Notable Women of Olden Time

Notable Women of Olden Time

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Title: Notable Women of Olden Time
Author: Anonymous
Release Date: May 5, 2006 [EBook #18316]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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WOMEN OF OLDEN TIME ***

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[Illustration]

NOTABLE WOMEN

OF
OLDEN TIME.
WRITTEN FOR THE AMERICAN SUNDAY-SCHOOL UNION.
PHILADELPHIA: AMERICAN SUNDAY-SCHOOL UNION, 1122
CHESTNUT STREET.

_Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1852, by the
AMERICAN SUNDAY-SCHOOL UNION, in the Clerk's Office of the
District Court of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania._
_No books are published by the AMERICAN SUNDAY-SCHOOL
UNION without the sanction of the Committee of Publication,
consisting of fourteen members, from the following denominations of
Christians, viz. Baptist, Methodist, Congregationalist, Episcopal,
Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Reformed Dutch. Not more than three of
the members can be of the same denomination, and no book can be
published to which any member of the Committee shall object._

CONTENTS.
PAGES
THE WIFE--(SARAH) 7
THE WIFE UNLOVED--(HAGAR) 35
THE PARTIAL AND INTRIGUING MOTHER--(REBEKAH) 63
THE RIVAL SISTERS--(LEAH AND RACHEL) 89
THE AFFECTIONATE SISTER--(MIRIAM) 119
THE PROPHETESS--(DEBORAH) 171

THE ARTFUL WOMAN--(JEZEBEL) 187
THE AMBITIOUS WOMAN--(ATHALIAH) 205
THE ORPHAN QUEEN--(ESTHER) 231

THE WIFE--SARAH.
[Illustration]
Within a few centuries after the flood, while some who had witnessed
the sin and the destruction of the antediluvian world were still living,
Jehovah saw fit, in accordance with his designs of eternal wisdom, to
separate Abraham from his brethren, calling upon him to leave the land
of his birth and go out into a strange land, to dwell in a far country. He
was to pass the rest of his days as a sojourner in a land which should be
thereafter given to a people yet unborn,--to a nation which was to
descend from him.
Abraham was a lineal descendant of Shem, who was doubtless still
living while "the father of Abraham yet abode with his kindred in the
land of the Chaldees;" and from the lips of his venerable progenitor,
Abraham himself may have first received the knowledge of the true
God, and have learned lessons of wisdom and obedience, as he sat at
his feet. Shem may have conversed with Methuselah; and Methuselah
must have known Adam; and from Adam, Methuselah may have heard
that history of the creation and fall, which he narrated to Shem, and
which Shem may have transmitted to Abraham; and the history of the
world would be thus remembered as the traditional recollections of a
family, and repeated as the familiar remembrances of a single
household.
Tales of the loveliness of Eden,--of the glories of the creation,--of the
blessedness of the primeval state,--of the days before the fall;
remembrances of the "mother of all living" in the days of her holiness,
when she was as beautiful as the world created for her home, in all the
dewy sweetness of the morning of its existence,--of the wisdom of man

before he yielded to the voice of temptation, when authority was
enthroned upon his brow, and all the tribes of the lower creation did
him homage;--of the good spirits who watched over to minister unto
and bless them;--of those dark, unholy and accursed ones, who came to
tempt, betray and destroy them,--were recounted as events of which
those who described them had been the witnesses. And from the
remembrances thus preserved and transmitted by tradition, each
generation obscuring or exaggerating them, have descended what we
call fables of antiquity,--great facts, now dimly remembered and darkly
presented, as shadowed over by the mists of long ages.
How must the hearts of the descendants of Shem have thrilled as they
heard from him the history of by-gone times--of a world which had
passed away! How much had the great patriarch of his race, himself,
beheld? He had seen the glory and the beauty of the world before the
flood. It was cursed for the sin of man, in the day of his fall--but slowly,
as we measure time, do the woes denounced by God often take effect,
and, though excluded from Eden, the first pair may have seen little
change pass over the face of the earth. The consummation of this curse
may have been the deluge; and those who dwelt on the earth, before
this calamity swept it with its destroying wing, may have seen it in
much of its original beauty; while those who