Immediate recourse was had to his counsellors, who concurred in the opinion of Memucan, that it was a public question of great importance to the future welfare of the state, and affecting the domestic felicity, not of the king only, but of every family in the Persian empire. The advice he gave them, which Ahasuerus promptly followed, was to divorce Vashti, and interdict her forever from reappearing in the royal presence. "If it please the king, let there go a royal commandment from him, and let it be written among the laws of the Persians and the Medes, that it be not altered. That Vashti come no more before king Ahasuerus: and let the king give her royal estate unto another that is better than she. And when the king's decree which he shall make shall be published throughout all his empire (for it is great,) all the wives shall give to their husbands honour, both to great and small." It is not surprising that such a gratifying, but _unchristian_ proposal, should be adopted by an arbitrary heathen monarch. Neither Memucan nor his royal master had drunk at the purifying fountain of evangelical truth. God was now making "the wrath of man to praise him." Human passions, prejudices, and errors were promoting divine designs. The feast, and the riot, and the vanity, and the rage of Ahasuerus, all concurred, though unconsciously on his part, to fulfil the mighty arrangements of Providence, and to introduce, a train of events which now march through the page of sacred history in rapid and wonderful succession. After the divorce of Vashti, the ministers of Ahasuerus advised him to adopt speedy measures to fill up the vacancy in his affections and his throne. Their plan exhibits the barbarity of the age and the sensuality of the king. He was to have his choice of all the "fair young virgins," collected from the provinces of the empire: and it devolved upon Hadassah, or Esther, an orphan educated under the inspection of Mordecai, her cousin and guardian, one of the captive Jews at this period attached by some employment to the royal establishment. That God, who had bestowed upon this young Jewess unusual beauty, gave her favour in the eyes of the king, and secretly accomplished his own gracious purposes respecting his people by her advancement. Little did any of the persons immediately concerned in this affair imagine the predestined results. Ahasuerus was gratifying his passions; Esther and Mordecai conforming to an irresistible influence; Hegai, the keeper of the women, following the impulse of a secret admiration, and, perhaps, aiming to ingratiate himself in the favour of one whom he might suppose likely to become the future queen; while the Supreme Disposer was making use of all this variety of feeling and design as the means of securing the ends in his omniscient view.