Burlington weekly free press. [volume] (Burlington, Vt.) 1866-1928, 1899-09-14
THE WORK OF WOMAN
REV. DR.. TALMAGE'S STIRRING SER
MON ON 1.-THE QUEENS OF HOME"
Hcroines of the Fircside and the
Notwithstanding Angeis-In
the siclSroom-Wbnt Her chief De-
sire should lie.
copyright, Louis Klopsch, 1892

copyright, Louis Klopsch, 1891
WASHINGTON, Sept. 10.-In this dis
course the opportunities of usefulness for
women are set forth by DIR. Talmage,
and many sympathes are stirred and
memories recalled. The text is Solomons
Song vi, s, "There are threescore
queens"
SO Solomon, by one stroke, set forth
the imperial character of n true Chris
tian woman. She is not slave, not a
hireling, not n subordinate, but a queen.
In a former sermon | showed you that
crown and courtly attendants and inn
perial wardrobe were not necessary to
make a queen, but that graces Of the
heart and life will give coronation to
any woman. | 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 denied 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
/ began an enumeration of some of her
rights, and now l resume the subject.
In the first place woman has the special
and the supcrlative right of blessing and
comforting the sick What land, what
street, what house, has not felt the smit-
ings OF disease? Tens of thousands Of
sickbeds! What shall we do with them?
Shall man, with his rough hand and
clumsy foot, go stumbling around the
sickroom, trying to soothe the distracted
nerves and alleviate the pains of the dis
tressed patient? The young man at col
lege may scott at the idea of being under
maternal 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 please,
When pain and anguish wiring the brow,
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 Shu-
mem and got sunstruck-pressing 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, "Ie sat on her knees
till noon and then died"
Woman on the Battlefield.
1t is an awful thing to be i'll away from
home in strange hotel, once in 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 brightest of homes for
several weeks business absence at the
west. A telegram came at midnight that
he was on his deathbed far away from
home. By express train the wife and
daughters went 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, II am willing to die, but not
alone" BIT the pulses futtered, the
eyes closed, and the heart stopped. The
express trains met in the midnight. wife
and daughters going westward. lifeless
remains of husband and father coming
eastward. Oh, it was a sad, pitiful, over
whelming spectacle. When we are sick,
we want to be sick at home. When the
time comes for us to die we want to die
at home. The room may be very hum
Bile, and the faces that look into ours
may be very plain, but who cares for
that? Loving hands to battle the tenn
pies Loving voices to speak good cheer.
Loving lips to read the comforting prom
ises Of Jesus.
In our civil war men cast the cannon,
men fashioned musketry, men cried To
the hosts, Forward, march" men hurl-
ed their battalions on the sharp edges OF
the enemy, crying, charge, charge.
But woman scraped the lint, woman ad-
ministered the cordials, woman watched
by the dying couch, woman wrote the
last message to the home circle, woman
wept at the solitary burial, attended
by herself and four men with n 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 tho
swamps of the Chickahominy; of Annie
Ross in the cooper shop hospital of Mar
garet Breckenridge, who came TO men
who had been for weeks with their
wounds undrcssed, some of them frozen
to 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 Chi
cago with blankets and with pillows I'M
til 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 Christian soldier" and of Mrs
/ int xx,ha fana tha u,l