FIFTEEN YEARS AGO

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, June 24, 1880

FromAdvent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 56, No. 1

FIFTEEN YEARS AGO.

I REMEMBER so well the wedding; a fair, girlish bride with winsome manners, well educated, reared in the best society, and a member of the church; the husband somewhat older, dignified and manly in bearing, a college graduate, but with no Christian principle. Some doubted the wisdom of marrying a man who was not rooted and grounded in the faith, but they said, He is fond of her, and who knows but she may win him to a different life? They were glad when the young man came with her to the old church Sunday after Sunday, and they put aside their prejudice about being unequally yoked together with unbelievers.

By-and-by the seat at church was vacant. Were the young people ill? When visited, it was found that Mr. Harvey thought he should like a church broader in doctrine than ours, and thither both had gone. Children came to the home. They were taught to pray and go to Sunday-school, but finally, as Sunday was the only day the father had to visit with his family, and take a drive, it was deemed wise to take the children out of school. It was confining enough to be in the day-school for a week, and they need the bracing air.

After a time Mr. Harvey said the family attended services so little that it hardly seemed worth while to pay for a seat in a fashionable church, so the pew was given up. Very few in their circle were Christians, so their social power was not greatly lessened.

Fifteen years have come and gone. I was in the home a short time ago, a beautiful home, that wealth, and travel, and taste have made very attractive, but the Christianity seems to have departed. No one of the family ever goes to church. Some of the children are openly infidel. A blessing, or prayer, or hymn is never heard. The lines have gathered in the face that was girlish and sunny fifteen years ago; gathered somehow in such a way that the sweet, indescribable look that the gospel of Christ gives has faded out. There are faces that never become old, eyes that never grow dim, hearts that never get weary, because they have drunk at the spring of eternal life.

Whose fault was it that this home was not a Christian home? Should the wife have gone contrary to the will of her husband and brought discord into the family? Did Mr. Harvey love his wife better for yielding to him in matters of conscience? Assuredly not. Men believe in, and admire, Christian womanhood. I shall never forget what a prominent lawyer in this city, now dead, said to me once, speaking of a lady whom he loved in youth: “I would have married her gladly, but I wanted a Christian woman for a wife!” and he not a Christian man himself.

Love gives dominion, and wise is she who holds and uses it prayerfully. If woman be weaker than man physically, she holds a power the greatness of which she usually but half comprehends. There are compensations in life which equalize great differences.

I remember another young couple married about the same time. The bride was a graduate of a Western college, as gentle and refined as the one above mentioned. She wedded the man of her choice, agreeable, interesting, fine-looking, but unchristian. She hoped, as thousands more have hoped, to see him change his course in life. The years went by, but no change came. She was always in her place in church, always at the prayer-meeting. Sometimes she came miles in storm and darkness, alone. She always knelt by the bedside and prayed in his presence, and he could not help knowing that she prayed for him. She would never consent to have wine upon her table, though her husband used it elsewhere. There were no cards, though he played at other places. Somehow he respected consistent living, and made no opposition to her wishes.

Five or six years ago, in one of those mysterious ways in which the Holy Spirit works, the heart of the profane, irreligious husband was touched, broken in contrition, and saved. Then the heroic wife was the strong tower on which, next to God, he leaned. Her life had corresponded with her prayers, and her counsel was sure.

I have known them intimately for years. A more earnest, active Christian, one who speaks for Christ, and judiciously too, in horse cars or railroad trains, from the platform, anywhere, to redeem the years he has lost, I think I have never met.

The wife stood by her principles and saw her husband saved. It is a mistake to suppose that a gentle woman can have no strength, or a strong woman no gentleness. The world needs both combined in its best and truest womanhood. The doing of one's duty has no sex limitation.—Congregationalist.