| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 7 |
Page 5 |
But why should the empty chair be the first revealer of the real worth of those who have walked so close to us? Why should sorrow over our loss be the first influence to draw from our hearts the tenderness and the wealth of kindly ministries that le pent up in them all the while? Surely, wedded life should call out all that is richest, truest, tenderest, most inspiring and most helpful in the life of each. This is the true ideal of Christian marriage. Its love is to be like that of Christ and his Church. It should not wait for the agony of suffering or the pang of separation to draw out its tenderness, but should fill all its days and nights with unvexed sweetness.
There are many such marriages. Few more beautiful pictures of wedded love were ever unveiled than that which was lived out in the home of Charles Kingsley. His wife closes her loving memoir with these words: “The outside world must judge him as an author, a preacher, a member of society, but those only who lived with him in the intimacy of every day life at home can tell what he was as a man. Over the real romance of his life and over the tenderest, loveliest passages in his private letters a veil must be thrown, but it will not be lifting it too far to say that if in the highest, closest of earthly relationships a love that never failed – pure, patient, passionate – for six and thirty years, a love which never stooped from its own lofty level to a hasty word, an impatient gesture or a selfish act, in sickness or in health, in sunshine or in storm, by day or by night, could prove that the age of chivalry has not passed away for ever, then Charles Kingsley fulfilled the ideal of a ‘most true and perfect knight’ to the one woman blest with that love in time and to eternity. To eternity, for such love is eternal, and he is not dead. He himself, the man, the lover, husband, father friend – he still lives in God, who is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” And why should not every marriage in Christ realize all that lies in this picture? It is possible, and yet only noble manhood and womanhood, with truest views of marriage and inspired by the holiest love, can realize it.
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