oretell what the future of Christian
work for Syrian Women will be?

May it ever be a work founded on the Word of God, aiming at the
elevation of woman through the doctrines and the practice of a pure
Christianity, striving to plant in Syria, not the flippant culture of
modern fashionable society, but the God-fearing, Sabbath-loving, and
Bible-reading culture of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors!

A few years ago, a Greek priest named Job, from one of the distant
villages high up in the range of Lebanon, called on me in Beirut. I had
spent several summers in his village, and he had sometimes borrowed our
Arabic sermons to read in the Greek Church, and now, he said, he had
come down to see what we were doing in Beirut. I took him through the
Female Seminary and the Church, and then to the Library and the Printing
Press. He examined the presses, the steam engine, the type-setting, and
type-casting, the folding, sewing, and binding of books, and looked
through the huge cases filled with Arabic books and Scriptures, saw all
the editions of the Bible and the Testament, and then turned in silence
to take his departure. I went with him to the outer gate. He took my
hand, and said, "By your leave I am going. The Lord bless your work.
Sir, I have a thought; we are all going to be swept away, priests and
bishops, Greeks and Maronites, Moslems and Druzes, and there will be
nothing left, nothing but the Word of God and those who follow it. That
is my thought. Farewell."

May that thought be speedily realized! May the coarseness, brutality and
contempt for woman which characterize the Moslem hareem, give way to the
refinement, intelligence, and mutual affection which belong to the
Christian family!

May the God of prophecy and promise, hasten the time when Nusairy
barbarism, Druze hypocrisy, Moslem fanaticism, Jewish bigotry and
nominal Christian superstition shall fade away under the glorious beams
of the rising Sun of Righteousness!

May the "glory of Lebanon" be given to the Lord, in the regeneration
and sanctification of the families of Lebanon!

Too long has it been true, in the degradation of woman, that the "flower
of Lebanon languisheth."

Soon may we say in the truly Oriental imagery of the Song of
Songs,--"Come with me from Lebanon, look from the top of Amana, from the
top of Shenir and Hermon, from the lions' dens, from the mountains of
the leopards,"--and behold, in the culture of woman, in society
regenerated, in home