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said anything about their parents,--that we know
absolutely nothing of them? Is there any evidence
that they showed any particular respect even for the
mother of Christ?
Mary Magdalen is, in many respects, the tenderest
and most loving character in the New Testament.
According to the account, her love for Christ knew
no abatement,--no change--true even in the hopeless
shadow of the cross. Neither did it die with his
death. She waited at the sepulchre; she hasted in
the early morning to his tomb, and yet the only
comfort Christ gave to this true and loving soul lies
in these strangely cold and heartless words: "Touch
"me not."
There is nothing tending to show that the women
spoken of in the Bible were superior to the ones we
know. There are to-day millions of women making
coats for their sons,--hundreds of thousands of
women, true not simply to innocent people, falsely
accused, but to criminals. Many a loving heart is
as true to the gallows as Mary was to the cross.
There are hundreds of thousands of women accept-
ing poverty and want and dishonor, for the love they
bear unworthy men; hundreds and thousands, hun-
dreds and thousands, working day and night, with
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strained eyes and tired hands, for husbands and
children,--clothed in rags, housed in huts and hovels,
hoping day after day for the angel of death. There are
thousands of women in Christian England, working in
iron, laboring in the fields and toiling in mines. There
are hundreds and thousands in Europe, everywhere,
doing the work of men--deformed by toil, and who
would become simply wild and ferocious beasts,
except for the love they bear for home and child.
You need not go back four thousand years for
heroines. The world is filled with them to-day.
They do not belong to any nation, nor to any religion,
nor exclusively to any race. Wherever woman is
found, they are found.
There is no description of any women in the Bible
that equal thousands and thousands of women known
to-day. The women mentioned by Mr. Talmage fall
almost infinitely below, not simply those in real life, but
the creations of the imagination found in the world of
fiction. They will not compare with the women born
of Shakespeare's brain. You will find none like
Isabella, in whose spotless life, love and reason
blended into perfect truth; nor Juliet, within whose
heart passion and purity met, like white and red within
the bosom of a rose; nor Cordelia, who chose to
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suffer loss rather than show her wealth of love with
those who gilded dross with golden words in hope
of gain; nor Miranda, who told her love as freely
as a flower gives its bosom to the kisses of the sun;
nor Imogene, who asked: "What is it to be false?"
nor Hermione, who bore with perfect faith and hope
the cross of shame, and who at last forgave with all
her heart; nor Desdemona, her innocence so perfect
and her love so pure, that she was incapable of sus-
pecting that another could suspect, and sought with
dying words to hide her lover's crime.
If we wish to find what the Bible thinks of
woman, all that is necessary to do is to read it.
We will find that everywhere she is spoken of
simply as property,--as belonging absolutely to the
man. We will find that whenever a man got tired
of his wife, all he had to do was to give her a writing
of divorcement, and that then the mother of his
children became a houseless and a homeless wanderer.
We will find that men were allowed to have as
many wives as they could get, either by courtship,
purchase, or conquest. The Jewish people in the
olden time were in many respects like their barbarian
neighbors.