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Testimonies for the Church Volume 1
strife, and censure. Do you account these as manly and noble? as
an exhibition of the sterner virtues of your sex? However you may
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consider them, God looks upon them with displeasure and marks them
in His book. Angels flee from the dwelling where words of discord
are exchanged, where gratitude is almost a stranger to the heart, and
censure leaps like black balls to the lips, spotting the garments, defiling
the Christian character.
When you married your wife, she loved you. She was extremely
sensitive, yet with painstaking on your part, and fortitude on hers, her
health need not have been what it is. But your stern coldness made you
like an iceberg, freezing up the channel of love and affection. Your
censure and faultfinding has been like desolating hail to a sensitive
plant. It has chilled and nearly destroyed the life of the plant. Your love
of the world is eating out the good traits of your character. Your wife is
of a different turn and more generous. But when she has, even in small
matters, exercised her generous instincts, you have felt a drawback in
your feelings and have censured her. You indulge a close and grudging
spirit. You make your wife feel that she is a tax, a burden, and that
she has no right to exercise her generosity at your expense. All these
things are of such a discouraging nature that she feels hopeless and
helpless, and has not stamina to bear up against it, but bends to the
force of the blast. Her disease is pain of the nerves. Were her married
life agreeable, she would possess a good degree of health. But all
through your married life the demon has been a guest in your family
to exult over your misery.
Disappointed hopes have made you both completely wretched.
You will have no reward for your suffering, for you have caused it
yourselves. Your own words have been like deadly poison upon nerve
and brain, upon bone and muscle. You reap that which you sow. You
do not appreciate the feelings and sufferings of each other. God is
displeased with the hard, unfeeling, world-loving spirit you possess.
Brother C, the love of money is the root of all evil. You have loved
money, loved the world; you have looked at the illness of your wife
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as a severe, a terrible, tax, not realizing that it is your fault in a great
measure that she is sick. You have not the elements of a contented
spirit. You dwell upon your troubles; imaginary want and poverty far
ahead stare you in the face; you feel afflicted, distressed, agonized;
your brain seems on fire, your spirits depressed. You do not cherish