1. Four years had passed since the deposition of Vashti; and after the rejoicings over the marriage and the remission of tribute, and the sending of presents to all parts of the empire in honour of Esther, five more years pass away with only the record of one episode-Mordecai's unveiling of a plot formed by two of the chamberlains to assassinate the king. We are, therefore, carried to the ninth year after the opening of the story, when Esther would probably be twenty-four or twenty-five years of age. In that year the favourite minister of Ahasuerus, named Haman, conceived a murderous design against all the Jews, because one of them, Mordecai, had refused to do obeisance to him.
2. Those Jews whom we find in Persia were some who refused to return to Palestine when Cyrus gave permission for the nation to go back from captivity. Many of the people did go, under the leadership of Zerubbabel. Living cut off by distance and associations from their kindred, with everything about them operating to rid their minds of national sympathy in watching for the hope of Israel, and of reverence for the God of their fathers, it is no wonder that the selfish and unworthy motives which first led them to remain in Persia should so increase upon them as to drift them into a life of irreligion and open sin. Their national polity and worship were such as could exist and thrive only under conditions of the unity of the whole people, unity not only of heart and sympathy, but of life and action; and any attempt at the practice of even the outward forms of that worship would be a difficulty to Jews, related by abode and habit to a foreign people; and the setting upon them of a visible brand of alienation would expose them to hatred and persecution. No doubt the elements of the eruption had been combining, and the fire had been smouldering long before the shock came. The cause being in the people themselves and their peculiarities,-peculiarities which no failure in religious ardour could obliterate,-the occasion might come about through the merest trifle. It came through the jealousy and pride of the king's favourite, Haman. He easily persuaded his master to issue a proclamation condemning the Jews to be extirpated. “If it please the king, let it be written that they be destroyed.” The king replied, “Do with them as it seemeth good to thee.” It was speedily arranged, then, that on a certain day the Jews, men, women, and children, young and old, should be slain. This was an age of tragic necessity for God's people.
Mordecai contemplated this bitter necessity. He gazed upon it till his eyes were a fountain of tears. He studied the situation till the iron entered into his very soul. Then he made his appeal to Queen Esther to stand forward as the saviour of her people. He laid upon her the charge “that she should go in unto the king, to make supplication unto him, and to make request before him, for her people.”
3. Esther is now at the well of testing. We must not be too hard upon her if we discover that the first things she thought about were the difficulties in the way. We are behind the scenes; we know the issue; but that was not Esther's position. To carry out a charge like this meant real danger for her, and in the end she might fail to accomplish her purpose.
It was the law of the palace that, on pain of death, no woman, not even his wife, should approach the king unbidden. It was true that those were excepted from this penalty to whom the king, at their approach, held out the golden sceptre; but events had recently happened which rendered it extremely unlikely that the king would be disposed to overlook anything which might appear an infringement of his rights. The king had evidently got tired of Esther, having probably found another favourite; for Esther had not been called into the royal presence for thirty days. And so she wished Mordecai to understand the situation and the difficulties in her way. That was the purport of her reply-not a refusal, but a wise estimate of the opposing forces.
To this Mordecai replied by repeating his entreaty; and, rising to a strain of truly prophetic earnestness, he added the words: “If thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall relief and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place, but thou and thy father's house shall perish: and who knoweth whether thou art not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
It was a sublime appeal, and it was effectual. The fair young heroine's soul rose to the occasion, and responded with a swift determination to her uncle's lofty words. Esther returned answer to Mordecai to gather all the Jews in the city to fast and pray for the success of her adventure. “I also,” she added, “and my maidens will fast in like manner; and so will I go in unto the king, which is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish.”
4. Her pathetic request for the prayers of the people for whose sake she was facing death was surely more than superstition. Little as she says about her faith in God, it obviously underlay her courage. When Esther nerved herself to enter the presence of Ahasuerus at the risk of her life-“I will go in unto the king; and if I perish, I perish”-she expressed, although she never named the name of God, a religious devotion as acceptable to Him as that of Moses and David, who no less sincerely had the sacred name always on their lips. She was relying not on her beauty and grace, but, on the contrary, on her fastings and prayers; and these not of herself alone, but of her attendants, and especially of “all the Jews present in Shushan,” that she might go before the king, not in her own strength, but in that of God.
5. This call to save her people saved Esther; for it smote down and annihilated in her the instincts of selfish pleasure and brought up to the surface all the noble elements of her character; and the consequence was that, instead of living and dying as the puppet of an Oriental despot, she now survives through all the centuries as one of those figures from whom noble deeds draw their inspiration. We cannot but admire her spirit of courage and patriotism. She was asked to go in and plead with the king for those millions of her kinspeople. She was asked to go in and tell him what he did not yet know, that she herself was one of the despised and hated race. She was asked to brave his possible anger, his almost certain displeasure, to incur the risk of disgrace, and, not improbably, of a sharp and cruel death. No one else could do it. On her decision hung the fate of these two millions. It was but a forlorn hope; the chances were that she would fail and fall with the rest of them. But no matter! There are things dearer than life. She would rather venture all and, failing, die, than leave those people to perish and live on. “So will I go in unto the king, which is not according to the law: and if I perish, I perish.” This is the true note of heroism.
Personality, a self-determining whole, as it has been somewhere defined, stands as it were apart or aloof, and making its choice determines of what character it will be, and in the surrender to Truth realizes the idea of its being. True decision, true self-determination, will be the right corrective for all false ideas of emancipation, falsely fancied freedom from conventions. Real freedom, as is well known, does not consist in doing as we like in imagined independence, but it is freedom to live according to the right law of being, to make actual the ideal self.1 [Note: R. M. Wills, Personality and Womanhood, 93.]
Grant us the will to fashion as we feel,
Grant us the strength to labour as we know,
Grant us the purpose, ribbed and edged with steel,
To strike the blow.
Knowledge we ask not-knowledge Thou hast lent,
But, Lord, the will-there lies our bitter need,
Give us to build above the deep intent
The deed, the deed.2 [Note: J. Drinkwater, Poems of Men and Hours, 2.]
