ABSTRACT
There has always been an idea among religious people of a certain temperament that public affairs have a distracting or hardening effect on the mind; and that it is safer to avoid such affairs altogether than to enter them with a determination to do one's duty, seeking for Divine help and guidance there as elsewhere. The prejudice against women working for others in any organised or effective manner, is only a pronounced form of this sentiment. And the fact that so many women, for a considerable part of their lives, have private duties of a very absorbing character, which render their personal presence beyond their homes only occasionally possible, has seemed to give some sanction 547to this doctrine of abstention. Yet it has absolutely no foundation in Scripture; which never draws lines of demarcation between public and private duties, bat rather assumes, alike in the Old Testament and the New, that every servant of God has both to do, though, there may be endless diversities of nature and of method among them.
