It has been my aim in this little volume to recount the history of Woman’s Work in the past.  Who can foretell what the future of Christian work for Syrian Women will be?

May it ever be a work founded on the Word of God, aiming at the elevation of woman through the doctrines and the practice of a pure Christianity, striving to plant in Syria, not the flippant culture of modern fashionable society, but the God-fearing, Sabbath-loving, and Bible-reading culture of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors!

A few years ago, a Greek priest named Job, from one of the distant villages high up in the range of Lebanon, called on me in Beirut.  I had spent several summers in his village, and he had sometimes borrowed our Arabic sermons to read in the Greek Church, and now, he said, he had come down to see what we were doing in Beirut.  I took him through the Female Seminary and the Church, and then to the Library and the Printing Press.  He examined the presses, the steam engine, the type-setting, and type-casting, the folding, sewing, and binding of books, and looked through the huge cases filled with Arabic books and Scriptures, saw all the editions of the Bible and the Testament, and then turned in silence to take his departure.  I went with him to the outer gate.  He took my hand, and said, “By your leave I am going.  The Lord bless your work.  Sir, I have a thought; we are all going to be swept away, priests and bishops, Greeks and Maronites, Moslems and Druzes, and there will be nothing left, nothing but the Word of God and those who follow it.  That is my thought.  Farewell.”

May that thought be speedily realized!  May the coarseness, brutality and contempt for woman which characterize the Moslem hareem, give way to the refinement, intelligence, and mutual affection which belong to the Christian family!

May the God of prophecy and promise, hasten the time when Nusairy barbarism, Druze hypocrisy, Moslem fanaticism, Jewish bigotry and nominal Christian superstition shall fade away under the glorious beams of the rising Sun of Righteousness!

May the “glory of Lebanon” be given to the Lord, in the regeneration and sanctification of the families of Lebanon!

Too long has it been true, in the degradation of woman, that the “flower of Lebanon languisheth.”

Soon may we say in the truly Oriental imagery of the Song of Songs,—­“Come with me from Lebanon, look from the top of Amana, from the top of Shenir and Hermon, from the lions’ dens, from the mountains of the leopards,”—­and behold, in the culture of woman, in society regenerated, in home affection, in the Christian family, what is in a peculiar sense, “a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon!”

“Is it not yet a very little while, and Lebanon shall be turned into a fruitful field?” When “the reproach of the daughters of Syria,” shall be taken away, and when amid the zearas of the Nusairiyeh, the kholwehs of the Druzes, the mosques of the Moslems and the tents of the Bedawin, may be heard the voice of Christ, saying to the poor women of the Arab race, weary and fainting under the burdens of life: