Church-bells are not, to my ear, an "impertinence." One is a free agent. I am free to go, which I like to do; you are free to stay, if you prefer; though I may think you make a mistake. I don't say that I should go every Sunday to hear a man who was always binding doctrines together like bundles of dry sticks, and thrusting them at his yawning hearers. I want to hear a sermon that any poor soul who straggles into church, from any by-lane or alley, can understand, and carry home with him to his cellar or garret; not a sermon that comes on chariot wheels, but afoot, and with a warm, life-like grasp for every honest, aye, and dishonest, hand in the assembly, defaulter or Magdalen; for who bade you slam heaven's gate in their faces?

I want a human sermon. I don't care what Melchisedek, or Zerubbabel, or Kerenhappuk did, ages ago; I want to know what I am to do, and I want somebody besides a theological bookworm to tell me; somebody who is sometimes tempted and tried, and is not too dignified to own it; somebody like me, who is always sinning and repenting; somebody who is glad and sorry, and cries and laughs, and eats and drinks, and wants to fight when they are trodden on, and don't! That's the minister for me. I don't want a spiritual abstraction, with stony eyes and petrified fingers, and no blood to battle with. What credit is it to him to be proper? How can he understand me? Were there only such ministers in the pulpit, I wouldn't go to church either, because my impatient feet would only beat a tattoo on the pew floor till service was over: but, thank God! there are! and while they preach I shall go to hear them, and come home better and happier for having done it.

So I pray you don't abolish my Sunday, whatever you may do with yours. Don't take away my blessed Sunday breakfast, when we all have time to love one another. Don't take away the Sabbath bells, which I so love to hear. Don't take away my human minister, whose God is no tyrant, and is better pleased to see us go smiling home from church, than bowing our heads like a bulrush, and groaning back to our dinners, till all you anti-Sabbatarians are mad to abolish Sunday,—and no wonder.

Our Catholic brethren have set us, at least one good example; their churches are not silent as the tomb on week-days. Their worshippers do not do up all their religion on Sunday. It may be only for a few moments they step in through that open church-door, on a week-day, to kneel and lay down burdens too heavy else to be borne. I like the custom. I should rather say, I like the reminder, and the opportunity thus afforded them; and I heartily wish that all our Protestant churches could be thus opened. If rich Christians object to the promiscuous use of their velvet cushions and gilded prayer-books, at least let the aisles and altar be free for those who need God on the week-days; for the poor, the tried, the tempted; for those who shrink, in their shabby habiliments, from the Sunday exhibition of fine toilettes and superfine Christianity. Were I a minister, and obliged to preach to paniers and diamonds and satins, on Sunday, I think I should have to ease my heart in some such way as this, to make my pastoral life endurable, else my office would seem to me the most hollow of all mockeries. "The rich and the poor meet together, and the Lord is the Maker of them all," should be inscribed outside my church door, had I one. I could not preach to those paniers and their owners. My tongue would be paralyzed at those kneeling distortions of womanhood, bearing such a resemblance to organ-grinders' monkeys. I am not sure that I should not grow hysterical over it, and laugh and cry in the same breath, instead of preaching. I can never tell what vent my disgust would take; but I am sure it must have some escape-valve. You may say that such worshippers (Heaven save the mark!) need preaching to. I tell you that women, so given over to "the devil and all his works," are past praying for; "having eyes, they see not; having ears, they hear not." They are ossified, impervious; they are Dead-Sea apples, full of ashes. There! now I feel better.

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.

I wanted to hear this clergyman say something about that. I wanted to know of him whether these women were doing God and their husbands service, by so sinking the spiritual part of them that one could hardly tell that it had existence. I wanted to ask him whether, if their husbands, through indifference or selfishness, or both, gave no thought to this matter, if he—set in a high place to teach the people—had no word of advice to such men, that they look as well to the spiritual deterioration of the mothers of their children as to their own—the fathers. Nay, I insist that for the mother it is of more consequence, as having infinitely more to do with the forming years of these children. And what time, pray, have many of these "routine" mothers for "thought," properly so called? What time for reading even the daily papers, to keep up intelligently with the great issues of the day, of which it is a shame and disgrace for any American wife and mother to be ignorant? How can they in this way be fit companions for their children's future? How can they answer their questions, on this subject and on that, while their vision is for ever bounded by the horizon of the physical wants of the household? You may preach "woman's duty" to me till you are hoarse; and I will preach to you the lust and the selfishness, which is ever repeating the dilemma of "the old woman in the shoe," till she has not an interval to think whether she or her brood have souls. "Routine life" of men! Men can and do get out of it—"business takes them away from home on journeys." "Business" takes him out pleasant evenings; on rainy ones, he never has "business;" then he goes early to bed, to prepare for a long evening of "business" when the sky clears.

His wife—well, "she don't seem to need it; or if she does, she don't say so;" and I might add, in the language of Dickens's nurse, Sary Gamp, "it is little she needs, and that little she don't get," at least from him.

Routine men! Oh, bah! "Routine men" have a result to show for their "routine." They have clerks—not from Intelligence-offices either—who have to do as they bid them. They also lock up shop at dark. They also walk or ride home in the fresh air, and talk with their male friends while doing it. They also are not dependent on the whim or caprice of any man to take them out for a breath of fresh air at night, after an exhaustive day of indoor stifling detail. And so, though the sermon to which I listened was excellent from a man to men, I made up my mind to add this little Appendix to women, from a woman, on the routine-woman's side of the question. You may talk of the selfishness of women till your head is white; there never lived that selfish woman so execrably selfish as a selfish man can be. I don't say you are so, sir: though at this distance, I venture to inquire whether, were you in your wife's place, you wouldn't occasionally like to climb up on the edge of the peck-measure in which she daily revolves, and look about outside, even if it should tip over on the whole brood of young ones in the process?