This work is "fitted for our times. It will be of vast service to many mothers and daughters in the Church, by showing them how they may practically conform their lives to the bright pictures of womanly virtue you have so felicitously portrayed. And if others outside the Church may be induced to look into these pages, how many may be saved who are eager to do good and live virtuously, and have no one to teach them! There is a vast multitude of women in this country marching toward a precipice of ruin, and it is a mystery to know what to do to arrest their downward progress. Many of them have no religion, and, though a man without religion is dangerous to society, a woman who is destitute of it is prone to be a monster." Thomas Foley, Bishop of Chicago, 1877 A.D.