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Sisterhood is especially and pre-eminently fitted. I believe in this work of rescuing and raising the fallen being committed to women of high culture and devotion—who in the name of Sister recognise a Sister in Christ in the outcast—being especially fitted for this work. (Cheers.) Surely, you can all feel this, when you have to raise the fallen one and the outcast, when you have to elevate those who are degraded—that you need the most cultivated, the most refined, and the most saintly, influences that can be brought to bear upon them. Therefore, when I hear of women of good birth, of high culture and refinement, giving their lives to this work, all I have to say is this,—it must be something very bad indeed in their methods that will induce me to stand aside and not help them. It must be something more than I am likely to hear against the Sisterhood at Wantage. (Cheers.) Then there is another thing: I think a Sisterhood, constantly given to this work, acquires stores of experience, traditional methods of work, that could not possibly be in the possession of any single individual engaged in the work; or if it could be concentrated in one person, could not be continued to that person's successor. You want tradition of work—you want continuity of work—and this is to be obtained only by a guild or by an association of persons who give themselves continuously to the work. By this means you get skilled labour, and increasingly skilled labour, in the work. There was a great deal of wisdom on the part of our ancestors in forming trade and workmen's guilds, because they held that the acquired wisdom and the improved practice of those who gathered together in those guilds became a common possession, and were handed on, not perishing with the individuals who possessed them, and becoming an hereditary gift to the community in which they were fostered and acquired. For that reason I should think the services of the Sisterhood—of devout women giving themselves to this work of acquiring the knowledge and habits of dealing with this work—is of immense value in such a work as this. But I am told that in engaging in this work, and in joining with you in it, I am engaging in a conspiracy for the promotion of Romanism. I think I am as little likely to join in a conspiracy of that sort as any person in this diocese or out of it. I am not at all afraid of any conspiracy for promoting Romanism in any institution which is under the guidance of my friend the Dean of Lincoln. You have heard his speech this afternoon. That speech was not only filled with orthodox loyalty to his own Church,
