Ruth Erskine's Crosses

by Pansy

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.