The Israelites were already forty years in the bondage of the Philistines, when the angel of the Lord appeared unto the wife of Manoah (a Danite), and promised her a son, who should deliver Israel out of the hands of the Philistines. “Then the woman came and told her husband; and the birth of the last of the patriot rulers of Israel verified the prophecy. The struggles of Samson for his country, and his great and eventful life (terminated by a death of self-sacrifice, the most remarkable in story), had lost its influence over those for whom he had suffered. The subsequent anarchies and crimes, the substitution of the grossest idolatry for the purest theism, when “every man did that which seemed right in his own eyes,” and the law and the prophets were alike forgotten, form a dreary picture, only relieved by the beautiful episode of two private and lowly women: and thus the flickering flame of moral truth and of spiritual hope was again preserved and fed by woman, as the celestial fire, in Pagan times, was committed to the vigilance of the vestal priestess!

The story of Naomi and Ruth is full of simplicity and beauty; and in the conversion of the fair young Moabitess (the grandmother of the future king David), and the bringing her into the pedigree of the Messiah, there is offered a type of the calling of woman, in the fulness of time, to the great mission of redemption.