To Miss E.S. Gilman, New York, April 29, 1871.
The subject of your letter is one that greatly interests me, and I should be glad to get more light upon it myself. As far as I know, those who live apart from the world, communing with God and working for Him chiefly in prayer, have least temptation to wandering and distracted thoughts, and are more devout and spiritual than those of us who live more in the world. But it stands to reason that we can't all live so. The outside work must go on, and somebody must do it. But of course we have the hardest time, since while in the world we must not be of it. I have come, of late, to think that both classes are needed, the contemplative and the active, and God does certainly take the latter aside now and then as you suggest, by sickness and in other ways, to set them thinking. Holiness is not a mere abstraction; it is praying and loving and being consecrate, but it is also the doing kind deeds, speaking friendly words, being in a crowd when we thirst to be alone, and so on and so on. The study of Christ's life on earth reveals Him to us as incessantly busy, yet taking special seasons for prayer. It seems to me that we should imitate Him in this respect, and when we find ourselves particularly pressed by outward cares and duties, break short off and withdraw from them till a spiritual tone returns. For we can do nothing well unless we do it consciously for Christ, and this consciousness sometimes gets jostled out of us when we undertake to do too much. The more perfectly He is formed in us the more light we shall get on every path of duty, the less likely to go astray from the happy medium of not all contemplation, not all activity. And to have Him thus to dwell in us we are led to pray by His own last prayer for us on earth, when He asked for the "I in them." Let us pray for each other that this may be our blessed lot. Nothing will fit us for life but this. In ourselves we do nothing but err and sin. In Him we are complete.
* * * * *
II.
Her Husband called to Chicago. Lines on going to Dorset. Letters to young Friends, on the Christian Life. Narrow Escape from Death. Feeling on returning to Town. Her "Praying Circle." The Chicago Fire. The true Art of Living. God our only safe Teacher. An easily-besetting Sin. Counsels to young Friends. Letters.
Mrs. Prentiss' letters relating to her husband's call to Chicago require perhaps an explanatory word. She had some very pleasant associations with Chicago. It was the home of a brother and sister-in-law, to whom she was deeply attached, and of other dear relatives. There Stepping Heavenward had first appeared, and many unknown friends—grateful for the good it had done them—were eager to form her acquaintance and bid her welcome to the great city of the Interior. And yet the thought of removing there filled her with the utmost distress. Had her husband's call been to some distant post in the field of Foreign Missions, her language on the subject could hardly have been stronger. But this language in reality expresses simply the depth of her devotion to her church and her friends in New York, her morbid shyness and shrinking from the presence of strangers, and, especially, her vivid sense of physical inability to make the change without risking the loss of what health and power of sleep still remained to her. Misgiving on this last point caused her husband to hesitate long before accepting the call, and to feel in after years that his decision to accept it, although conscientiously made, had been a grave mistake.
To Mrs. Condict, New York, June 3, 1871.
I knew that you would rather hear from me than through the papers, the fact that Mr. Prentiss has been once more unanimously elected by the General Assembly to the Chicago Professorship. He has come home greatly perplexed as to his duty, and prepared to do it, at any reasonable cost, if he can only find out what it is. We built our Dorset house not as a mere luxury, but with the hope that the easy summer there would so build up our health as to increase and prolong our usefulness; but going to Chicago would deprive us of that, besides cutting us off from all our friends. But we want to know no will but God's in this question, and I am sure you and Miss K. will join us in the prayer that we may not so much as suggest to Him what path He will lead us into. The experience of the past winter would impress upon me the fact that place and position have next to nothing to do with happiness; that we can be wretched in a palace, radiant in a dungeon. Mr. P. said yesterday that it broke his heart to hear me talk of giving up Dorset; but perhaps this heartbreaking is exactly what we need to remind us of what for many years we never had a chance to forget, that we are pilgrims and strangers on the earth. Two lines of my own keep running in my head:
Oh foolish heart, oh faithless heart, oh heart on ruin bent, Build not with too much care thy nest, thou art in banishment.
I have seen the time when the sense of being a pilgrim and a stranger was very sweet; and God can sweeten whatever He does to us. So though perplexed we are not in despair, and if we feel that we are this summer living in a tent that may soon blow down, it is just what you are doing, and in this point we shall have fellowship. I am sure it is good for us to have God take up the rod, even if He lays it down again without inflicting a blow. I know we are going to pray till light comes. I feel very differently about it from what I did last summer. The mental conflicts of the past winter have created a good deal of indifference to everything. Without conscious union and nearness to my Saviour I can't be happy anywhere; for years He has been the meaning of everything, and when He only seems gone (I know it is only seeming) I don't much care where I am. I am just trying to be patient till He makes Satan let go of me. Excuse this selfish letter, and write me one just as bad!