The united opinion. [volume] (Bradford, Vt.) 1881-1970, 1899-09-15
A WORK FOR WOMEN.
DR.. Talmage's Stirring Sermon on
"The Queens of Home"
AerOInes of the Fireside and the Bat-
tlefeld - Ministering Angels
What Her Chief Desire
Should be.
copyright, Louis Klopsch, 1891
Washington, Sept. 10.

text is Solomon's Song 6, s: There arr
threescore queens"
So Solomon, by one stroke, set fortl
the imperial character of true Chris
tan woman. She is not a slave, not &
hireling, not a subordinate, but queen
In former sermon l showed you thai
crown and courtly attendants and i'm
perial wardrobe were not necessary tc
make a queen, but that graces of the
heart and life will give coronation tc
any woman. l showed you at once at
some length that woman's position was
higher in the world than mans, and
that although she had often been de-
MED the right of suffrage, she always
did vote, and always would vote by her
influence, and that her chief desire
ought to be that she should have grace
rightly to rule in the dominion which
she has already won. 1 began an emu
meration of some of her rights, and now
/ resume the subject.
In the first place woman has the spe-
cial and the superlative right of bless
ing and comforting the sick. What
land, what street, what house, has not
felt the smitings of disease? Tens of
thousands of sickbeds What shall we
do with them? Shall man, with his
rough hand and clumsy foot, go STUN
bling around the sickroom, trying to
soothe the distracted nerves and al
1eviate the pains of the distressed pa
tient? The young man at college may
scoff at the idea of being under mater
nal influences, but at the first blast of
typhoid fever on his cheek he says:
"Where is mother?" Walter Scott
wrote partly in satire and partly in
compliment:
oh, woman, in our hours of ease,
Uncertain, coy and hard to please,
When pain and anguish wiring the brow,
A ministering angel thou!
think the most pathetic passage in
all the Bible is the description of the
lad who went out to the harvest field
of Shunem and got sunstruck-press-
ing his hands on his temples and crying
out: "Oh, my head My head!" And they
said: Garry him to his mother" And
then the record is: HE sat on her
knees till noon and then died.
1t is an awful thing to be i'll away
awhile men coming in to look at you,
holding their hand over their mouth for
fear they will catch the contagion. How
roughly they turn you in bed. How
loudly they talk. How you long for the
ministries of home. | know one such
who went away from one of the bright
est homes for several weeks business
absence at the west. A telegram came
at midnight that he was on his death
bed far away from home. By express
train the wife and daughters came
westward, but they went too late. He
feared not to die, but he was in an
agony to live until his family got there.
He tried to bride the doctor to make
him live little while longer. He said:
81 am willing to die, but not alone"
But the pulses fluttered, the eyes closed,
and the heart stopped. The express
trains met in the midnight, wife and
daughters going westward, lifeless re-
mains of husband and father coming
eastward. Oh, it was a sad, pitiful,
overwhelming spectacle! When we
are sick, we want to be sick at home.
When the time comes to die, we want
TO die at home. The room may be very
humble, and the faces that look into
ours may be very plain. but who cares
for that? Loving hands to battle the
temples. Loving voices to speak good
cheer; Loving lips to read the comfort
ing promises of Jesus.
In our civil war men cast the cannon, !
men fashioned musketry, men cried to
the hosts: Forward, march," men |
hurled their battalions on the sharp
edges of the enemy, crying: Charge, |
charged" But woman scraped the lint,
woman administered the cordials, wom-
an watched the dying couch, woman
wrote the last message to the home cir
Gle, woman wept at the solitary burial, |
attended by herself and four men with
q spade. We greeted the generals home |
with brass bands and triumphal arches |
and wild huzzas; but the story is too |
good to be written anywhere, save in
the chronicles of Heaven, of Mrs. Brady, |
who came down among the sick in the |
swamps of the Chickahominy; of Annie
Ross in the cooper shop hospital; of |
Margaret Breckenridge, who came to
men who had been for weeks with their
wounds undressed, some of them frozen
10 the ground, and when she turned
them over those that had an arm left
waved it and filled the air with their
"hurrah!" of Mrs. Hodge, who came
from Chicago with blankets and with
pillows until the men shouted: Three
cheers for the Christian commission!
God bless the women at home;" then
sitting down to take the last message:
"Tell my wife not TO fret about me, but
to meet me in Heaven; tell her to train
up the boys whom we have loved so
well; tell her we shall meet again in the
good land; tell her to bear my loss like
the Christian wife of a Christian sol
dier;" and of Mrs. Shelton, into whose
face the convalescent soldier looked and
said: "Your grapes and cologne
cured me-"
And so it was also through all of our
war with Spain-women heroic on the
field, Drawing death and wounds to reach
the fallen, watching by their fever Gotta
in the West Indian hospitals or on the
froopships or in our smitten home