said anything about their parents,--that we know absolutely nothing of them? Is there any evidence that they showed any particular respect even for the mother of Christ? Mary Magdalen is, in many respects, the tenderest and most loving character in the New Testament. According to the account, her love for Christ knew no abatement,--no change--true even in the hopeless shadow of the cross. Neither did it die with his death. She waited at the sepulchre; she hasted in the early morning to his tomb, and yet the only comfort Christ gave to this true and loving soul lies in these strangely cold and heartless words: "Touch "me not." There is nothing tending to show that the women spoken of in the Bible were superior to the ones we know. There are to-day millions of women making coats for their sons,--hundreds of thousands of women, true not simply to innocent people, falsely accused, but to criminals. Many a loving heart is as true to the gallows as Mary was to the cross. There are hundreds of thousands of women accept- ing poverty and want and dishonor, for the love they bear unworthy men; hundreds and thousands, hun- dreds and thousands, working day and night, with 124 strained eyes and tired hands, for husbands and children,--clothed in rags, housed in huts and hovels, hoping day after day for the angel of death. There are thousands of women in Christian England, working in iron, laboring in the fields and toiling in mines. There are hundreds and thousands in Europe, everywhere, doing the work of men--deformed by toil, and who would become simply wild and ferocious beasts, except for the love they bear for home and child. You need not go back four thousand years for heroines. The world is filled with them to-day. They do not belong to any nation, nor to any religion, nor exclusively to any race. Wherever woman is found, they are found. There is no description of any women in the Bible that equal thousands and thousands of women known to-day. The women mentioned by Mr. Talmage fall almost infinitely below, not simply those in real life, but the creations of the imagination found in the world of fiction. They will not compare with the women born of Shakespeare's brain. You will find none like Isabella, in whose spotless life, love and reason blended into perfect truth; nor Juliet, within whose heart passion and purity met, like white and red within the bosom of a rose; nor Cordelia, who chose to 125