, which I doubt--and _there_ learn that need, and the way to satisfy it. The devil is cunningly and wisely busy _every day_ and every night in the week. Why should good Christians think to circumvent this skilful diplomatist in one?--on _Sunday_ only? The devil makes _easy_ all the paths leading to perdition. Christians make hard and difficult the road to heaven, with their fine churches, and fine worshippers, and empty preaching once a week. And all around us pitiful hands are outstretched, and hungry hearts are waiting for the loving Christian word of help, temporal and spiritual; and men and women go down into the maelstrom of despair, folly, and sin; and we open our churches and let _well-dressed_ Christians in to pray for them on Sunday. Sunday! the word has no meaning. Call it Monday or Tuesday, or Fourth of July, or anything you will, but not "Sunday." _That_ once meant something.
Let me give you a postscript to a sermon I once heard. "Middle age is inevitable routine, but keep your _souls_ above it," I heard a clergyman remark the other night. He "knew that it was difficult," he said, "not to merge one's self at that crisis in the shop, in the store, in the office; difficult _not_ to become a mere drudge and a machine; but still, avoiding it was the only hope for this life." Oh, how my heart echoed these words--not for men, but for my own sex, of whose routine life the clergyman said nothing. I wanted to get up and say to him, "My dear sir, your address is eloquent, and true, scholarly, and sound, so far as it goes. It _is_ the only hope for this life that these men of business should not become mere tools." But I wanted to ask him if men, with their freedom of action--men who, out in the world, inevitably come into collision with _stirring_, not _stagnant_ life--find this difficult, what of their wives? With twenty nerves where men have one to be jarred and agonized, with the pin and needle fret, of every minute, which they may never hope to escape or get away from; tied hand and foot, day and night, week after week, with the ten thousand cords, invisible often to the dull eye of husband and father, who accepts at evening the neat and pleasant result, without a thought of how it was accomplished--without a thought of the weariness of that inexorable grind of detail necessary to it--without a thought that a change of scene is either necessary or desirable for the wife and mother who is surely under its benumbing influence, merging _her_ "soul" till she is a mere machine.