of our Lord Jesus Christ, may
you be enabled to imitate the example of Rachel, and Hannah, and
Abigail, and Deborah, and Mary, and Esther, and Vashti.

THE DAY WE LIVE IN.

"Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a
time as this?"--ESTHER iv. 14.

Esther the beautiful was the wife of Ahasuerus the abominable. The
time had come for her to present a petition to her infamous husband in
behalf of the Jewish nation, to which she had once belonged. She was
afraid to undertake the work, lest she should lose her own life; but
her uncle, Mordecai, who had brought her up, encouraged her with the
suggestion that probably she had been raised up of God for that
peculiar mission. "Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom
for such a time as this?" Esther had her God-appointed work; you and I
have ours. It is my business to tell you what style of men and women
you ought to be in order that you meet the demand of the age in which
God has cast your lot. If you have come expecting to hear abstractions
discussed, or dry technicalities of religion glorified, you have come
to the wrong church; but if you really would like to know what this
age has a right to expect of you as Christian men and women, then I am
ready in the Lord's name to look you in the face. When two armies have
rushed into battle the officers of either army do not want a
philosophical discussion about the chemical properties of human blood
or the nature of gunpowder; they want some one to man the batteries
and swab out the guns. And now, when all the forces of light and
darkness, of heaven and hell, have plunged into the fight, it is no
time to give ourselves to the definitions and formulas and
technicalities and conventionalities of religion.

What we want is practical, earnest, concentrated, enthusiastic, and
triumphant help.

I. In the first place, in order to meet the special demand of this
age, you need to be an unmistakably aggressive Christian. Of
half-and-half Christians we do not want any more. The Church of Jesus
Christ will be better without ten thousand of them. They are the chief
obstacle to the Church's advancement. I am speaking of another kind of
Christian. All the appliances for your becoming an earnest Christian
are at your hand, and there is a straight path for you into the broad
daylight of God's forgiveness. You may have come into this Tabernacle
the bondsmen of the world, and yet before you go out of thes