| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 16 |
Page 3 |
Many a woman gives out her life for Christ in lowly, self denying ministries. She turns away from ease and comfort and toils for the poor. With her own fingers she makes garments for the widow and orphan. When she is dead there is great mourning. The poor rise up and call her blessed. Those she has clad gather about her coffin and show the coats and garments she made for them while she was alive. Her pastor preaches her funeral sermon with wondrous tenderness and eloquence. All very well. It is a sweet reward, a beautiful ending, for such a life. But would it not have been better if part at least of that kindness had been shown to her while her weary feet were walking on their long love errands and her busy fingers were drawing the needle through seam after seam?
A husband piled most elaborate floral offerings about his wife’s coffin, built a magnificent monument over her grave and spoke in glowing eulogy of her noble sacrifices. But it was whispered that he had not been the kindest of husbands to her while she lived. A daughter showed great sorrow at her mother’s funeral and could not say enough in commendation of her, but it was known that she had thrust many a thorn into her pillow while she was living.
Is it not a better thing to seek to make the living happy than to leave them to walk along dreary paths without sympathy, unhelped, neglected, perhaps wronged, and then flood their coffins with sunshine? Many a man goes down under the pressure of life’s hardship and the weight of its burdens, never hearing the voice of human sympathy. What matters it to him, when the agony is over and he lies dead on the field, that friends come in throng to lament his fall and to utter his praises? May it not be that a tithe of the sympathy and appreciation wasted and unavailing now would have kept his heart bravely beating for many another year?
“How much would I care for it could I know
That when I am under the grass or snow,
The raveled garment of life’s brief day
Folded and quietly laid away,
The spirit let loose from mortal bars
And somewhere away among the stars,–
How much do you think it would matter then
What praise was lavished upon me, when,
Whatever might be its stint or store,
It neither could help nor harm me more?”
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