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, and Deborah, the judge and prophetess, lays no claim to personal communication with God, but quotes his promises, and stimulates Barak to action, So also when the angel came from the court of heaven to foretell the joy that was to come to the world in the birth of John, the forerunner of Christ, he came to Zacharias instead of to Elisabeth.  But when the message related to Christ, then the angel passed by man, and approached woman direct.  God never forgets.  A thousand years are but as a day to Him.  Yesterday, in Eden, he foretold the coming of Christ to Eve.  To-day, in Nazareth, the angel comes to Mary, and