The Woman’s Kingdom

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 14, 1912

The Woman’s Kingdom

NEVER was there a nobler challenge to heroic action than the words of Mordecai to Esther: “Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Every one is called to a kingdom; there is no domain like duty, no sovereignty like service, no royalty like opportunity. It is an inspiring example to all true hearts, and especially to true womanhood, this stirring story of the lovely Jewish woman who at the call of a great crisis mounted from an earthly queenship in the dreamy idleness of an Oriental harem to a more glorious throne in the realm of noble daring and unselfish duty.

Every true woman is a queen. It is the tritest commonplace to say that her first and dearest kingdom is the home. Within its charmed boundaries she sits enthroned as empress, ruling by the law of love and with the scepter of service.

But Christianity has enlarged the sphere of woman’s life. Jesus placed new crowns upon her brow. He rolled the stone away from the sepulcher of her old subjection, and in his own character exalted those virtues which the world calls feminine. To-day might well be called the “woman’s age.” Nowhere is this more so than in America. Nowhere else do women have such largeness of liberty, such wealth of influence.

“Such a time as this!” was there ever an age bigger with peril or opportunity? Both the political and the moral map of the world is changing. All walls are down; the crust of immemorial custom is breaking up. Is it not for such a time as this that woman has come into her kingdom? The problem of the expansion of Western civilization must be solved not by the might of militarism or the conquests of commerce, but by the sweet sovereignty of loving service. Our real victory in the awakening Orient will be won not by sending soldiers or goods, but by the creation of holy Christian homes.

“The woman’s cause is man’s; they rise or sink Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free.”

Service is sovereignty; selfishness is slavery. Larger privilege means larger duties. Power never means prerogative; it always means debt. Prosperity is an even severer test of essential character than adversity. The women, and men also, who clamor for larger rights need to remember that they are daring larger duties, coveting heavier burdens, and seeking the severe moral test of more awful responsibility. The true royal function is service. This is too often forgotten, and place, power, and wealth are made the ministers to a mean, callous selfishness. Those were stern words of Mordecai: “If thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then will relief and deliverance arise . . . from another place, but thou and thy father’s house will perish.” The heartless dancers of the Tuileries before the French Revolution ignored their suffering sisterhood of France; doom was not long delayed. Neglect is crime. God can get along without us better than we without him. Self-seeking is self-ruin. If self-preservation is the first law of nature, self-sacrifice is the first law of God’s kingdom.

Opportunity is always with us, and all may be sovereigns in the kingdom of duty. Sometimes all life seems a preparation for one great moment when out of the commonplace the heroic is born. Yet the daily task is not less imperial in its glory than such a supreme crisis. Better than a century-plant that waits a hundred years for one gorgeous bloom are the violets, whose dewy eyes open on every spring-time. One royal duty we may be ever performing, that of intercession. God makes us partners of his omnipotence by the path of prayer. And we come to no arbitrary Xerxes, as did Queen Esther, but to touch the merciful scepter of a living Heavenly Father. An aeronaut has said that the voice of woman, shrill and clear, reaches upward twice as high as that of a man. Are there any petitions that more surely pierce the sky and reach the heart of God than those of sister, wife, mother?

“O woman hearts, that keep the days of old In loving memory, can you stand back When Christ calls? Shall the Heavenly Master lack The serving love, which is your life’s fine gold?” —Selected.