“Wondrous woman! A girl, petted, ill-trained, from poverty suddenly exalted, surrounded by the skilled intriguants of court, a jealous, exacting, conceited, harem-demoralized old king for a spouse, she was then burdened with the salvation of a nation. I’ve so pitied her that I’ve forgotten to admire how well she did in her trying lot.” “Can the world ever have a finer figure or presentment of all that is womanly? I do not challenge thy Mary, but may I not put the two side by side?” “Israel has two great women in their way. The one, Esther, exemplifying all sweetness and the mild strength of a suddenly developed woman, doing grandly in one emergency when great peril and great love aroused her from only being an entrancing, petted beauty, to be the heroine of an hour. But she was not tried by the searching test of a lifetime. She never meets the needs of mothers seeking an ideal. Rizpah, your other grand woman, was the mother, even the mother of sorrows, of the Old Testament. It takes these two to make an ideal, and yet the pattern is incomplete. God walks yet in the garden where men live, with only these two before them, and ever and anon they hear the unanswerable, ‘_Where art thou?_’” “Why, my mentor, master, thou hast touched our Scriptures with the rod that budded; the whole opens to me as if for the first time. Methinks, if I were permitted to lay hands now upon one of our sacred volumes, I’d be fairly overcome by the light that would break out on me from within it.” “‘The entrance of the word giveth light,’ Ichabod.” “I’m moved, master, along lines I can not turn from, to the one woman of all, Mary. She is thy ideal queen of hearts?” “I’m a pilgrim and follow her, seeing none better.” “Then thou wouldst be willing to wed such as Mary?” “Hold! This is sacrilegious! I’ll not think of Mary in any such comparison. Leave my patron saint upon her high pedestal. I save her for my soul’s health, as every man should save some noble woman, for an inner enshrining, to be all that woman may be at her best, his beloved, his inspirer, and yet touching no spring of his life save such as responds to things of moral grandeur.”