he is a layman, but you never say a laywoman. You say: a woman. Abraham
Lincoln said, "All these things are done and suffered, that government
of the people, for the people, and by the people should not perish
from the earth." Now, people, the dictionary says, are men, women, and
children. Did Abraham Lincoln mean that any women or children can take
any part in the government of the nation? No, no, no! He meant this.
When he stood up and delivered his inaugural speech, he said this, "The
intent of the lawmaker is the law."

I give them something from one of the greatest lawyers that ever lived
to think of awhile--John Selden: "The only honest meaning of any word is
the intent of the man that wrote it." At the time that the plan of lay
delegation was adopted, there was not a single Conference of the Church
on this wide globe, not one that distinguished between the ministry and
the laity that allowed women to take any part in its law-making body.
Some one will talk about the Quakers. But they deny the existence of the
Church, the sacraments of the Church, and make no distinction between
the ministry and the laity. Let them get up and show that there was ever
one Church in the world worthy of the name that allowed women to make
its laws. There is not one to-day. Let them name a Church, let them name
one that has allowed women in its law-making body; and yet such is the
blinding power of gush that men will say that our fathers all understood
it and proposed to put women in. The fact is, that they only proposed to
allow them to put us in. As soon as the General Conference adjourned the
women made an appeal in a public statement. They were asked to vote for
lay delegation, and were told that then they could set the Church right.
The opponents appealed to them to vote against it on the ground that it
would not make any difference to them. James Porter, Daniel Curry, Dr.
Hodgson (Professor Little thinks he was the greatest of them all) wrote
a series of articles in the _Advocate_, and it never occurred to them