A YOUNG lady was remarkable for her beauty and her winning manners. She though a child of many prayers, finding herself admired and flattered, longed to break loose from parental restraint, and to rush into the false glare of worldly pleasure. Hitherto she had been held back from such scenes by the entreaties of her mother. But she was nearing womanhood, and her heart rebelled against what she termed “religious captivity:” and nothing short of a father’s command could now restrain her. Home was made as agreeable as possible, and she was loved, with all her faults, with a love which is almost fearful to bestow on mortals. But still her heart asked for the ballroom, the card party, and the theater; and she cried, “I wish I could be happy for one night!”
Her father was laid upon a sick bed, unconsciously moaning in his pain. One night, while the anxious mother watched beside him, she, who should have shared her weariness and smoothed her sufferer’s pillow, stole, thinly dressed, from her home, and passed the hours until gray morning in a scene of unhallowed revelry. O! what a sight for angels to behold—the mother weeping, praying, and ministering beside the sick bed of him who had so tenderly loved his children; while the daughter, young and strong to perform the work of love, was “killing time” in the giddy whirl of the midnight dance; mingling with those whose characters shut them out from her father’s fireside, and hearing things all new to one taught by a praying mother.
She wanted to be happy, and for one night she was happy!
But joy fled with the first beam of day; and she crept like a thief, half-clad, to her home; and shivering to her very heart, sought her bed. Two weeks from that day she left that bed for her coffin! Poor beauty 1 She had been often reproved, but hardened her heart, and now sudden destruction had come upon her. Parents, pastor, Sabbath schoolteacher, had labored for her soul; while she, vain child, made a mock at sin. When her lovely form was stretched in restless agony on her couch, she moaned pitifully in her wanderings, “O, if I had only known this;” O! if I could have seen it before “Is it possible, is it possible that I am numbered with the dead! Mother, mother, pray for me!”
O! then she, who used to elude her pastor and friend, lest he might speak of her soul, called his name wildly throughout the long night, and when he came, begged piteously that he would not leave her.
Thus she died, and that face, all too lovely for the grave, seems to speak from the coffin’s pillow a warning to those children of praying parents who will seek their portion below. That sweet face had ensnared her soul, and she had preferred the flattery of the trifler to the love of God.
The writer, when ministering beside the poor sufferer, as those large, earnest eyes were raised pleadingly to physician and pastor, and every remark and every prayer only received the one answer, “O! if I had only known this!” felt that it is indeed a fearful thing for the child of a Christian home, the scholar of a Sabbath school, to break loose from such heavenly restraint, and madly choose vanity as her portion. “She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.”
C. T.