It was during a mission in a town that one Sunday afternoon a man named Sherlock came into our meeting. He was quite a stranger to such meetings, and to the knowledge of the Gospel, and that afternoon he was awakened and greatly interested. At the tea table, after he went home, he was unusually quiet. His wife noticed it and asked him what was the matter. He said he would tell her afterward. There was a boarder at the table, and he did not wish to say anything before him.
A short time after he asked his wife and the boarder if they would come to the evening meeting. His wife, a very shrewd woman, at once surmised what was the matter. She said, “No! On no account will I go. I don’t believe in such things.” The boarder consented to go with him.
At the close of the first meeting we had an after meeting. The boarder went home, but the husband stayed. As soon as the boarder arrived the wife asked, “Where is my husband?”
The boarder answered, “They are talking to him.”
To think of her husband being talked to in that way made her very angry, and she was quite in a fever to say to him what she meant to say to him on his return. In a short time, the husband came home rejoicing, and before his wife had time to say anything, he said, “Now, Polly, I am tonight as I have never been before.”
“And what’s ado with you,” she said.
“Oh! Polly, I’m washed in the blood of the Lamb; that’s what is ado with me!”
She scolded and railed on him into the middle of the night, but in the enjoyment of such peace with God he never resented it. From her point of view it was a most serious thing, and she determined she would knock all this out of him before a week passed. They had been married some time, and she knew all his likes and dislikes, so she made up her mind that she would give him day by day exactly what he did not like.
On Monday, his meals were not prepared as she knew he liked them; but he said nothing. The next day there was something more objectionable, and she then hoped he would lose his temper, and scold her as he sometimes had done, and then she would surely go for him; but day after day her wonder grew, as he never uttered a cross word.
It was nearing the end of the week when she gave him something for dinner that he had a special dislike to. She fully expected he would be very cross, but to her amazement, he said nothing. He took very little, and then went off to work, singing,
“In the sweet by-and-by,
We shall meet on that beautiful shore.
She stood on the doorstep and looked after him, and said to herself, “There is certainly something wonderful in all this. If he asks me to go to those meetings again I will go.”
She did not have long to wait; he asked her again, and she went with him, and within the week she was saved―a rejoicing believer.
The paralytic man in Matthew 9. That the people might know that the Son of Man had power on earth to forgive sins, rose up and walked. It was the walk of her husband that won his wife. He walked in the joy of a new life, born again by the Word and Spirit of God.
On the next Sunday afternoon, they both gave their testimony, and such a testimony. Praise God!
J. S.