n. The three celebrated women of history are
destitute of those characteristics which make of a wife a companion,
counsellor, and friend.

Do we study the history of Miriam, of Deborah, and Esther? we behold
women rising up in the name of God to help their people to save their
kindred. They were the introduction to a noble succession. Woman then,
as now, is loved for bringing _help_ to those on whom God devolves
responsibility.

The picture best loved and most praised in the Old Testament is that
of Hannah, the mother of Samuel, as she fits him for his post of duty
in the service of the Lord. In Hannah the world finds their beau ideal
of a mother, actuated by principle and ruled by love, recognizing her
allegiance to God, and her obligations to her child and husband, and
there is hardly a child in this Christian land who does not dwell with
delight upon this fact, that each year the mother made for her boy a
little coat. It was a motherly deed, and links her to the history of
the race by the blessed tie which finds its origin in maternal care.

Ruth comes next, because of her fidelity to her mother, and her love
of virtue. It is by her life we are introduced afresh to the golden
vein of prophecy that runs through the Old Testament, and which ever
pointed towards the coming of Christ as the hope of woman and the
hope of the world. Esther's love of her race, and her noble daring
of Eastern despotism for the good of her people, lifts her to a high
place, though as a wife and mother we know nothing more than that she
was hedged round by the iron regulations of a paganized court. The
revelations made concerning the daughter of Jacob, or of Bathsheba,
the loved wife of David, and in fact of nearly all of the women of the
Bible, prove that the women of the olden time left as well as received
an inheritance of shame. The names we have mentioned are among the
brightest and the best. We will draw a veil over the characters of
women such as the wife of Lot, or of Potiphar, the would-be seducer
of Joseph, or of Job, the betrayer of her husband in misfortune, of
Jezebel, the fury, or of Delilah, the traitress to her husband, and of
a score of others, that make the age in which they lived seem like the
night of humanity.

3. _Woman obtains her recognition in Christ._ From the moment God
pronounced sentence upon Eve to the moment when the angel appeared
to Mary, man was recognized as the head. Even Miriam wrought through
Moses, a