What land, what street, what house has not felt the smitings of
disease? Tens of thousands of sick-beds! What shall we do with them?
Shall man, with his rough hand and heavy foot and impatient bearing,
minister? No. He cannot soothe the pain. He cannot quiet the nerves.
He knows not where to set the light. His hand is not steady enough to
pour out the drops. He is not wakeful enough to be watcher. The Lord
God, who sent Miss Dix into the Virginia hospitals, and Florence
Nightingale into the Crimea, and the Maid of Saragossa to appease the
wounds of the battlefield, has equipped wife, mother, and daughter for
this delicate but tremendous mission.
You have known men who despised woman, but the moment disease fell
upon them, they did not send for their friends at the bank, or their
partner in business, or their worldly associates. Their first cry was,
"Take me to my wife." The dissipated young man at the college scoffs
at the idea of being under home influences, but at the first blast of
the typhoid fever on his cheek he says,
"WHERE IS MOTHER?"
I think one of the most pathetic passages in all the Bible is the
description of the lad who went out to the harvest-field of Shunem
and got sun-struck, throwing his hands on his temples and crying out,
"Oh, my head! my head!" and they said: "Carry him to his mother." And
then the record is: "He sat on her knees till noon, and then died." It
is an awful thing to be ill away from home in a strange hotel, once in
a while men coming in to look at you, holding their hand over their
mouth for fear they will catch the contagion. How roughly they turn
you in the bed! How loudly they talk! How you long for the ministries
of home!
I knew one such who went away from one of the brightest of homes for
several weeks' business absence at the West. A telegram came at
midnight that he was on his death-bed, far away from home. By express
train the wife and daughters went westward; but they went too late. He
feared not to die; but he was in an agony to live until his family got
there. He tried to bribe the doctor to make him live a little while
longer. He said: "I am willing to die, but not alone." But the pulses
fluttered, the eyes closed, and the heart stopped. The express trains
met in the midnight--wife and daughters going westward, lifeless
remains of husband and father coming eastward. Oh, it was a sad,
pitiful, overwhelming spectacle! When we are sick we want to be sick
at home. When the time comes for us to die,