“THESE BE THY GODS.”
AT last in Ruth Burnham’s home, life settled into routine. Everything
was as she had planned it. She had tried two ways of life. For a
season almost everything had gone contrary to her desires and plans.
Then there came this period wherein she was permitted to carry out, in
detail, all the schemes which seemed to her wise. In the earlier days
of her Christian experience she had felt, if she did not say, that if
she could but have the control of her own affairs, humanly speaking,
she could make things work together in a different and more helpful
manner for herself and her friends. It was as if the Lord had taken
her at her word and opened the door for her to plan and carry out
according to her will. The question was, Did she find it a success?
Was she now, at last, a happy, growing Christian—one whose influence
was felt in all the departments of her life? Oh, I am afraid that Ruth
hated to admit, even to her own heart, how far from success she felt!
Painful though the admission was, she had to make it to her conscience
that she was neither a growing nor a happy Christian.
What was the trouble? Why, in her heart and in her life there was
conflict. She knew the right, and too often she did it not. Give me
such an experience as that, and you may be sure that you have given the
record of an unhappy and an unfruitful life. There were so many ways in
which Ruth could see that she had erred. She meant to commence in just
the right way; she had taken great credit to herself for her sacrifice
of personal ease and pleasure, for the taking up of hard crosses in
connection with Judge Burnham’s duties; yet now she saw that there were
crosses far more important which she had not taken up at all.
Almost as often as she knelt alone in her own room to pray she knelt
in tears. First, because she was always alone; her husband never bowed
with her, never read the Bible with her. Was this, in part, her fault?
What if, in those first days when everything was new, and when he was
on the alert to be her comfort, she had asked him to read with her, to
kneel with her, and hear her pray? Was it not possible that he might
have done so? Well, those first days were not so long gone by. Was it
not just possible that he might join her now?
Alas for Ruth! Though the days of her married life had been so few,
she could look back upon them and see inconsistencies in word and
manner and action which went far toward sealing her lips. Not that
they should, but is it not the painful experience of each one of us
that they so often do? If Ruth had but commenced right! It is so hard
to make a beginning, in the middle of a life. Besides, there had been
many words spoken by Judge Burnham which would serve to make it harder
for him to yield to any innovations. If she had but beguiled him before
these words were spoken! Then, indeed, it is possible that some of
them at least would never have been uttered. Only a few weeks a wife,
and for how many of her husband’s sins was she already in a measure
responsible?
Then the girls were a source of pain to Ruth’s conscience. Not that
they had not learned well her first lessons. It surprised, at times
it almost alarmed her, to see with what eagerness they caught at the
ribbons and ruffles, and all the outside adornments of life. They
were entirely willing to give these, each and all, important place in
their thoughts. She had given them intoxicating glimpses of the world
of fashion before their heads or hearts were poised enough not to be
over-balanced. They had caught at the glimpse and made a fairyland of
beauty out of it, and had resolved with all their young, strong might
to “belong” to that fairyland, and they looked up to and reverenced
Ruth as the queen who had the power of opening these enchanted doors
to them. You are to remember that, though backward, they were by no
means brainless. Having been kept in such marked seclusion all their
lives, until this sudden opening of the outer doors upon them, and this
sudden flinging them into the very midst of the whirl of “what to wear
and how to make it,” hearing little else during these first bewildering
days than the questions concerning this shade and that tint, and
the comparative merits of ruffles or plaits, and the comparative
qualities of silks and velvets, and the absolute necessity of perfect
fitting boots and gloves and hats, what wonder that they jumped to the
conclusion, that these things were the marks of power in the world, and
were second in importance to nothing?
Having plunged into her work with the same energy which characterized
all Ruth’s movements, how was she now to teach the lesson that these
things were absolutely as nothings compared with a hundred other
questions having to do with their lives?
She worked at this problem, and saw no more how to do it than she saw
how to take back the first few weeks of married life and personal
influence over her husband and live them over again. There was no
solace in trying to talk her difficulties over with Susan, because
she, while intensely sympathetic in regard to every-day matters,
was gravely silent when Ruth wondered why the girls were so suddenly
absorbed in the trivialities of life to the exclusion of more important
things. And Ruth felt that her sister recognized _her_ share in the
matter and deplored it.
