“I cannot give thee up. Not a drop of my blood flows in any living being but in thee, the blood of a noble race. I had thought that in this new soil, transplanted, the old oak might flourish with renewed strength; but over thee, the dearest and the last, is creeping the shadow of the grave. My sons died a soldier’s death, and I mourned them as a soldier should. Thy mother I married as the great marry, for reasons of state and policy, but thou with thy gentle ways hast knit thyself into my very heart, and I must lay thee in a nameless grave, and conceal it from the Indian’s gaze, while thy kindred sleep beneath sculptured marble and the shadow of proud banner folds. Thine uncle who thought to take the journey with us flinched when it came to the trial, while I have faced pestilence, treachery, and war. Surely I have borne a heavy cross, and thus am I rewarded. God is too hard with me. He has no right to bereave me in my old age of the only being I ever truly loved.”
“Father, whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.”
“Dear child, torture me not thus or I shall go mad.”
“No, father, but thou wilt go mad if, in this desperate sorrow, thou dost not win Heaven’s grace. If thy heart does not break in penitence, thy brain will reel in madness. Father, dear father, it becomes me to seek knowledge of thy gray hairs, and thou art esteemed by all a man of shrewd counsel. But to those who, like me, are on the brink of eternity, there is given a knowledge not of earth, and through these weak lips the spirit speaks. Deceive not thyself. Thou hast as yet borne no cross, but thou hast wrested the Scriptures. May it not be to thine own destruction. Thy spirit could not brook oppression, and, as thou couldst not resist, so hast thou fled from it. The perils of exile and the stormy seas were less terrible to thee than the foot of the oppressor on thy neck. Thou wast bred amid the alarms and in the bloody frays of the border wars; thou hast loved the clash of steel, and the smoke of battle is as the breath of thy nostrils. Thou hast been a man of blood from thy youth up. My uncle was bred a scholar amid home delights, unused to scenes of trial and hardship. They had terrors for him, whereas they had none for thee. And yet he would have gladly come with us had he not been forbidden of Heaven. I heard him pleading with God to make known to him his duty. That which would have been to him a real cross but was none to thee he was willing to take up. But God has laid upon him a weightier one at home. Thus hast thou prayed to have thine own way, hast suffered in accordance with thine own will, not the will of God. The cross, the real cross, is now before thee. Wilt thou take it up? If thou dost not do this, father, whither I go thou canst not come. For nineteen years thou hast anticipated my slightest wish. Wilt thou now refuse my last request? I, a timid maid, a daughter of affluence and luxury, who had never listened to a harsher sound than the murmur of Derwent-Water over the rocky bed and the breath of morn among the hills, have broken every tie, torn from my heart the youth I loved, because he stood between me and Christ, encountered perils before which warriors quail, for the love of Jesus. I have drunk of the bitter cup, but the cross has brought me to the crown. I see it. It glitters in the hand of Christ. Soon it shall press my brow. Never in the flush of youth and love in my early home did I know such joy as in this savage wilderness, this rude hut, and at this dying hour fills my soul. So will the cross bring thee to the crown. Dear father, wilt thou not say, ’Thy will be done’?”
The words died upon her lips like the murmur of distant music. Her head which in the last energies of expiring nature she had raised from his shoulder fell back, and she passed away even on his bosom. The red light of morning fell on that still cold face on which the strong man’s tears were showering like the summer rain, but they were tears of submission. In that midnight vigil he had lived years, had fathomed the difference between doing the will of God when it suited and when it crossed his inclination, between wresting and wrenching the Scriptures into conformity with a haughty spirit and bringing that spirit into obedience to the truth; between making a cross to suit ourselves and then bearing it in our own strength and for our own glory, and taking up that which Christ places before us.
Are we, my dear friends, wresting the Scriptures, picking and choosing among the commands of God, and obeying only those that run parallel with our inclinations? Have you gone just so far in obeying the commands of God as fashion and the custom of your acquaintances would go and stopped short when duty became self-denial? Have you done just as little for Christ as you thought could in any way consist with a fair profession in the eyes of the world, and have you gone just as far in the pleasures of the world as you in your judgment might go and still escape the fate of the unbeliever?
Some persons wrest the Scriptures with a rude force, a noisy and destructive violence, denying the existence and attributes of their Maker, and are open scoffers and unbelievers; but others with a silent, imperceptible force, unperceived even by themselves, and silent as the power of frost which lifts the whole northern continent upon its shoulders. Their morality, Christian culture, urbanity of deportment, earnestness in defence of sound doctrine, private and public charities, are not grounded on a new heart, but proceed from other motives; force of education, the restraints of society, the love of a sect, connection of religion with some political opinion, and not from the spirit of love to Christ which it breathes; they spring from the desire to be reconciled to God by something less galling to the pride of the human heart than unconditional surrender. My friends, receiving the doctrines of Scripture without obeying their requirements is a plain and palpable wresting of the Scriptures. You believe there is a God whose hand rules the universe, yet you have never bent the knee to ask for His direction or to thank Him for the mercies He has bestowed. You believe that you must strive to enter in at the strait gate, yet you have never striven. You believe that when a person feels in his soul the strivings of the Holy Spirit directing him to God, he ought, if he would be saved, to fall in with and supplement them by his own efforts. You have felt these strivings, yet you have never lifted a finger to help yourselves. Is not this holding the truth in unrighteousness?
Delay is wresting the Scriptures. God saith, “Now is the accepted time.” Unbelief says, “Will not another time do just as well?” God says, “To-day if you will hear his voice.” Procrastination says, “Will not to-morrow do as well?” God says, “You know not what a day may bring forth.” The careless hearer says, “To-morrow shall be as this day and much more abundant.” Thus you think one thing and do another. This is not the way to live, and certainly it is not the way to die. Remove, I entreat you by faith and repentance, this strange discrepancy between faith and practice.