Many a woman has written me that she is afraid that the Spirit has forsaken her, and that she is left as a wife and mother to a hopeless realization of need, such as no power but this which is denied her can supply. I have been glad to be able to say to all such, "You have the Spirit already. The very life you live is lived by His power. He is in you, and you cannot possibly get away from Him as long as you live." "Do you mean that?" said one with whom I was conversing." "I mean it; it is true," I replied; and I would like to make every mother among us realize not only the tremendous responsibility which that truth entails, but the glorious possibility as well.
The first manifestation of the Spirit of God in the earth was in life; and the fact that you are alive is in itself a manifestation of the Holy Ghost. There is but one source of life,--one Spirit; and that is always the Holy one. It cannot be defiled any more than the sunlight can be defiled. A sunbeam streams down upon the earth and strikes into a pool of filth or into the heart of a lily; and in the filthy pool it is just as pure as it is in the cup of the lily, and in both it performs the same office, which is by its light, heat, and other chemical properties, to reveal the truth about any and everything which comes in its way.
The life that we live in the flesh is all of the Spirit of God; and it is because the Spirit of God lives and moves in you, my sister, that you have any life at all. Job said, "All the while my breath is in me, and the Spirit of God is in my nostrils; my lips shall not speak wickedness, nor my tongue utter deceit." Job 27:4. The breath that you breathe in and out is the sacred breath of God. The moment that you are separated from the Spirit you cease to be, and until that moment comes you have the privilege and the responsibility of deciding just what you will do with it, whether you will submit to it, or try to compel it to submit to you. Everything depends upon that decision. With life comes power. Power is a manifestation of the Spirit. It is given to every man for profit, that by it he may be, in all that he is, to the glory of God; and his own well-being depends upon his being to the glory of God.
As a navigator must trim his sails to meet the breeze, so must every soul trim itself to the breath of God if it makes a safe voyage. The Spirit is given for a definite purpose, which each individual can defeat if he so determines. You, as a mother, can take this life out of the hand of God and abuse it by using it in fretting, in scolding, instead of yielding yourself to be used by it in the gentle services of a woman's holy ministry. You can certainly use your God-given strength for very selfish ends. You can drag Him down and use His power with which you run away from every duty, after every whim and error. Isa. 0:25. The trouble with the world is that it has perverted the power with which God entrusted it for those uses which would have hallowed every common necessity of life.
The woman who has the least of ability, the smallest, the most circumscribed sphere, may be able to control resources that are infinite. God says, "Concerning the work of my hands Command ye me." Concerning all that He has done, concerning everything that He has ever thought, concerning all the great plans which are worked out in the universe, He says, "Command ye me." All these resources which are locked up in the power which keeps the universe in order and causes the world to move so steadily through space, and the simple appliance of faith by which all is appropriated, are within the reach of every mother.
The women whom I would like to reach in this world-wide work know what it is to realize a great need. No woman ever comes to the point where she becomes a mother, no woman ever looks into the face of her newly born child and realizes what may be in the destiny of that little life, but that her heart is touched with the sense of need which brings her into intimate relation with the infinite One. She cannot be unmoved by the demands that are made upon her by that morsel of humanity. She may be a weak woman in every way, she may have little of what we would call moral strength, she may know but very little about purity; but no woman is indifferent to her need at such a time as that. That is God's one chance at many a woman's heart. The weaker she is, the stronger is her claim on the resources of this manifested Spirit, and God could not be Himself and for one instant ignore or refuse the plea of her need.
"Hard to Manage"
The woman who can realize that her life is only one of the manifestations of the Spirit of God, that it is her privilege to determine what it shall be in her and what office it shall perform in the work of her home, will very soon find the solution of every domestic problem. Everything turns upon the question as to whether she will surrender the natural selfish desire to use the power of God and consecrate herself to His own unquestioned control. In our wilful desire to execute our own plans, we have often undertaken to mortgage the power of God, and to compel it to serve our own purposes. We have tried to bring the infinite down to our own little comprehension to our own narrow ambitions, and thus have brought defeat and sorrow upon us and upon all that depend upon us.
