MY MOTHER’S GOD

I suppose there are still such husbands in the world, but I am wondering if there are any more women like mother. Maybe she would be called a pill now. Looking back, the methods she used to restore father’s soul do seem drastic. She loved him with a shrewd tenderness; but let him break his traveling gait toward Heaven and she was the most adroit persecutor of the damned and fallen I have ever known. She kept a good little house not more than one short prayer path from the gates of Heaven. Everything in it was clean, white where it should be white, glistening where it should shine. If by chance an unworthy person crossed her threshold, he brought his former virtues with him and practiced them. She demanded at least a noble deceit of goodness.

This was the kind of father I had, and this was my mother. I was a sort of human hybrid composed of these two natures. Nothing could cure me of a dangerous likeness to father. I was closer kin to him in mind and spirit. I may have inherited some invincible stamina from mother, a capacity for standards and principles. My notion is that father merely begot me, and that mother continued to exercise the same functions to me morally that she did physically before I was born. She produced qualities of character in me which went far toward determining my woman’s life afterwards. She had Moses’ gift for guiding me and controlling the rabble in me.

But I have never reached the promised land. Neither did the children of Israel under Moses. No one does. Your Moses is too much of a disciplinarian. Looking back now at my wilderness, it seems to me if I make the last stretch it will be upon the wings of a spirit inherited from father. But I shall never make it now. I shall pass like other people who have been anxious to be good all their lives--barely in sight of that fair and happy land. I have been encompassed about by too great a cloud of witnesses to just righteousness. The burden of being obedient to mother’s God, and later on to the God of a still more drastic saint, has wearied me. I am too tired now to shout and be happy. I shall probably die up here in a high place, barely in sight of the promised land as usual.

I have often wondered how real saints feel about this. I know how they talk, but do they in their secret hearts as humans sometimes regret the hard and narrow way? Isn’t there something unsatisfied in them to the last? Have they been entirely gratified? Can one ever have in this world the peace promised? Maybe we do at the last moment. I am expecting it then. But one moment, with your breath already leaving you, is a short time to enjoy what you have spent a lifetime to win.

As near as I can make out, we cannot obey the Scriptures and be as much like the Lord as we claim to be. There is too much submission, too much bondage to sacrifice. We do not seem to have arrived yet at that almighty mental poise where we can punish as He does. Vengeance is still His. Our minds have dropped a stitch somewhere between the Ten Commandments and that beatitude which reads: ‘Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you, for my sake, ... for great is your reward in heaven.’

We are short on giving out these rewards. Maybe we are still so vicious it would not be safe to trust us with administering justice one to another according to the Lord’s way. We must go to a court and get balled up with an attorney to obtain our rights, and maybe have the decision go against us. Or we must go to a church conference and get balled up with the presiding elder and get very little satisfaction there for our wrongs compared to the way we could satisfy ourselves if it were not for sitting down dutifully and being persecuted for righteousness’ sake. Maybe we should go on turning the other cheek a while longer; but my experience has been that there is very little gratification of the vanity of the human soul in turning the other cheek, or giving a man your coat also because he took your cloak. It leaves you naked, cold, and bruised in the face, and the other fellow strutting around bragging at your expense. Compare that with the way the Lord punishes evildoers and you get an inkling of what I mean--and the chief reason why I am writing this history. My mind has misled me frequently through the Scriptures.