About her husband she chose to be entirely silent herself. If pride
had not kept her so, the sense of wifely vows would have sealed her
lips. At least she had high and sacred ideas of marriage vows. Alas for
Ruth, there were other disquieting elements. She realized her husband’s
influence on herself. Try as she would, resolve as she might, steadily
she slipped away from her former moorings. Little things, so called,
were the occasions of the lapses, but they were not little in their
effect on her spiritual life.
“How is it possible that you can desire to go to that stuffy little
room and meet a dozen illiterate men and women or, is it a mistaken
sense of duty which impels you?”
This was her husband’s question regarding the suggestion of Ruth that
they go to the weekly prayer-meeting. His tone was not unkind, but
there was just a touch of raillery in it, which was at all times harder
for Ruth to bear than positive coldness.
“You must be content to tolerate my tastes,” she said, “since you can
not sympathize with them. Endurance is the most that I can expect.”
He laughed good-naturedly.
“Now, Ruth, dear, don’t be cross. I haven’t the least idea of being
so, and I propose to humor your whims to the last degree. I will
even escort you to that most uninviting room and call for you again,
enduring, meantime, with what grace I can the sorrows of my country
solitude. What more can you expect? But in return for such magnanimity
you might enlighten my curiosity. Why do you go? How can I help being
curious? In town, now, it was different. While I might even there
question your choice of entertainments, at least you met people of
culture, with whom you had certain ideas in common. But really and
truly, my dear wife, I am at home in this region of country, so far
as knowledge of the mental caliber of the people is concerned, and
I assure you you will look in vain for a man or woman of brains.
Outside of the minister—who is well enough, I suppose, though he is
a perfect bore to me—there is a general and most alarming paucity of
ideas. Besides which, there is no gas in the church, you know, and
kerosene lamps are fearful at their best, and these, I judge, are at
their worst. So, taking the subject in all its bearings, I think I am
justified in asking what can be your motive?”
Is it any wonder that there were tears in Ruth’s eyes, as she
turned them toward her husband? How explain to one who would not
understand the meaning of her terms why she sought the little country
prayer-meeting?
“Judge Burnham,” she said, speaking slowly, and trying to choose the
words with care, “is it unknown to you that I profess to expect to meet
there with the Lord Jesus Christ?”
“Oh, that indeed!” he said, and the lightness of his tone so jarred on
her that she shivered. “I believe that is an article in your creed. I
don’t discredit it in its intellectual and spiritual sense, but what
does it prove? I suppose you meet him equally in this room, and I
suppose the surroundings of this room are as conducive to communion
with the Unseen Presence as are those of that forlorn little square box
of a church. Isn’t that the most doleful building for a church that
it was ever your misery to see? It is abominably ventilated; for that
matter churches nearly always are. I wonder if there is any thing in
church creeds that conscientiously holds people from observing the laws
of health and comfort? I don’t believe there is an opera-house in the
United States that would be tolerated for a season, if the question of
light and heat and ventilation had been ignored in it as entirely as
they are in churches.”
What was there to be said to such as he? Perhaps Ruth said the best
thing under the circumstances. “Well, come, don’t let us discuss the
subject further; there is the bell; please take me down to the poor
little church, for I really want to go.”
“Certainly,” he said, rising promptly, and making ready with a
good-natured air. He attended her to the very door and was on its
threshold in waiting when the hour of prayer was over, and was gracious
and attentive in the extreme during the rest of the evening, making no
allusion to the prayer-meeting, after the first few mischievous and
pointed questions as to the exercises, questions which tried Ruth’s
nerves to the utmost, for the reason that the little meeting had been
so utterly devoid of anything like life and earnestness that it was a
trial rather than a help to her.
Conversations not unlike these were common on prayer-meeting evening,
always conducted on Judge Burnham’s part, in the most gracious spirit,
ending by accompanying her to the church door. She ceased to ask him to
enter, for the reason that she was not sure but it would be a positive
injury to him to do so. One Wednesday evening he followed her to the
parlor with a petition:
“Now, wifie, I have been most patiently good every ‘meeting’ evening,
since I had you all to myself, having given you up, if not willingly,
at least uncomplainingly, to the companionship of those who are neither
elevating nor inspiriting. Now it is your turn to show yourself
unselfish. I’m a victim to one of my old-fashioned headaches, to-night,
and want you to take care of me.”
