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.