e in the utmost consternation, and look to
Mordecai. His hope is based on Esther, the queen, who might soften, by her
fascinations, the heart of the king. She assumes the responsibility of
saving her nation at the peril of her own life--a deed of not extraordinary
self-devotion, but requiring extraordinary tact. What anxiety must have
pressed the soul of that Jewish woman in the task she undertook! What a
responsibility on her unaided shoulders? But she dissembles her grief, her
fear, her anxiety, and appears before the king radiant in beauty and
loveliness. The golden sceptre is extended to her by her weak and cruel
husband, though arrayed in the pomp and power of an Oriental monarch,
before whom all bent the knee, and to whom, even in his folly, he appears
as demigod. She does not venture to tell the king her wishes. The stake is
too great. She merely invites him to a grand banquet, with his minister
Haman. Both king and minister are ensnared by the cautious queen, and the
result is the disgrace of Haman, the elevation of Mordecai, and the
deliverance of the Jews from the fatal sentence--not a perfect deliverance,
for the decree could not be changed, but the Jews were warned and allowed
to defend themselves, and they slew seventy-five thousand of their
enemies. The act of vengeance was followed by the execution of the ten
sons of Haman, and Mordecai became the real governor of Persia. We see in
this story the caprice which governed the actions, in general, of Oriental
kings, and their own slavery to their favorite wives. The charms of a
woman effect, for evil or good, what conscience, and reason, and policy,
and wisdom united can not do. Esther is justly a favorite with the
Christian and Jewish world; but Vashti, the proud queen who, with true
woman's dignity, refuses to grace with her presence the saturnalia of an
intoxicated monarch, is also entitled to our esteem, although she paid the
penalty of disobedience; and the foolish edict which the king promulgated,
that all women should implicitly obey their husbands, seems to indicate
that unconditional obedience was not the custom of the Persian women.

(M226) The reign of Artaxerxes, the successor of Xerxes, was favorable to
the Jews, for Judea was a province of the Persian empire. In the seventh
year of his reign, B.C. 458, a new migration of Jews from Babylonia took
place, headed by Ezra, a man of high rank at the Persian court. He was
empowered to make a collection a