Oh, was not Miriam, the sister of Moses, doing a good thing, an
important thing, a glorious thing when she watched the boat woven of
river plants and made water-tight with asphaltum, carrying its one
passenger? Did she not put all the ages of time and of a coming
eternity under obligation, when she defended her helpless brother from
the perils aquatic, reptilian, and ravenous? She it was that brought
that wonderful babe and his mother together so that he was reared to
be the deliverer of his nation, when otherwise, if saved at all from
the rushes of the Nile, he would have been only one more of the
God-defying Pharaohs; for Princess Thermutis, of the bathing-house,
would have inherited the crown of Egypt, and as she had no child of
her own, this adopted child would have come to coronation. Had there
been no Miriam there would have been no Moses. What a garland for
faithful sisterhood!
For how many a lawgiver, and how many a hero, and how many a
deliverer, and how many a saint are the world and the Church indebted
to a watchful, loving, faithful, godly sister? Come up out of the
farm-houses, come up out of the inconspicuous homes! Come up from the
banks of the Hudson, and the Penobscot, and the Savannah, and the
Mobile, and the Mississippi, and all the other Niles of America, and
let us see you, the Miriams who watched and protected the leaders in
law and medicine and merchandise and art and agriculture and mechanics
and religion!
If I should ask all these physicians, and attorneys, and merchants,
and ministers of religion and successful men of all professions and
trades who are indebted to an elder sister for good influences, and
perhaps for an education or a prosperous start, to rise, they would
rise by the hundreds. God knows how many of our Greek lexicons and how
much of our schooling was paid for by money that would otherwise have
gone for the replenishing of a sister's wardrobe. While the brother
sailed off for a resounding sphere, the sister watched him from the
banks of self-denial.