A sister said to me, "What is the matter with Seventh-day Adventist children? They are the hardest children in the world to manage." I have heard that said again and again, and it is true.
There is a good reason. Seventh-day Adventists are a peculiar people. They are all hard to manage. And for this, be thankful. Any man or woman who is not hard to manage is sure sooner or later to become somebody's tool. All that is needed to make the tool is to find somebody who has a little larger ability, a little more wit to take hold of a manageable man, make him over, and use him as he will. This is another manifestation of the Spirit of God. God is hard to manage; He is fixed, unalterable, steadfast in His nature, and His children are to be like Him.
A principle cannot be whittled nor twisted. It may be counterfeited, but that is the worst that can be done to it; and a true representative of a great principle cannot be "handled" by anybody. It is a demonstration of the purpose and plan of God in these ends of the earth that He has called together a company of men, women, and children who are hard to move about, and has made them the depository of such a manifestation of Himself. This need not, however, make them ungentle or lacking in tenderness: they should all the more abound in these graces, and their steadfastness should make them long-suffering in loving-kindness.
But the mothers in these homes must have an unusual task,—a greater responsibility than has ever fallen to any others. They have a grade of human material to mold, out of which will be made unchangeable vessels of honor or of dishonor.
There is a sentiment in the world that one who cannot be managed is of necessity a lawbreaker, in a world where laws may be, in themselves criminal. And there is a sense in which this may be true in a world where laws are something in themselves criminal.
There is also a sentiment that it is a Christian grace to be easily managed; and people have tried to cultivate a manageable spirit; with the result that Seventh-day Adventists, their homes, their children, as well as all that goes to make them what they are, became a necessity in the economy of God. They have a strange place to fill in the earth. Their experiences must be peculiar to themselves from first to last; their homes must be unlike any other. Take two people such as will make good Seventh-day Adventists, let them come together in the making of a home, and they must have an experience such as no others can have in so relating themselves to each other that any home life at all will be possible. If any Christians who are known by some other name have the same experiences, it will be because they are Seventh-day Adventist material, whether they know it or not. Before a home is possible those who compose it must come to know that divine principle of unity which is never found excepting through the manifestation of the Spirit.
The husband in this home recognizing that the life which he lives in his flesh is altogether by the power of the Holy Spirit, settling every question for himself alone as if he and God alone were in the world—will be a hard man for his wife to "wind around her finger." And she should be glad to have it so, for if she could wind him, another woman might. Let her thank God that no other brain, not even hers, can think for him; that he must work out his own individuality in his own peculiar individual way. Such a man's life with his wife must be only as one grade of that school in which he will be prepared for the time when he and God will truly stand alone; when no human love, no human sympathy, no human power can have any influence in comforting or controlling him, or in mitigating his destiny in any way; when for all that he is, for all that he is not, for all that he was required to be, he and God must stand together in an undisturbed secret council.
And the same thing must be true of the wife. Her relation to God must be settled upon the same basis; and when two people have come together according to this plan, each adjusting his individuality to the same Spirit, although they may be filled with material out of which dissension might be manufactured, they must live at peace in the unity of the Spirit.
This is another manifestation of the Spirit; this is the true basis of the home. Without it, there can be no home such as God intended to establish in the earth for a testimony of His Spirit.
The children that are born into such a home of two such people, must be unmanageable until they have elected and surrendered themselves to control. They can be taught, cultivated, grown, but, as God in the beginning had planned, they will be free. God must have willing service out of us and our children if any,—that kind of service that a son yields to the father,—from a loving, free, deliberate preference to serve. The service of a tool He will never accept. No man who undertakes to serve God unwillingly from fear can ever have any sense of his acceptance. Every promise will fail to bring him comfort. He may, under a show of freedom and gladness cover up the unwillingness which is within; but sometime when the Spirit of God moves mightily upon him, he will come out with a confession such as will lay bare the sore places which his chains have worn into his soul.
