I. In the first place, woman has the special and superlative right of blessing and COMFORTING THE SICK. What land, what street, what house has not felt the smitings of disease? Tens of thousands of sick-beds! What shall we do with them? Shall man, with his rough hand and heavy foot and impatient bearing, minister? No. He cannot soothe the pain. He cannot quiet the nerves. He knows not where to set the light. His hand is not steady enough to pour out the drops. He is not wakeful enough to be watcher. The Lord God, who sent Miss Dix into the Virginia hospitals, and Florence Nightingale into the Crimea, and the Maid of Saragossa to appease the wounds of the battlefield, has equipped wife, mother, and daughter for this delicate but tremendous mission. You have known men who despised woman, but the moment disease fell upon them, they did not send for their friends at the bank, or their partner in business, or their worldly associates. Their first cry was, "Take me to my wife." The dissipated young man at the college scoffs at the idea of being under home influences, but at the first blast of the typhoid fever on his cheek he says, "WHERE IS MOTHER?" I think one of the most pathetic passages in all the Bible is the description of the lad who went out to the harvest-field of Shunem and got sun-struck, throwing his hands on his temples and crying out, "Oh, my head! my head!" and they said: "Carry him to his mother." And then the record is: "He sat on her knees till noon, and then died." It is an awful thing to be ill away from home in a strange hotel, once in a while men coming in to look at you, holding their hand over their mouth for fear they will catch the contagion. How roughly they turn you in the bed! How loudly they talk! How you long for the ministries of home! I knew one such who went away from one of the brightest of homes for several weeks' business absence at the West. A telegram came at midnight that he was on his death-bed, far away from home. By express train the wife and daughters went westward; but they went too late. He feared not to die; but he was in an agony to live until his family got there. He tried to bribe the doctor to make him live a little while longer. He said: "I am willing to die, but not alone." But the pulses fluttered, the eyes closed, and the heart stopped. The express trains met in the midnight--wife and daughters going westward, lifeless remains of husband and father coming eastward. Oh, it was a sad, pitiful, overwhelming spectacle! When we are sick we want to be sick at home. When the time comes for us to die, WE WANT TO DIE AT HOME.