The book has an ofiice in the Bible not unlike that which God has given to the flowers in the world of nature; it softens, it
2i8 A WOMAN'S CHOICE
sweetens, it soothes. And as God has greatly cared for His flowers, so He has greatly cared for this book. Its Maker has made it very beautiful.^
^ A recent Gongregationalist quotes the following from the Saturday Evening Post as the sentiment of Senator Beveridge: " The Bible has something for everybody. If you are a politician, or even a statesman, no matter how shrewd you are, you can read with profit, several times a year, the career of David, the cleverest politician and one of the greatest statesmen who ever lived. If you are a business man, the Proverbs of Solomon will tone you up like mountain air. If you are a woman, read Euth. A man of practical life, a great man, but purely a man of the world, once said to me : ' If I could enact one statute for all the women of America, it would be that each of them should read the Book of Euth once a month.' " ^
2. The Book of Euth is the story of Euth the Moabitess. Now in the whole gallery of Scripture portraits there are few which are more familiar to us, or more attractive, than the sweet figure of " Euth standing amid the alien corn." Nor is it the least of her attractions to the Christian heart that the blood of Euth ran in the veins of Jesus of Nazareth. In his genealogy of our Lord, St. Matthew inscribes the names of only four women — Tamar, Eahab, Euth, and Bathsheba ; and among these four, Euth easily holds the pre-eminence. Tamar, Eahab, and Bathsheba were all women of dubious virtue, even when judged by the standards of antiquity ; but, judged by the moral standard of any age, Euth is not only pure and sweet as the fields in which she gleaned, she rises to an heroic pitch of unselfish devotion and love.
3. Than the scene depicted in the first chapter there is hardly any more beautiful and affecting in the whole range of Old Testa- ment Scriptures. All three actors in it are admirable, and are admirably portrayed. Even Orpah shows a love and devotion which command our respect, although her love did not rise to the full heroic pitch ; while of Euth and Naomi it is hard to say which is the more admirable — Naomi, in putting from her her sole com- fort and stay, or Euth, in leaving all that she had in order to become the stay and comfort of Naomi's declining years. The exquisite and pathetic beauty of the scene has been recognized
* Armstrong Black. ' A. Lewis.
RUTH I. i6, 17 219
from of old, and has inspired painter after painter, musician after musician; while Euth's famous reply to Naomi's dissuasive entreaties takes high rank among the sentences which the world will not willingly let die.
^ It was a voice of the night which said, " Behold, thy sister- in-law is gone back unto her people, and unto her gods : return thou after thy sister-in-law " — a long-drawn-out complaint flung after Orpah in vain, and echoing back its own unanswered mono- tone to Kuth as, amidst " shadows numberless," she stood alone by Naomi ; but it awakened a morning song, the first of the dawn of the better day in which it was to be known how much God loved the world — a song that was sung while it was yet dark, as Euth's soul rose on the wing until the unrisen Sun of God's own love shone on her face ; a song in which notes that escaped from heaven and God are mingled with hers ; a song the words of which one can scarcely read for fear of doing wrong to their own plain- tive melody.^
4. And yet, in this contest of self-sacrificing love, it is hard to tell whether the palm should be awarded to Euth or to Naomi. Has not Naomi discharged her full duty of dissuasion in placing the discomforts and dangers of her lot before her daughter ? She, at all events, thinks that she has not. When Orpah has kissed her and gone back, while Euth is still "cleaving" to her, she renews her entreaties and dissuasions. " Thy sister-in-law has gone back to her people, an6L to her gods ; go thou also. It is not simply, or mainly, that we belong to different races ; we worship different gods. It is this that really separates us, and makes it impossible that you should find an asylum in Judah. Eeturn, then, after thy sister." When we consider how dark and solitary Naomi's path must have been had Euth yielded to her entreaties, we cannot but feel that these two noble women were well matched, that it is hard to say in which of them love was the more generous and self-forgetting.
Tl If, in the judgment of the world, Euth carries off the palm, it is, in part, because we expect more of a mother in Israel than of a daughter of Moab ; but it is still more, I think, in virtue of the exquisite and pathetic words in which her reply to the dis- suasions of Naomi is couched. Her vow has stamped itself on the very heart of the world ; and that not because of the beauty