God wants out of you a child like Himself, of free and independent action, instead of a tool such as even He can pick up and use like a stick. In this consists one feature of the image in which man was created; and your home is to be made a place in which this image of God shall be reproduced in every child that comes into it.
One trouble with the average man in our day is that he has no established convictions, does not recognize the life which he lives as a manifestation of the Spirit of God. He considers the power by which he moves as all his own to dispose of just as he shall choose; consents to be whipped about by every impulse, like a leaf in the wind. He does not believe in saying "No" very positively; for, according to the philosophy of the world, that would make a very ungraceful and uncongenial character. But a man may say "No" very positively, and yet gently. He need not be unyielding and boorish, because he is of that unmanageable type who yields only to principle, never to personal influence.
One man who undoubtedly had in him the right material, but which he had abandoned to utter selfishness, said to me, "I own up that I am under conviction. I am not having a good time. I have found out that I ought to be a Christian, but I have made up my mind that I shall stuff it out;" and against all the pleadings of the Spirit, and of his mother and friends, he was "stuffing it out" the last that I knew of him. He reasoned that his life was his own. He had his own plans to follow, and he prided himself upon the fact that he was strong enough to refrain from making to his mother, at their last good-by, a promise to seek God, which if he had made he would not have intended to keep. Of course, since he would not have intended to keep it, the only honorable course was to resist all her pleading even to the bitter end. Simply to make an outward show of yielding to his mother's prayers and tears would not have settled his account with God, and so would have brought no permanent comfort to her, since it was his salvation for which she groaned; and as hard and satanic as this man's course seems, it was more tolerable in the sight of God than the hypocrisy of much that passes for Christian courtesy.
A man may carry an unyielding spirit to the end of eternal death or of eternal life, according as it is for or against good or evil.
The child in your home with this wonderful legacy of power may be so taught in principles and established in truth that he shall make the wise choice, and by his own election become not only a willing, but an unchangeable, servant of God; and it is the mother's grandest office to preside over and direct the processes by which this end shall be attained.
Polities in the Home
There are so-called Christian people who would apparently be glad of any influence that would lead a child into any sort of a show of Christian living, if only there might be avoided the disgrace of a public revelation of wickedness. They would not care so much for anything that could be kept covered. They reason inwardly, if not openly, that if the boy can only be kept in the church, if he can only be kept to a profession of faith, be kept from outbreaking sin, he is all right; and to this end "influences" are set in motion. The father or the mother will say to this or that Christian friend, or to the minister, "I wish you would try to exert a personal influence over my child." But nothing has made God more trouble than the possibilities bound up in a strong personal influence brought to bear upon the individual who at last must give an account of himself. Personal influence must always go by spasmodic periods. Many a mother has defeated the work that God wanted her to do in her children because she has depended upon that, instead of upon the patient teaching of principle. And in church work all through the centuries, especially in these days, the gospel is handicapped by the same thing.
It often happens, when a child has done something that the mother has seen as wrong, that she has used command, pleading, and tears; living all the time herself in direct violation of the special principle involved, and still hoping by these flimsy devices of her influence to restrain him from an openly evil course and the public disgrace that it might involve.
One mother said to me, "I have wept my eyes almost out over my boy, but it does no good. He has got so that just as soon as he sees that I am going to cry, he will take his hat and get out of the house." And who can blame him? That sort of influence is not of God. Character cannot be built up by tears and pleading, but only by principles of truth. The only power to which the child should yield is the power of the Word and the Spirit that is life. If his mother's tears could prevail upon him to do a right thing against his will, some other woman's tears could prevail upon him to do a wrong thing. Anything that tears can do, tears can undo. Just as it is with votes.
Personal influence is the soul of the political machine, and it is just as political when it is set up in the Christian home or in the church, as it is in the congressional district or any lowdown ward of the city. It has its place like anything else that we find extant in the world and cannot get rid of; and the first business of every consecrated man and woman is to see that it is kept in that place instead of being lifted up into that which belongs to the Holy Spirit. Each must see that his power of influence is so subordinated that instead of being used in the gross material form in which it naturally grows, it shall be distilled and filtered through the Word and Spirit of God and only come forth out of the life as a perfume, odorous with the Rose of Sharon, and with the Lily of the Valleys.
