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.

“How is it possible that you can desire to go to that stuffy little room and meet a dozen illiterate men and women or, is it a mistaken sense of duty which impels you?”

This was her husband’s question regarding the suggestion of Ruth that they go to the weekly prayer-meeting. His tone was not unkind, but there was just a touch of raillery in it, which was at all times harder for Ruth to bear than positive coldness.

“You must be content to tolerate my tastes,” she said, “since you can not sympathize with them. Endurance is the most that I can expect.”

He laughed good-naturedly.

“Now, Ruth, dear, don’t be cross. I haven’t the least idea of being so, and I propose to humor your whims to the last degree. I will even escort you to that most uninviting room and call for you again, enduring, meantime, with what grace I can the sorrows of my country solitude. What more can you expect? But in return for such magnanimity you might enlighten my curiosity. Why do you go? How can I help being curious? In town, now, it was different. While I might even there question your choice of entertainments, at least you met people of culture, with whom you had certain ideas in common. But really and truly, my dear wife, I am at home in this region of country, so far as knowledge of the mental caliber of the people is concerned, and I assure you you will look in vain for a man or woman of brains. Outside of the minister—who is well enough, I suppose, though he is a perfect bore to me—there is a general and most alarming paucity of ideas. Besides which, there is no gas in the church, you know, and kerosene lamps are fearful at their best, and these, I judge, are at their worst. So, taking the subject in all its bearings, I think I am justified in asking what can be your motive?”

Is it any wonder that there were tears in Ruth’s eyes, as she turned them toward her husband? How explain to one who would not understand the meaning of her terms why she sought the little country prayer-meeting?

“Judge Burnham,” she said, speaking slowly, and trying to choose the words with care, “is it unknown to you that I profess to expect to meet there with the Lord Jesus Christ?”

“Oh, that indeed!” he said, and the lightness of his tone so jarred on her that she shivered. “I believe that is an article in your creed. I don’t discredit it in its intellectual and spiritual sense, but what does it prove? I suppose you meet him equally in this room, and I suppose the surroundings of this room are as conducive to communion with the Unseen Presence as are those of that forlorn little square box of a church. Isn’t that the most doleful building for a church that it was ever your misery to see? It is abominably ventilated; for that matter churches nearly always are. I wonder if there is any thing in church creeds that conscientiously holds people from observing the laws of health and comfort? I don’t believe there is an opera-house in the United States that would be tolerated for a season, if the question of light and heat and ventilation had been ignored in it as entirely as they are in churches.”

What was there to be said to such as he? Perhaps Ruth said the best thing under the circumstances. “Well, come, don’t let us discuss the subject further; there is the bell; please take me down to the poor little church, for I really want to go.”

“Certainly,” he said, rising promptly, and making ready with a good-natured air. He attended her to the very door and was on its threshold in waiting when the hour of prayer was over, and was gracious and attentive in the extreme during the rest of the evening, making no allusion to the prayer-meeting, after the first few mischievous and pointed questions as to the exercises, questions which tried Ruth’s nerves to the utmost, for the reason that the little meeting had been so utterly devoid of anything like life and earnestness that it was a trial rather than a help to her.

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.