The semi-weekly messenger. [volume] (Wilmington, N.C.) 1897-1908, 1899-09-14
TIE QUEENS OF HOME.
DIR. TALuAGE pssC0UxsE~ On THE
RIGHT ss WOMAN.
Fer Dominion rs "one' and There
She should Rightly Director
of the Spiritual Life Of Iiie House
hoId-ComforIer OF the sick.

hoId-ComfOrIer of N sick.
copyright, Louis Klopsch, 1890
In this discourse the opportunities OF
usefulness for women are set forth
by DR.. Talmage, and many sympatnies
are stirred and memories recalled. The
tex is Solomon's Songs, vi, s, There
are three-score queens"
So Solomon by one stroke set forth
the imperial character of a true Chris
tian woman. h is not a slave, not a
hireling, not a subordinate but a
queen. In a former sermon I showed
you that crown and courtly attendants
and imperial wardrobe were not neces-
sary to make a queen, but that graces
of the heart and life will give corona
ton to any woman l showed you 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 al
ways 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
dOIIllIIIOII WHICH sic mas dIISdOy "Oil.
/ began an enumeration Of some or her
rights, and now 1 resume the subject.
2 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 smitings of disease? Tens of
thousands of sick beds! 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 allevi-
ate the pains Of the distressed patient?
The young man at college may scott at
the idea of being under maternal infu-
ences, but at the first blast of typhoid
fever on his cheeks he says, Where is
mother?" Walter Scott wrote partly in
satire and partly in compliment;
ooh, woman, in our hours of ease.
Uncertain, coy and har to please,
When pain and anguish wiring the
brow,
A ministsring angel thou!
l 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 cry
ing put, 'Oh, my head! my head"
And they said, Garry him to his
mother" And then the record is, H
sat on her knees till noon and then
died.
-; A MINISTER1NG ANGEL.
1t is an awful thing to be i'll away
from home 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 Ions
o. 1900 ~~.,
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 a little while longer. He said:
II am willing to die, but not alone"
But the pulses 1uttered, the eyes closed
and the heart stopped. The express
trains met in the midnight, wife n
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 times comes for us to die, we
want to die at home. The room may be
very humble I'd the faces that look
into ours may roe very plain, but who
cares for that? Loving hands to battle
the temples. Loving voices to speak
good cheer. Loving lips to read the
comforting promises Of Jesus.
In our civil war men cast the can
non, men fashioned the musketry, men
cried to the hosts, Forward, march,"
men hurled their b%attalions on the
sharp edges of he enemy, crying,
saCL1ar~ 4borry H,,f znD,n earoy
ed the lint, administered 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 md
four men with a spade. We gre> Vd
the generals home with brass bar Us
and triumphal arches and Wild huzzaC
but the story is too good to be writteAA
anywhere save in the chronicles OF
heaven, of Mrs. Brady, who came down
among the sick in the wampS 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 to the
9round, and when she turned them
! over those that had an arm left waved
it and filled the air with their "hur-
rah!"-of Mrs. Hodge. who came from
Chicago, with blankets and with pill
lows, until the men houted "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 80
WE'LL: tell her we shall meet again in
the god land; tell her to year my loss
like the Christian wife of a Christian
soldier" and of Mrs. shelton, into
whose face the convalescent soldier
looked and said, Your grapes and CO.
logne 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 cots IN the
West Indian hospitals or on the troop
ships or in our smitten home camps
Nen did their work with shot and shell,
and carbine and howitzer; women die
their work with socks II slippers anC
b~andages and warm drinks and Scrip
ture texts and gentle stroking of the
hot temples and stories Of that LAND