eat deal said about all
kinds of help in the Bible. After the help of God, of which the Bible
and especially the more experimental Psalms are full, this fine name is
then applied to many Scriptural persons, and on many Scriptural
occasions. The first woman whom God Almighty made bore from her Maker to
her husband this noble name. Her Father, so to speak, gave her away
under this noble name. And of all the sweet and noble names that a woman
bears, there is none so rich, so sweet, so lasting, and so fruitful as
just her first Divine name of a helpmeet. And how favoured of God is
that man to be accounted whose life still continues to draw meet help out
of his wife's fulness of help, till all her and his days together he is
able to say, I have of God a helpmeet indeed! For in how many sloughs do
many men lie till this daughter of Help gives them her hand, and out of
how many more sloughs are they all their days by her delivered and kept!
Sweet, maidenly, and most sensible Mercy was a great help to widow
Christiana at the slough, and to her and her sons all the way up to the
river--a very present help in many a need to her future mother-in-law and
her pilgrim sons. Let every young man seek his future wife of God, and
let him seek her of her Divine Father under that fine, homely, divine
name. For God, who knoweth what we have need of before we ask Him, likes
nothing better than to make a helpmeet for those who so ask Him, and
still to bring the woman to the man under that so spouse-like name.

'What next I bring shall please thee, be assured,
Thy likeness, thy fit help, thy other self,
Thy wish exactly to thy heart's desire.'

And then when the apostle is making an enumeration of the various offices
and agencies in the New Testament church of his day, after apostles and
teachers and gifts of healing, he says, 'helps,'--assistants, that is,
succourers, especially of the sick and the aged and the poor. And we do
not read that either election or ordination was needed to make any given
member of the apostolic church a helper. But we do read of helpers being
found by the apostle among all classes and conditions of that rich and
living church; both sexes, all ages, and all descriptions of church
members bore this fine apostolic name. 'Salute Urbane, our helper in
Christ . . . Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my helpers in Christ.' And both
Paul and John and all the apostles were forward to confess in their
epistles