"Simon had but lately been baptised," observed Laver, "when St. Peter, the apostle, said to him, 'Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter, because his heart was not right in the sight of God.' ‡ Oh! Dear wife, suffer me to speak for a few minutes freely on those things on which our salvation depends. God asks for our hearts, He will accept nothing less, and He accepts these hearts that, by His Spirit, He may make them holy."
‡ Acts viii. 21.
Ann would not hear her husband to the end.
"How you veer and change about!" she exclaimed. "Before you went to the hospital, it was all—'What must I do to be saved?' And now you are all for holiness as the way to get to Heaven."
"No, never, not the way!" exclaimed Martin, with such energy that his wife stared at him in surprise. "Christ is the Way, the only Way, it is His blood that cleanseth from all sin. * But, as some good man has said, 'He does not save us in our sins, but from our sins.'
* 1 John i. 7.
"'If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature'; † he that comes to the Saviour in faith, seeks to follow the Saviour in that 'holiness without which no man shall see the Lord!'" ‡
† 2 Cor. v. 17. ‡ Heb. xii. 14.
Ann Laver had never come to the Saviour, nor felt her need of being saved; she was one of the many who choose their own way, and do their own will, and yet expect, somehow or other, to get to Heaven in the end. She was like a person with bandaged eyes walking towards the edge of a precipice, and the attempt to unbandage her eyes, or stop her on her perilous course, only roused her pride and her anger. It is needless to repeat the bitter things which she said to him whose love had made him speak the truth which she hated to hear. After a violent burst of temper, Mrs. Laver, slamming the door behind her, retired into the back parlour, where Annie had good reason to know that something had put her mother thoroughly out of temper.
With a heavy sigh, Martin Laver went to put up his shutters again. He was so weak from his recent illness, that he had to pause more than once, even when making so slight an exertion. Six months before he would have lifted ten times the weight of a shutter with ease. It was sad to feel the once strongly-knit arms so feeble; but it was not this sense of weakness, nor the fear of approaching poverty, that drew that deep sigh from Laver's heart. It was the burden of that cross which is wont to press more or less heavily upon all who would follow Christ fully—that cross of which the Blessed Master knew the weight day by day, and which He bids all His servants take up.