Christian Spouse’s Behavior
35
Your husband has rights; your children have rights; and these must
not be ignored by you. Whether you have one talent or three or five,
God has given you your work. Parents are fearfully neglectful of their
home duties. They do not meet the Bible standard. But to those who
forsake their homes, their companions, and children, God will not
entrust the work of saving souls, for they have proved unfaithful to
their holy vows. They have proved unfaithful to sacred responsibilities.
God will not entrust to them eternal riches....
Letters have come from mothers, relating their trials at home and
asking my counsel. One of these cases will serve to represent many.
The husband and father is not a believer, and everything is made hard
for the mother in the training of her children. The husband is a profane
man, vulgar and abusive in his language to herself, and he teaches the
children to disregard her authority. When she is trying to pray with
them he will come in and make all the noise he can, and break out
into cursing God and heaping vile epithets upon the Bible. She is so
discouraged that life is a burden to her. What good can she do? What
benefit is it to her children for her to remain at home? She has felt an
earnest desire to do some work in the Lord’s vineyard, and has thought
that it might be best to leave her family, rather than to remain while
the husband and father is constantly teaching the children to disrespect
and disobey her.
In such cases my advice would be, Mothers, whatever trials you
may be called to endure through poverty, through wounds and bruises
of the soul, from the harsh, overbearing assumption of the husband and
father, do not leave your children; do not give them up to the influence
of a godless father. Your work is to counteract the work of the father,
who is apparently under the control of Satan.—
Letter 28, 1890
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[44]
Counsel to the Wife of an Unbelieving Husband—We receive
many letters soliciting advice. One mother says her husband is an
unbeliever. She has children, but they are taught by the father to
disrespect the mother. She is deeply burdened for her children. She
does not know what course she can pursue. She then expresses her
anxiety to do something in the cause of God, and inquires if I think
she has a duty to leave her family, if she is convinced she can do no
good to them.
I would answer: My sister, I cannot see how you could be clear
before the Lord and leave your husband and your children. I cannot