all about it. She perhaps might not have disentangled your finances or
extended your credit, but she would have helped you to bear
misfortune. You have no right to carry on one shoulder that which is
intended for two.
There are business men here who know what I mean. There came a crisis
in your affairs. You struggled bravely and long; but after a while
there came a day when you said, "Here I shall have to stop," and you
called in your partners, and you called in the most prominent men in
your employ, and you said, "We have got to stop." You left the store
suddenly. You could hardly make up your mind to pass through the
street and over on the ferry-boat. You felt everybody would be looking
at you, and blaming you, and denouncing you.
You hastened home. You told your wife all about the affair. What did
she say? Did she play the butterfly? Did she talk about the silks and
the ribbons and the fashions? No. She came up to the emergency. She
quailed not under the stroke. She helped you begin to plan right away.
She offered to go out of the comfortable house into a smaller one, and
wear the old cloak another winter. She was one who understood your
affairs without blaming you. You looked upon what you thought was a
thin, weak woman's arm holding you up; but while you looked at that
arm, there came into the feeble muscles of it the strength of the
eternal God. No chiding. No fretting. No telling you about the
beautiful house of her father, from which you brought her ten, twenty,
or thirty years ago. You said, "Well, this is the happiest day of my
life. I am glad I have got from under my burden. My wife don't care--I
don't care."
At the moment you were utterly exhausted. God sent a Deborah to meet
the host of the Amalekites, and scatter them like chaff over the
plain. There are sometimes women who sit reading sentimental novels,
and who wish that they had some grand field in which to display their
Christian powers. Oh, what grand and glorious things they could do if
they only had an opportunity! My sister, you need not wait for any
such time. A crisis will come in your affairs. There will be a
Thermopylae in your own household, where God will tell you to stand.
There are scores and hundreds of households in this city to-day where
as much bravery and courage are demanded of women as was exhibited by
Grace Darling, or Marie Antoinette, or Joan of Arc.