To which proposition Ruth instantly agreed—the pang of conscience which
she felt being not on account of the wife’s obvious duty to care for
a sick husband, but because of the instant throb of relief of which
she was conscious in having a legitimate reason for escaping the
prayer-meeting. It was too painfully apparent, even to her own heart,
that she had not enjoyed the hour of religious communion; that she had
sighed inwardly when the door closed after her retreating husband, and
she had gone back eagerly to his companionship, directly after the
hour of separation was over. It transpired that, on this occasion,
his headache was not so severe, but that it admitted of his being
entertained by his wife’s voice reading aloud, and he was presently so
far recovered as to sit up and join in her reading, giving her a lesson
in the true rendering of Shakespeare, which was most enjoyable to both.
On the following Wednesday there was a concert of unusual interest
in the city, and Ruth obeyed her husband’s summons by telegraph to
come down on the six o’clock train and attend. Of course it would not
do to have him wait in the city for her and disappoint him. Another
Wednesday, and she went again to the little meeting; but it had in
the interim grown more distasteful to her; and, indeed, there was this
excuse for poor Ruth, that the meeting was one of the dullest of its
kind; there were no outside influences helping her. It was a matter
of hard duty between her and her conscience. Perhaps when we consider
that human nature is what it is, we should not think it strange that
six weeks after the concert found Ruth accepting an invitation to a
select party in town, forgetting utterly, until, in her estimation, the
acceptance was beyond recall, that it was Wednesday evening. When she
remembered it, she told her long-suffering conscience somewhat roughly,
that “wives certainly had duties which they owed to their husbands.” I
have given you now only a specimen out of many influences which slowly
and surely drew Ruth down stream. Susan, looking on, feeling for the
present powerless, except as that ever-present resource—prayer—was left
her, felt oftener perhaps than any other command, the force of that one
sentence: “Thou shall have no other gods _before me_.”
Yet was not Ruth Burnham happy. Perhaps she had never, in her most
discontented hours, been further from happiness. Her conscience
was too enlightened, and had, in the last two years, been too well
cultivated for her not to know that she was going contrary very often
to her former ideas of right.
Too surely she felt that her husband’s views, her husband’s tastes, her
husband’s plans of life were at variance with hers. It was all very
well to talk about his yielding, and being led; he could yield to the
inevitable; and there is a way of appearing to yield, gracefully, too,
which develops itself as only a master-stroke to the end that one may
gain one’s own way. This method Judge Burnham understood in all its
details.
His wife early in their married life began to realize it. She began to
understand that he was, in a quiet, persistent way, actually _jealous_
of the demands which her religion made upon her time and heart. It was
not that he deliberately meant to overthrow this power which held her;
rather he sought in a patient way to undermine it. Perhaps if Ruth had
realized this, she might have been more on her guard. But Satan had
succeeded in blinding her eyes by that most specious of all reasonings
that she must, by her concession to his tastes and plans, win him over
to her ways of thinking. In other words, she must, by doing wrong,
convince him of the beauty that there is in a consistent Christian
life, and win him to the right way! In matters pertaining to this life
Ruth’s lip would have curled in scorn over such logic. Why was it that
she could not see plainly the ground whereon she trod?
Is there, then, no rest in the Christian life? Is the promise, “Come
unto me, and I will give you rest,” utterly void and worthless? Has not
God called his children to “peace?” Is there no “peace which passeth
understanding,” such as the world can neither give nor take away?
Why did not Ruth Burnham, with her educated mind and clear brain,
ponder these things, and determine whether, when she told herself, that
of course one must expect conflict and heart-wars in this life, she was
not thereby making the eternal God false to his covenants?
What was the trouble? Why, the same thing which comes in so continually
with its weary distractions—a divided heart. “Whosoever therefore will
be a friend of the world is the enemy of God!” That old solemn truth
remains to-day, after eighteen hundred years of experience, a _truth_
which many a world-tossed soul has proved; and Ruth Burnham had need to
learn that it matters not whether the world be represented by a general
glitter, or by a loving husband, so that the object of special choice
was placed “_before_” _Him_, solemn effect must follow.