The mother who breathes out the fragrance of the Spirit of God, until her home is filled, and her children seasoned by it as the summer air seasons both building material and growing fruit, will be able without any efforts at management to lead her flock in the way of truth. Any well-born child will thrive in such an atmosphere. He will take to it naturally, for it is his native air; and as native air has been supposed curative for many forms of disease it is certain that this breath of God will heal the taint of vice in any child; for is he not filled with the breath of God?
"He Shall Grow as the Lily"
It seems strange, since every breath is breathed into the child by the Holy Spirit, that Christian fathers and mothers have not found out how wonderful is the opportunity which is theirs with the first beginning of life while yet everything is to be learned by him and developed in him. Strange that the life of the church home could not have been such as God intended it to be, so that the children could have a chance to grow up into the truth as the lily grows up into beauty, strength, and fragrance.
Even after He had sin to reckon with, God held to this plan for the child; and with the gospel message there has always been something for the children. The mothers of today have a wonderful privilege. If the mothers of my generation had but known the things that are being taught so universally today! I cannot but compare the advantages of the present day with the experiences of the past, and urge that the young mothers of this time will appreciate the manifestation of the Spirit to them and the floods of light that are being poured out upon them.
The Humble Home
O, what mothers you should be! How you should be able to teach your children so that they may recognize and shun evil, and keep themselves separate from every unclean thing. How firmly they should be established in every principle of righteousness!
Because of the power that is in the manifestation of the Spirit, there is little excuse for the Christian fathers and mothers among us who fail to hold their children to the home and to the Truth. The manifestation of the Spirit is given for profit, for constant practical use, so that out of these may be brought forth those fruits which are needed for common use.
When people begin to seek the gift of the Holy Spirit, often wondering how they shall receive it, their first thought is that it is away off outside somewhere, entirely separate from everyday life; something hard to obtain, provided only for those who have some great and unusual work to do. But the truth is that God has made His Spirit the motor by which the entire machinery of the body must run until it stops forever, and its most important use is for the simplest necessary duties of the humble home, just as truly as for the greater work in some wider field.
The humble mother, amid her meager surroundings, with small gifts, with homely furnishing, in poverty, and the apparent lack of nearly all things, but with her little all consecrated to God and used for His glory, cannot measure what her ministry may mean to the kingdom of heaven.
What a work is hers even in making and dispensing the daily bread! leading the children to honor God in their little lives in both work and play; to be in the world as the Lord Jesus Christ was in it as a child; teaching them how to grow up as He grew,—thoughtful, careful, and with faithful obedience to principle. Nowhere among the angelic hosts can there be any manifestation of power and beauty that can bring such delight to God as a home of this humble pattern, filled with the sweet savor of obedience, purity, and love.
Many complain of the lack of elegance in their homes; but can this for a moment be considered a defect among a people who are waiting and watching for the culmination of all things, which is so soon to be that almost anything ought to suffice to take them through?
With the principles in which we have been instructed, and the expectations that are before us, there must be a simplicity and self-denial in all furnishings. No Seventh-day Adventist can afford much that the world calls comfort. He cannot afford to reach out and gather in even a small store of wealth and put it away in bank to draw upon for luxuries, nor for costly beauty anywhere. Nothing can be more gross and unseemly than such things among a people who know that the "time of trouble such as never was" is about to break upon the world. It would be akin to making arrangements for a feast, while all the atmosphere was contagious with pestilence, and while we knew that death was waiting at every door, while the sound of suppressed weeping was all about us. Even people of the world would refrain from such bad form.
The weeping may not as yet be very loud or continuous, but there is all about us a sobbing and soughing of the tempest of sorrows that is about to break; and you to whom the Lord has entrusted the secret of this knowledge, together with the opportunity to earn a salary, or turn material into wealth, which you know was all given, and should be spent, for this last emergency work in a dying world, could never feel warranted to spend money or labor in exchange for costly elegance in furniture or clothing, for luxury in food, or for anything which is simply to gratify the sight of the eye or the appetites of the flesh. I am sure that every sister who reads this will find her heart answering, "No, No!"
