Surrounded by all the splendour of the court, with all the pleasures that pomp and power can command, with troops of menials treading marble halls, with the more genial luxuries of fair flowers and pure fountains and soft music—­Esther felt the insufficiency of all that earth can yield in the hour of sorrow and trial.  We may almost fancy that we see her, with lofty brow and pale cheek, her dark soft eye fixed in thought, and the compressed lip telling of the firm resolve.  She has decided!  She will venture the loss of royal favour, and life itself, to secure the safety of her people.  “I WILL GO IN TO THE KING, AND IF I PERISH—­I PERISH.”  Words more simple, yet sublime in their high meaning, have seldom been recorded.  Strong purpose and high resolve call for but few words.

Yet Esther relied upon a power higher than that of Ahasuerus.  She may have recalled the history of her nation; she may have remembered all the interpositions of Divine mercy in past extremities; and doubtless she relied upon those promises for the future which induced in Mordecai a confident hope of deliverance.  She remembered that Jehovah—­the God of Israel—­hears the prayers of the humble and the contrite.  She appointed a solemn fast of three days, in which the Jews of Shushan should humble themselves and remember her before the God of their fathers.

A more eminent instance of simple dependence upon the Divine interposition, or of entire reliance upon the voice of prayer, has seldom if ever, occurred.  There was no resort to outward ceremonies to awaken a deeper feeling, or to atone for the want of it by a formal observance.  There was no altar, no sacrifice, no long procession, no promised offering, no resort to temple or priest, but there was the call upon God from the depth of the soul—­the simple, unfailing trust of the heart, the personal humiliation, the individual prayer, the united offerings of supplication and confession from a whole people.  There was the simple faith that relies on the Divine power and pleads the Divine promises with submission to the Divine will.  It was a strange contrast to the sensual, gross, superstitious, and unholy rites of the heathen, while from its deep spiritual meaning, and from the entire absence of all merely formal observance, it was both a precedent and a model for future ages, and for the holy spiritual worshipper of other days.

It was no heartless service, no formal act of worship rendered by the Jews of Shushan, when Esther called upon them to pray and to fast with her and for her.  While the queen and her maidens fasted in the recesses of the palace, in many a lowly home or quiet chamber were gathered the race of Esther, to commit her and themselves to Jehovah, to beseech him to forgive the sins of his people and save them, for his mercy’s sake, in this hour of their extremity.  Mingled with their personal apprehension and anxiety for their wives and their children would be thoughts of “the