epting her aged father, and the poor creatures to whose help she had
come. It would have been very different had it been a deed that could
have been done before an admiring world. For instance, Joan of Arc was
a noble girl, full of inspiration and courage; but her deeds were great
as the world looks on greatness, and there was much of pomp and show
about her achievements. But this girl went out on the angry waters in
the grey light of an early morning, with the simple purpose in her
heart of saving from drowning those whose lives were in jeopardy. She
did not care whose lives they were. They might be only those of a few
poor sailors or emigrants. It did not matter to Grace. They were
human lives, and therefore precious. She must have had the purest
motives in what she did, and in this she excelled many women who have
been praised. Dear, indeed, she was to the hearts of her father and
mother, and all who were more immediately concerned, and dear also to
the world, which admired her heroic virtues. Another sermon which she
preaches from this chapter is, that women should not be satisfied with
less than the best. Even good actions and kind words are not enough;
they must be the sincere expressions of good and pure motives.

"Favour is deceitful, and beauty is vain; but a woman that feareth the
Lord, she shall be praised." There have been other illustrious women
besides Grace Darling: some, whose beauty has been so great, that men
have gone mad over it, and hearts have been broken, and homes made
desolate by it. But when we come to search for any good which came of
it, we cannot find it. Beauty was there, but not "the fear of the
Lord." When these two are seen together, then indeed there is

"A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command."

Grace Darling was not what is called beautiful; but she had a pleasant
face, and she made no wrong use of it. She had favour, too; but,
perhaps, in her case, it was not deceitful. But better than beauty or
favour is conscientiousness, that fears to do wrong and displease God.
It is true that she did not parade her religion, and even refused to
give satisfactory answers to some of those who sat in judgment over
her, and wished to pry into her Christian experience; but no one could
know her, or could read the records that have come down to us, without
knowing that she was "a woman who feareth the Lord." There is a rule
by which she never needed