No, indeed. You realize that the displeasure of Him who has chosen us as His fellow-laborers in a world's redemption would fall quickly upon anyone who should in this way be guilty of misappropriating funds. A quick loss of all sense of agreement with the Holy Spirit would follow; and this not one of us can afford. Therefore, one manifestation of the Spirit in us must be the absence of many things that are esteemed necessary to make life beautiful or attractive.
It is a poor estimate of life to treat it as if it needed any mortal touch, or the flimsy adornment of gold, silver, or precious stones, draperies, architecture, or furnishing to make it attractive! These are the things that, misapplied, hide, detract from, blot, and cramp it so that it has never had a fair chance to reveal itself in the realm of humanity. It is our privilege, under the precious truths that are ours, to reduce to the smallest proportions all this lumber by which life has been concealed, and so be able to make men say: The life is manifested, and we have seen it. That which was from the beginning, of the Word of Life, we have seen with our eyes, we have looked upon, and our hands have handled,—we know that it is real.
Not that to do this we must go to the extreme of destroying the beautiful accumulations of former years, nor must any be led in the disposition of them by other convictions than those that the Spirit of God shall bring home to his own heart out of the Word; but it is clearly appropriate to the times when the end of all perishable things is at hand, and since money may, by consecration, be transmuted into the bread of life for starving souls, that every dollar should be held as sacred. Any adornment which we indulge should be of the beauty of holiness.
In the use of all resources we are shut up to the example of Jesus, and in the indulgence of the natural craving for loveliness, to the one chance of a symmetrical character such as will reveal the Spirit within in all its attractive drawing, uplifting beauty, in spite of meager surroundings and plainness in dress.
As to this we have no choice. Every beautiful thing for us must come by that manifestation of the Spirit which is given for our profit. And it is especially the mission of Seventh-day Adventists to make a consecrated life beautiful in the eyes of a beauty-loving world. The men and women of the world must be constrained to say, "I wish I were like that man." "0, that I were like that woman, and that my home had in it the sweetness and beauty, the fragrant atmosphere, that fills that Seventh-day Adventist home!" Your home must be made so attractive because of the manifestation of the Spirit that is in it, because of the beauty of love and faith, because of the aroma of heaven, that it will hold the children and youth against all the show and glitter of a vain world.
This must be done. It is our only resource in preserving the children against the day of the Lord. We must be able to manifest that spirit that is so sweet, so beautiful, so true, so pure, so attractive, as to cause the children to prefer the simple Christ-life with us to anything that the world can offer.
This can be done. I saw the effect of such a life upon a seventeen-year-old boy,—a lover of everything that was beautiful. He was left to spend one critical winter with a lady who had passed seventy years, and in the midst of a large circle of young people who would naturally have attracted him. The young people liked his society. The invitations to go among them were constant, but seemed to have no effect. He and his aged companion spent the day in the carriage, and the evening after the quiet fashion which distinguished the home of a consecrated lover of God for whom the world of sin had lost every attraction. Of all the invitations that came to him from those who thought he must, of course, wish for some agreeable change, he never accepted one. One day a young lady said to him, "Why do you not come to any of our parties? You stay all the time with that old lady; you are a very queer boy." This young lady thought his reply was too good to keep, and told it abroad, so that it passed into the social history of her "set." "If you want me, you must make yourself more attractive than Mrs. __ ." This old lady of more than seventy years—wrinkled, not strong, whose conversation was in heaven—had that manifestation of the Spirit, which is beauty, to such fulness as made her able to hold in her home that spirited seventeen-year-old boy in spite of all that a city full of attractions could bring to bear to draw him away. This has been to me a revelation of what a woman's life may be in any home.
We must take on years,—or, according to the common expression, "grow old." Years will make their mark upon all faces. We may be called to wear wrinkles; but where the manifestation of the Spirit of God is in its fulness of life, there is always beauty. If we must wear wrinkles, at least let them be glorified wrinkles.
