I charge you, my sister, that you take your husband along with you to
heaven. Of course this implies that you yourself are a Christian. I
must take that for granted. It cannot be possible that after what
Christianity has done for woman, and after taking the infinitely
responsible position you have assumed as the head of the household,
that you should be in a position antagonistic to Christ. It was not a
slip of the tongue when I spoke of you as being at the head of the
household. We men rather pride ourselves as being at the head of the
household, but it is only a pleasant delusion. To whom do the children
go when they have trouble? When there is a sore finger to be bound up
or one of the first teeth that needs to be removed to make way for one
that is crowding it out, to whom does the child go? For whom do
children cry out in the night when they get frightened at a bad dream?
Aye, to whom does the husband go when he has a business trouble too
great or too delicate for outside ears? We, the men, are heads of the
household in name, but you, O wives! are the heads of the household in
fact, and it is your business to take your husband with you into the
kingdom of God, and see that house prepared for heaven.
You can do it! Of course God's almighty grace alone can convert him,
but you are to be the instrument. Some wives keep their husbands out
of heaven, and others garner them for it. If your religion, O wife! is
simply the joke of the household, if you would rather go to the
theatre than the prayer-meeting, if you can beat all the neighborhood
in progressive euchre, if your husband never sees you kneel at the
bedside in prayer before retiring, if the only thing that reminds the
family of your church relations is that on communion-day you get home
late to dinner, you will not be able to take your husband to heaven,
for the simple reason that you will not get there yourself. But I
suppose that your religion is genuine, and that the husband realizes
that there is in your soul a divine principle, and that, though you
may be naturally quicker tempered than he is and have many
imperfections that distress you more than they can any one else, still
you are destined for the skies when the brief scenes of this life are
over. How will you take him with you? There are two oars to that
boat--prayer and holy example.
But you say he belongs to a worldly club, or he does not believe a
word of the Bible, or he is an inebriate and very loose in his habits?
What you tell me shows that you don't understand that while you are at
the one end of a prayer, the omnipotent God is at the other end, and
it is simply a question whether Almightiness is strong enough and
keeps His word. I have no doubt there will be great conventions in
heaven, called for celebrative purposes, and when in some Celestial
assemblage the saints shall be telling what brought them to God, I
believe that ten thousand times ten thousand will say: "My wife."