A “High Pressure” Christian.
“I WANT,” said Mrs. Honeyweiss, “the opinion of this club on a question that greatly troubles me. The greatest desire of my heart is to see my children grow up noble Christian men and women. My life is bound up in them; and my husband is, I am sure, as much in earnest as I am. But we pursue different ways; and sometimes I think he is wrong; and sometimes I think I am wrong; and sometimes I do not know but that we are both wrong. He gives all the time he can possibly spare outside his business to church work. He attends all the church meetings—prayer-meeting, sociables, teachers’ meetings, choir meetings; he is on the executive committee of the Young Men’s Christian Association, and when he isn’t at a church meeting he is at a cottage prayer-meeting, or at a service in the Hall, or with a District Visitation Committee, or something—I don’t pretend to keep the run of them all. Sundays we never pretend to see him. After an early breakfast he sits down to finish the study for his Bible-class, and then hurries off to Sunday-school. Of course we’re all at a church together; but after dinner he goes round to the Young Men’s Christian Association to their afternoon meeting; and that and an inquiry meeting, which he always attends, keep him till tea time. Right after tea he goes over to the church to the young peoples’ prayer-meeting; and then to church; and by the time he gets from church the young children are in bed and asleep, and I am pretty well tired out in trying to make Sunday pleasant and profitable for them, and he is pretty well tired out with his missionary work. He never gets time on Sunday to study the Bible with the children, nor in the week time to look into their lessons and see how they are getting along. And as to their games, I don’t believe he knows anything about what they do out of school hours, or what they read in the evenings. He never gets time to take them on his knee and talk to them of Jesus, for whom he is working so earnestly, or to go up with them at night and pray with them, as my dear father used to do with me. And I can’t help asking myself whether these children of ours are not the ones first to be prayed with, first to be talked with, and first to be labored with.”—Sel.