follow, saying, "even as Sarah obeyed
Abraham, calling him lord." But we won't lay this up against Peter,
for it is a telling fact (and shows the predicament he was in) that he
had to go back nearly two thousand years to find an obedient woman.
There were evidently none in his day, but as he wished to make his
teaching effective and submit some proof to clinch his argument, he
went back to Sarah and said, "even as Sarah obeyed Abraham," which
shows he had never gotten at the real facts in the lovely Sarah's
career, or else was misrepresenting Sarah to carry his point in favor
of the men.

A careful perusal of my Bible convinces me that the "holy women of
old," as Peter dubs them, were all afflicted with a chronic
determination to have their own way--and they had it.

But the men were always obedient to the women, and each one "hearkened
unto the voice of his wife" and also obeyed God and the angels.

At this point in the history of the affable Sarah and the dutiful
Abraham we come to the Abraham-Hagar case, and find the hired-girl
question already agitating society.

And the historian tells us that Sarah told Abraham that he could have
Hagar for his very own, and then the narrator naively remarks, "And
Abraham hearkened unto the voice of his wife."

But of course this is a vile slander against Sarah, and, at this late
day, I rise to refute the charge.

Probably some of Abraham's political friends, when the disgrace broke
forth in all its rosy glory, trumped up this story about Sarah's
consent to save his reputation. But Sarah never did anything of the
kind, as her subsequent actions prove. It isn't human nature; it isn't
wifely nature; and although Sarah was a little gay-hearted herself,
she wasn't going to stand any such nonsense--to speak lightly--from
Abraham, and when she discovered his intimacy with the hired girl she
quietly called him into the tent, and in less than ten seconds she
made his life a howling wilderness. I don't know exactly what she said
(as I wasn't there), but it ended, as such scenes usually do end, by
the dear man repenting. For, since he is found out, what else can a
man do? He said he was sorely tempted, no doubt, and so forth and so
on to the end of the chapter, and said: "Thy maid is in thy hands; do
unto her as it pleaseth thee." And "Sarah dealt hardly with her, and
she fled from her face." But she came back, because you remember she
met an angel in the wilderness, and he told her t