The Wilmington daily Republican. (Wilmington, Del.) 1890-1902, 1899-09-11
THE work or WOMAN
asv. Or. rALMAoe's STIRRING SER
MON on 1.-THE QUEENS or HOME"
Hs,eines OF the Ffreside and tho
I Battleneld-.aGinister AnSels-In
tho sickroom-what Her Chief De-
! sire Should BE.
copyright. Louis KIopsch. 1891

,tian woman. She is not a slave, not a
Ihircling, not subordinate, but queen.
In q former sermon showed you that
crown and courtly attendants and i'm
,psrial wardrobe were not necessary to
make q queen, but that graces Of the
heart and life will give coronation to
any woman. I 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.
L began an enumeration of some Of her
rights, and now resume the subject.
In the first place woman has the special
and the superlative right Of blessing and
comforting the sick. What land, what
street, what house, has not felt the smit-
Iings Of disease? Tens. Of thousands Of
sickbeds! What shall We do with them ?
Shall man, with his rough hand and
clumsy fost, go stumbling around the
sickroom, trying to soothe the distracted
nerves and alleviate the pains OF the dis
dressed patient? The young man at col
tlege may scofS at the idea Of being under
maternal influences, but at the first blast
of typhoid fever on his cheek he says,
Where 10 mother?" Walter Scott wrote
partly In satire and partly in compliment:
Oh, woman, in our hours Of ense.
Uncertain, coy and hard 10 please,
When pain and anguish wiring the brow,
minztering angel thoul
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
suid, "Carry him to his mother And
then the record is. "He sat on her knees
till noon and then died"
Woman on the Battlefield.
1t is an awful thing to be Ill away from
homo in a 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. I know one such who went away
IEOU OHt VI Tue DlleHieSt VI hoIhee IVA
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" But the pulses f1uttered, the
eyes closed, and the heart stopped. The
express trains met in the midnight, wife
and daughters going westward, ifeless
remains of husband and father coming
eastward. Oh, it was a sad, pitiful, over
whclming 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
Uses 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, charged
but woman scrRped the lint, woman ad-
ministered the ceYdials, woman watched
by the dying couch, woman wrote the
last message to the home circle, woman
wept Mt the solitary burial, attended
by herself and four men with 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 tins
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 undrcssetl, some Of them frozen
TO the ground and when she turned them
over those that had an arm left waved
1t and filed 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
mot 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
". shall meet again in the good land;
tell her to bear my loss like the Christian
wife Of Christian SOLDIER and of Mrs
Shelton, into whose face the GONZALES
cent soldier looked and sad, Your
grapes and cologne cured me-"
The Women who Watch.
And 20 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 cots
in the West Indian hospitals or on the
troopshps or in our smitten home camps.
Men did their work with shot and shell
and carbne and howitzer; women did
their work with socks and slippers and
'bandages and warm drinks and Scrip.
ture texts and gentle stockings of the
hot temples and stories Of that land
where they never have any pain. Men
knelt down over the wounded and said.
"On which side did you fight" Women
knelt down over the wounded and said:
rWbere are you hurt! What nice thing
can make for you to eat? What makes
Sou cry?' Tonight while we men are
sound asleep in our beds there will be a
light in yonder loft; there will be groan'
ing down that dark alley: there will be
cries of distress in that cellar. Men will
sleep, and women will watch.
Again. woman has special right to
take care of the poor. There are hun
dreds and thousands of them all over the
land. There is kind of work that men
cannot do for the poor. Here comes q
group Of little barefoot children to the
door of the Dorcas society. They need
b be clothed and provided for Which
of these directors of banks would know
how many yards 1t would take to make
that little girl a dress2 Which Of these
masculine hands could fit hat to that
little girls head2 Which Of the wise
men would know how to tic ON that new
pair of shoes? Man sometimes gives his
charity In rough way, and 1t falls like
the fruit Of tree In the east, which fruit
comes down so heavily that it breaks the
skull of the man who is trying to gather
it. But woman glides so softly into the
house of destituton and finds out all the
sorrows of the place and puts so quietly
the donation on the table that all the
family come out on the front steps as she
DEPARTS expecting that from under her
shawl she will thrust out two wings and
go right up toward heaven, from whence
she seems to have come down.
The Angel Chant.