Chapter 76—A Letter
Dear Brother O,
I have received your letter, and need not express to you the sadness
of my heart at the very sudden turn you have recently taken. As I
review your past history I call to mind your experience in Colorado,
your reflections while upon that rock where descent seemed impossible,
and your subsequent partial recovery to the faith, your temptations
through false and ambitious hopes to become greater away from our
people than with them, your disappointment, your praiseworthy course
of remaining silent, the prayers and sympathies of God’s people that
were ascending to heaven in your behalf, and my constant pleadings:
“Do not let him alone, but make efforts to save him. He is ensnared;
he has lost his hold upon God.”
I remember the last time I rode out with your wife before she died.
Her burden was for you and her children. She said she trembled for
the future because of her children and the skepticism of her husband.
“If I should die,” she said, “and he should give up the faith and lead my
children to give up the Sabbath, how terrible it would be after he has
received so great light and so many evidences! For this reason I have
clung to life. He has not that deep, inwrought work in the soul that
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will anchor him when temptations come. O Sister White, it is for the
souls of my husband and children that I have clung to life. And I want
to tell you right here that I am heartily sorry that I did not receive in a
different spirit the testimony given me and my husband. I see now that
the message to us was just what we needed; and had we accepted it, it
would have placed us both in a better, far better, position spiritually
than we have been in for some time. We were both proud in spirit, and
since that time I have felt like shunning you; for I thought you had
no faith or confidence in us. But during the last few months this has
all disappeared, and I have felt the same confidence, the same close
sympathy and love for you that I have had in my past life; but I know
my husband does not feel thus, and it is of but little use for me to talk
these things over with him. I am too weak to set matters before him
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