The Leon reporter. (Leon, Iowa) 1887-1930, 1901-08-22
TALMAGE's SERMON.
WOMAN AND HOME" THE SUBJECT
LAST SUNDAY.
Home Is the Only Sphere in Which
Woman Can Succeed in Ruling the
world-Her Best Rights DeHned-The
Ballot Box.

copyright, 1901. by Louis Klopsch, N. VI
Washington, Aug. 18.-In this dis
course DR.. Talmage extols home as
field Of usefulness, and especially en-
courages wives and mothers; text,
Genesis i, 81, male and female created
he them"
In other words, God, who can make
no mistake, made man and woman for
specific work and to move in par
ocular spheres-man to be regnant in
his realm, woman to be dominant in
hers The boundary line between italy
and Switzerland, between England and
Scotland, is not more thoroughly
marked than this distinction between
the empire masculine and the empire
feminine. So entirely dissimilar are
the fields to which God called them
that you can no more compare them
than you can oxygen and hydrogen,
water and grass, trees and stars. All
this talk about the superiority of one
sex to the other is an everlasting
waste of ink and speech. jeweler
may have a scale SO delicate that he
can weigh the dust of diamonds, but
where are the scales so delicate that
you can weigh in them affection, senti-
ment against sentiment. thought
against thought, soul against soul,
mans word against a woman's word?
You come out with your stereotyped
remark that man is superior to wo-
man in intellect, and then open on
my desk the swarthy, iron typed,
thunderbolted writings of Harriet Mar
tineau and Elizabeth Browning and
George Eliot. You come on with your
stereotyped remark about woman's
superiority to man in the item of af-
lection, but ask you where was there
more capacity to love than in John the
disciple, and Robert McCheyne, the
Scotchman, and John Summarized, the
Methodist and Henry Martyr, the mis-
sionary? The heart of those men was
SO large that after you had rolled into
it the henlispheres there was room
still left to marshal the hosts of hea-
ven and set up the throne of the eter-
nal Jehovah. deny to man the throne
intellectual. l deny to woman the
throne affectional. No human phrase
ology will ever define the spheres
while there is an intuition by which
we know when a man is in his realm
and when a woman is in her realm and
when either of them is out of it. No
bungling legislature ought to attempt
to make definition or to say, This
So %ho s., ho
Woman's Best Rights.
know there are women of most un-
desirable nature who wander up and
down the country, having no homes OF
their own or forsaking their own
homes, talking about their rights, and
we know very we'll that they them
selves are fit neither to vote nor fit to
keep house. Their mission seems to
be to humiliate the two sexes at the
thought of what any one of us might
become. No one would want to live
under the laws that such women would
enact, or to have cast upon society the
children that such women would raise.
But will show you that the best
rights that woman can own she already
has in her possession; that her posi-
ton in this country at this time is
not one of commiseration, but one of
congratulation; that the grandeur and
power Of her realm have never yet
been appreciated; that she sits today
on throne so high that all the
thrones of earth piled on top of each
other would not make for her foot
stool. Here is the platform on which
she stands. Away down below it are
the ballot box and the congressional
Appreciation of Her Rights.
Woman always has voted and always
will vote Our great-grandfathers
thought they were by their votes put
ting Washington into the presidential
chair. No. His mother. by the prin-
ciples she taught him and by the hab-
it's she inculcated, made him presi-
dent. 1t was a Christian mothers
hand dropping the ballot when Lord
Bacon wrote, and Newton philosophiz-
ed, and Alfred the Great governed, and
Jonathan Edwards Numbered of judg-
ment to come. How many men there
have been in high political station who
would have been insufficient to stand
the test to which their moral principle
wac put had it not been for wife's
voice that encouraged them to do
right and wife's prayer that sounded
louder than the clamor of partisan
ship! Why, my friends, the right of
suffrage, as we men exercise it, seems
to be a feeble thing. You, Christian
man, come up to the ballot box, and
then drop your vote. Right after you
comes libertine or sot, the offscour-
ing of the street, and he drops his vote,
and his vote counteracts yours. But
if in the quiet of home life daughter
by her Christian demeanor, a wife by
her industry, a mother by her faith
fulness, casts vote in the right direc-
ton, then nothing can resist it, and
the influence of that vote will throb
through the eternities.
My chief anxiety, then, is not that
woman has other rights accorded her,
but that she, by the grace of God, rise
up to the appreciation of the glorious
rights she already possesses. : shall
only have time to speak of one grand
and all absorbing right that every wo-
man has, and that is to make home
happy. That realm no one has ever
disputed with her. Men may come
homo at nom or NJ NIGHT QUA +b,r