Mothers and Daughters of the Bible.

JEPHTHAH'S DAUGHTER..

In the midst of these turbulent times, known in scripture as the period of the Judges, we are presented with a constellation of female characters, not excelled for great qualities by any upon whom the sun has ever shone. There we have the mother of Samson, timid yet confidingly holding discourse with the Angel whose name is Wonderful. There we have the wife of the Kenite Heber, and another Jael who sat as "a mother in Israel" long before there we have the fair exile of Moab, that for her filial piety obtained favor to become the mother of kings. There too we have a Delilah, too cunning and murderous in her feigned love for the most powerful man in the world, and more fatal in her wiles than thousands of heroes in their strength to bear him down with. the weight of their phalanx, or confine him in the imprisonment of adamantine walls and gates of brass. There also we have a Deborah, prophetic in her old age and a widowhood never to be forgotten, rising in times of trouble like a morning star over the night of Israel's calamities; at whose word "the stars fought in their courses" against her sacrilegious foes by the waters of Armageddon. There also we have the nameless daughter of Jephthah, coming forth in her beauty, and suddenly vanishing, like a Naiad that rises from the deep to soothe the face of old ocean with her smile beneath the setting sun, and melt away from sight in his departing beams, or like Hesper when drawn away into heaven through the power of divine love from the summit of his paternal mountain, to lead the host of congregated lights in their westering slope above the sea, and vanish in an ambrosial

cloud by the Azores to give light in other worlds. How could it be otherwise than that one so young, so lovely, and, like another Eurydice, with such mysterious suddenness withdrawn from our sight, at the moment when she first appears, should have elicited the warmest and liveliest synpathy of the world in all ages? And what reproach is this to our race that many among the best men in the world for so slight a cause have shewn themselves ever ready to create of her exit a domestic tragedy no less horrible than the worst times of heathenism have ever shewn? Is then the shedding of innocent blood so desirable to our truculence that we must accuse one among the best men of antiquity with staining his domestic altar by the blood of his own daughter? Is the assumption of Hobbes then to be maintained, and are war and violence and bloodshed to be deemed the natural employment of mankind? Is then the moving principle avowed by Napoleon common to all, and is there no glory to be held worth our comparing with the glory of military achievements, the feeding of ravenous birds fat with the flesh of heroes, and the spreading abroad of war, pestilence and famine, of robbery, wounds, and hatreds over the whole earth? Is there then no sight so splendid as a battle, or the sack of a city given over to violation and murder, and pillage and flames? And cannot such a character as Jephthah draw after it our admiration or our sympathy without adding to his terrible military deeds the immolation of his only child upon the altar of a God who testifies that he abhors the abominations of the heathen, and none worse than the sacrifice of human victims ?

Jephthah is the fruit prevent his expulsion

The fate of this family is peculiar. of stolen love, and his father cannot from the home where he was born. Now indeed he may find more bitter than death the end of that polygamous and unnatural life that the laws of Sinai disparage and discard, and that sin alone ever produced among the sons of Adam in the east or the west. The favorite son of his old age must fly and become an exile in distant regions. But his native originality and force of character soon render him a favorite