The Birmingham age-herald., 1905-10-08


 will compel my beautiful queen, Vashti
 to come into this banquet hall and unveil |
 herself before you inebriated men. I will |
 compel my queen to obey me because |
 I am her master. Ho chamberlain Go |
 forth and bring Vashti 10 me and let |
 her reveal her beauty before these drunk
 en brntes" The messengers hastened | away. They went to the queens apart | ments and carried the kings commands. | Then what happened? The outraged queen | drew herself to her full height Her cheeks flushed her eyes glittered with ex | eitement, her hands eonvulsiYely clutched | as she said. "Go back to your royal | master. Tell him I will not come My | honor is more sacred to me than my | throne" When she spake thus sine knew | in all probability she was signing her | own death warrant. Because she refused | to come Vashti lost her throne She was | exiled in perpetual disgrace Yet these | were the tyrannieal laws which held wo- | men in perpetual degradation that Queen
 Esther was ready to defy when she went | 10 plead with the king for her Hebrew | people. No wonder when she made her | noble resolution that she should have | said 'So will go In unto Nle king, which | is not according to the law, and if per | ish. l perish"
 Women sitting before me today are you as brave as Queen Esther9 Wives | and mothers and daughters. are you ready to be some thing more than A | plaything, a human puppet for man? | Are you ready to brave the social laws which would limit your sphere to the frivolities of life of ease and pleasure?
 You should truly be moral leaders moral teachers and noble companions of man. as Queen Esther was ready to take q share in the responsibilities of her hus- band, a wife should be a positive quality in the moral world. not a negative one An old English author once wrote. "A
 good wife should be like three things
 In some ways. but in others she should
 not be like. First, she should be like
 snail, to keep within her own house.
 but she should not be like snail to carry
 all she has upon her back; secondly, she should be like an echo, to speak when spoken to, but should not be like an echo. always to have the last word; third ly. she should be like a town clock, al- ways to keep time and regularity but
 she should not like a town clock speak so loud that all the town may here her" 1 do not agree with that old English writer at all. I do not believe a woman should be 'an echo and only speak when l spoken to-" She should be like Queen Esther. She should cease to be the play | thing of man. She should cease to be | the humorer of masculine whims. She should nobly and fearlesy take her po- | sition by her husbands side and help | him to solve the great problems of life | She should do this, even if she has
 to say, as did the noble queen of my
 text, And if perish, I perish.''
 Like Aria of Rome.
 | We follow with enthusiasm the cour- ageous resolution of this brave woman I But our wonder becomes more and more | pronounced as we realize that Queen Es- | ther was ready to lay down her throne | and her life. not for a prince or a prin- l cess. not for one of her daily companions | in the royal palace. but for a desplsed | race. She was almost identically in the
 position of the brave Roman lady. Aria l by name, whose husband. Oetavia Paetus | was convicted of one of the most hein- ous of all crimes, treason. He was not l only traitor, but coward. The find l ings of the court declared that he must l die the death of a suicide Fearing to
 take his own life. his wife, who stood l by his side in the court room picked | up a dagger and plunged 1t into her own
 heart, Then, as she was about to- totter | and fall, she handed this dagger to her l husband, saying: "Paetus. 1t does not l hurt. Hurry. Be quick and die with me" l Aria was willing to die for her dis ] graeed husband. Queen Esther was ready l to lay down her life for the Hebrew ptODit, d tOibtllOI Ol ufSplSed caDt1NPS, She was ready to do in the capital of Shushan what that greatest of all hu- | man leaders. Moses, who was called the son of Pharaohs daughter. had been ready to do in the Egyptian capital-to die. She was ready to do in Shushan what David Livingstone had been ready to do | in Africa, and Hudson Taylor in China, and John Patton in the New Hebrides. and as Judson and Brainard and John Elliott and Eatber fta ITot Damien were ready to do for the despised peoples to whom they ministered She was ready to do as the hosts of Christian | martyrs did in the time of the Roman prosecutions She was ready to do as 1 tho Salvation Army girls are doing down | in the slums of great city. She was | ready to give ID her life for those who are displsed and downtrodden and help | less, as you and l should be willing to l try to lift the fallen ones up out of sim l up out of ignorance, up out of supersti- | tion, up out of moral mental and physical | filth God help Ills to be like Queen Es- l ther and to be ready, in the name of Christ, to surrender our lives for a de- spised, downtrodden and sinful race. Honor of Wife.
 But as I follow the noble resolution of | this brave woman l am struck with an- other overwhelming fact. Queen Esther was willing to defy all the social con Ventionalities that govern oriental ideas of woman She was ready, If necessary to lay down her life for some ex-saves. But she was ready to do more than this She was ready to. wrench this concession If possible from a very bad man. King Ahasuerus lived in the deprayed east, in a deprayed age, but he must have been a most notorious example even In that vile generation. No man but the most morally corrupt, even in the depraved east is willing to allow a wife to incur dishonor before other men. The more de- prayed a man is, as rule, the more he tries to shield and guard the honor of his wife from the depravties of other men
 Could anyone but a criminal monstros- ity, man lost to all semblance of de- cency and honor, wish his wife to enter a banquet hall filled with drunkards and social lepers as King Ahasuerus demand ed of Queen Vasht? Why, even in In- dia where love is never reckoned as an essential of the marriage altar and where virtue in a man is looked upon as an un- known quantity. the women are protected. The wives and the sisters and the daugh- ters are shut up in harems. They are not even allowed to look upon the faces of their fathers and brothers after mar riage. woman Is guarded from the eyes of the world until death. If the wife of a Hindoo travels she is carried to the station inclosed in conveyance which suggests a big coffin Then big sheet or curtain Is thrown from the car door over this box, and the wife, heavily veil ed, crawls into her apartment.- where rtaf md