Nothing can be more beautiful than a face written all over with the handwriting of consecration, telling the story of love, of harmony with principle, with truth, with purity; and it is the privilege of every mother in every home, with every year that steals over her, and every mark of time and experience, to reveal more and more of this manifestation of the Spirit. It is her privilege to be filled with God, so that the whole machinery of her body shall in every play of muscle and bone and sinew move in harmony with His life, and be lifted out of invalidism into health. Then, although she may be weak in herself, may have but little native loveliness, may have inherited many defects of character, yet her life will become strong and beautiful, able to hold her children against an evil world for God and His kingdom.
It is to this end that God has called the women of this day, and with every call of God comes proportionate ability. If we do not hold our children, it is not because God has failed us, but because we have failed God.
God has set you to help Him in His work that you may be led to see how you need Him in your work. And 0, how every mother needs every possible manifestation of the Spirit! Often the entire influence of the father is antagonistic to her and all that she would do. Then comes the tug of faith.
The Father and His Boy
In the life of every boy there comes a time when he finds out that he is not growing up to be a woman. Up to a certain point, his mother is more to him than any other being; but the awakening of the masculine sense brings him into special need of a father, and if the father and mother are not in agreement, there must be questioning in his mind as to what is right, and a crisis becomes imminent which must be passed safely, or all is lost. Then to every mother comes the time of opportunity commensurate with her need, as well as a crisis in the life of both father and boy, which may be safely passed if only the mother will be true.
One man came to ask me for help. He had suddenly discovered with alarm that his boy, fourteen years old, was growing up to be another just such a failure as he had long known himself to be, and he came to ask me to talk with the mother and help her to keep hold of him.
"What have you been doing for your boy yourself?" I asked. "You would certainly wish him to be like you."
"My boy like me!" he exclaimed, "My boy such a man as I am! I would rather see him dead tomorrow."
"And how do you expect to prevent it?" I asked; "for he is just as nearly like you as a boy of fourteen can be like a man of your age."
"Prevent it!" he said, "I don't expect to prevent it. I expect my wife to do that; that is -what I got her for. And if my wife, with the advice that she can get, can't make a better man out of my boy than I ever professed to be, she had no business to be my wife."
Then with a glad conviction of a truth both awful and grand, I said:—
"Well sir, your wife can do it if she will. She can be made strong enough by the Spirit of God to overcome the influence of even a man like you. That little pale, delicate woman --just think of it! I will, however, be glad to say to her that if she will link herself to God so that He shall work through her, she can take that boy of )ours and make him the kind of man that you want him to be in spite of your evil example. But shall I tell you where she must begin? She must begin by breaking your influence upon him. She must teach him that in so far as he finds and follows the heavenly model of manhood to which you wish him to attain, he must discount that which his father is. Is that what you wish above all things, so that you would rather see your boy die than that it should fail? Would you like to have him grow up, by his virtues, his strength, his purity, in every trait and attribute by which he becomes a true man to condemn all that his father is?
That is what your boy will have to do: that is what your wife will have to do; what God will have to do, if He fulfils your expectations in your son. The mother can do it, if she will be a true laborer together with God; and I will help her all I can, and pray for her success; but what about you?"
Then his heart broke, and he cried out:—
"O, I must yield to God. I did not intend to give up; at least not now; but I must. Pray for me. I want my boy saved, and I cannot have him saved in that way."
And we prayed, and that proud, wicked man of the world humbled himself before God for the sake of the fatherhood within him, and went home to help his wife and God to make a good man out of his boy; not by stress of personal influence, but by the manifestation of the Spirit in him. But I have always insisted that if he had stood out to the last, his wife could have been used of God alone for the same end.
Just as truly as God could produce the child Jesus without a human father, so can He, in answer to the same consecration that Mary made when she said, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to Thy word," in spite of any human father, bring forth the child of prayer and faith into newness of life in Christ.
O that every mother could understand the possibilities folded up in this manifestation of the Spirit! And that our mothers may come to this knowledge, must be the first object of our woman-ministry,
(End of Series)
