ings that would come from it to the world. One one occasion, when she was under the strain of great effort to obtain needed help for Mt. Holyoke Female School (the institution of which she was the founder is now known as Mt. Holyoke College) she wrote a letter to a leading minister, in the course of which she said: "Woman elevated by the Christian religion was designed by Providence as the educator of our race. From her entrance into womanhood to the end of her life this is to be her great business. By her influence not only her friends, her scholars and her daughters are to be affected, but also her sons, her brothers, the young men around .her, and even the elder men, not excepting her father and his peers. Considering the qualifications which the mothers in our land now possess is there not a call for special effort from some quarter to render them aid in fitting their daughters to exert such an influence as is needed from this source in our infant Republic, on our Christian country?" Such a letter would not seem daring now, but it took a prophetess to write it twenty years ago. Miss Lyon's work in behalf of foreign missions was so immense that it can only be referred to in this short sketch of her life. So many missionaries went out from her seminary that worldly families became afraid to send their daughters there to school lest they should give themselves to Christian work. After her death, in 1849, one writer suggested the breadth of her missionary work in these words, "Is she missed? Scarcely a state in the American Union but contains those she trained. Long ere this, amid the hunting grounds of the Sioux and the villages of the Cherokees the tear of the missionary has wet the page which has told of Miss Lyon's departure. The Sandwich Islander will ask why his white teacher's eyes dim as she reads her American letters. The swarthy African will lament with his sorrowing guide, who cries, 'Help, Lord, for the Godly 'ceaseth!' The cinnamon groves of Ceylon, and the palm trees
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Part Taken by Women in American History
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