III.  Again, I want you this morning to consider Vashti the sacrifice.  Who is this that I see coming out of that palace gate of Shushan?  It seems to me that I have seen her before.  She comes homeless, houseless, friendless, trudging along with a broken heart.  Who is she?  It is Vashti the sacrifice.  Oh! what a change it was from regal position to a wayfarer’s crust!  A little while ago, approved and sought for; now, none so poor as to acknowledge her acquaintanceship.  Vashti the sacrifice!

Ah! you and I have seen it many a time.  Here is a home empalaced with beauty.  All that refinement and books and wealth can do for that home has been done; but Ahasuerus, the husband and the father, is taking hold on paths of sin.  He is gradually going down.  After awhile he will flounder and struggle like a wild beast in the hunter’s net—­further away from God, further away from the right.  Soon the bright apparel of the children will turn to rags; soon the household song will become the sobbing of a broken heart.  The old story over again.  Brutal Centaurs breaking up the marriage feast of Lapithae.  The house full of outrage and cruelty and abomination, while trudging forth from the palace gate are Vashti and her children.  There are homes represented in this house this morning that are in danger of such breaking-up.  Oh, Ahasuerus! that you should stand in a home, by a dissipated life destroying the peace and comfort of that home.  God forbid that your children should ever have to wring their hands, and have people point their finger at them as they pass down the street, and say, “There goes a drunkard’s child.”  God forbid that the little feet should ever have to trudge the path of poverty and wretchedness!  God forbid that any evil spirit born of the wine-cup or the brandy-glass should come forth and uproot that garden, and with a lasting, blistering, all-consuming curse, shut forever the palace gate against Vashti and the children.

One night during the war I went to Hagerstown to look at the army, and I stood on a hill-top and looked down upon them.  I saw the camp-fires all through the valleys and all over the hills.  It was a weird spectacle, those camp-fires, and I stood and watched them; and the soldiers who were gathered around them were, no doubt, talking of their homes, and of the long march they had taken, and of the battles they were to fight; but after awhile I saw these camp-fires begin to lower; and they continued to lower, until they were all gone out, and the army slept.  It was imposing when I saw the camp-fires; it was imposing in the darkness when I thought of that great host asleep.  Well, God looks down from heaven, and He sees the fireside of Christendom and the loved ones gathered around these firesides.  These are the camp-fires where we warm ourselves at the close of day, and talk over the battles of life we have fought and the battles that are yet to come.  God grant that when at last these fires begin to go out, and continue to lower until finally they are extinguished, and the ashes of consumed hopes strew the hearth of the old homestead, it may be because we have