“Ruth, don’t you know He says: ‘For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God?’ How often I have thought of that! He will not abide with a divided heart; he must be first; and, for myself, I did not for years keep him first. God was not in all my thoughts.”
“I don’t know,” Ruth said, speaking slowly after a long silence, and she spoke with a long drawn sigh.
“I don’t know that I can ever get back to where I was, even three weeks ago. Something has dropped like a pall upon my joy in religion. I never had much joy in anything. Really, it isn’t my nature to be joyful. Perhaps I should not expect it.”
Susan, smiling, shook her head. “That won’t do, you know. Joy is one of the fruits that you are commanded to bear. It is not optional with you. ‘The fruit of the Spirit is love’—joy—you remember. It is not the joy of nature that you and I are to look for, but the joy of grace. Ruth, if I were you, I would not try to go back to three weeks ago, I would try to go back to Christ and ask him to hold you, and lead you, and speak for you, and in this, your time of special need, not to let you drop for one moment away from him.”
But who shall account for the perversity of the human heart? Something in the simple, earnest words were translated by Satan to mean to Ruth a reflection against her husband. She lifted her head haughtily and the tremor went out of her voice. “I don’t know what you mean by my ‘time of special need;’ I do not know that one’s life, humanly speaking, could be more carefully shielded than mine. I have no anxiety as to Judge Burnham’s position in regard to these questions; he will respect my wishes and follow my plans.”
To this Susan had no answer. Had she spoken at all, she feared she would have shown Ruth that her own words were not strictly true. She believed her at this moment to be weighed down with a sense of her husband’s influence over her.
When the bell tolled for evening service, Susan and the two daughters of the house came down attired for church.
“Going again?” queried Judge Burnham, with uplifted eyebrows. “Ruth and I have had enough for to-day.” And Ruth, sitting back in the easy chair, with a footstool at her feet, and a sofa pillow at her head, and a volume of sacred poems in her hand, neither raised her eyes nor spoke.
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” This sentence stayed persistently with Susan Erskine. What had it to do with Judge Burnham and his wife that they, too, should remind her of it?