| The Every Day of Life |
Chapter 18 |
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No one naturally looks upon such a household as in any peculiar danger. The neighbors do not have special prayer requested for it in the church. Friends do not feel distressed about its condition. Yet there is no doubt that insidious moral dangers do lurk in such an experience of unbroken prosperity.
Oftentimes it is true that God has less and less welcome in such a home. The fires burn low and then go out upon the altar. The voice of prayer dies out of the home. Christ is lost out of the household life. And beneath the bright earthly prosperity the angels see spiritual death.
The same is true of individual life. Unbroken worldly prosperity is the bane of spiritual good. For one thing, it hinders growth in knowledge and experience. There are truths that can be learned better in darkness than in light. We should never see the stars if there were no night to blot out for the time the glare of the day. And there are truths in the Bible, which are perhaps never learned in the brightness of human joy. There are divine promises, which by their very nature are invisible in the noonday of gladness, hiding away like stars in the light, and revealing themselves only when it grows dark around us. The deeper, richer meaning of many a word of Scripture is learned only amid life’s painful changes.
There are also developments in spiritual growth, which cannot come in time of unbroken prosperity. The artist was trying to improve on a dead mother’s picture. But the son said, “No; don’t take out the lines; just leave them, every one. It wouldn’t be my mother if all the lines were gone.”
It was well enough, he said, for young people who had never known a care to have faces free from wrinkles; but when one has lived seventy years of love and service and self-forgetfulness, it would be like trying to cover up the tracks of one’s realest life to take out the marks. The very beauty of that old face was in the wrinkles and the lines, which told of what her brave heart, and strong hands had done for love’s sake.There is a blessing in such a life. But in the life of ease and luxury, which many of us experience, especially in woman’s lives, there hide sore perils.
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