We all know her--she is simply the woman of the past with an added grace--a
newer charm. Some of her dearest ones call her "selfish" because she thinks
so much of herself she spends her whole time helping others. She represents
the composite beauty, sweetness, and nobility of all those who scorn self
for the sake of love and her handmaiden duty--of all those who seek the
brightness of truth not as the moth to be destroyed thereby, but as the
lark who soars and sings to the great sun. She is of those who have so much
to give they want no time to take, and their name is legion. She is as full
of beautiful possibilities as a perfect harp, and she realizes that all the
harmonies of the universe are in herself, while her own soul plays upon
magic strings the unwritten anthems of love. She is the apostle of the
true, the beautiful, the good, commissioned to complete all that the twelve
have left undone. Hers is the mission of missions--the highest of all--to
make the body not the prison, but the palace of the soul, with the brain
for its great white throne.
When she comes like the south wind into the cold haunts of sin and sorrow,
her words are smiles and her smiles are the sunlight which heals the
stricken soul. Her hand is tender--but steel tempered with holy resolve,
and as one whom her love had glorified once said--she is soft and gentle,
but you could no more turn her from her course than winter could stop the
coming of spring. She has long learned with patience, and to-day she knows
many things dear to the soul far better than her teachers. In olden times
the Jews claimed to be the conservators of the world's morals--they treated
woman as a chattel, and said that because she was created after man, she
was created solely for man. Too many still are Jews who never called
Abraham "Father," while the Jews themselves have long acknowledged woman as
man's proper helpmeet. In those days women had few lawful claims and no one
to urge them. True, there were Miriam and Esther, but they sang and
sacrificed for their people, not for their sex.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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