Drunkards' Wives by Anvil

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, Cal. · Feb 9, 1882

Drunkards' Wives.

By Anvil

If there be a lonely woman amid the multitude of lone and sorrowful women more to be pitied than another, I think that it is a wife looking upon the one she has promised to honor, lying upon the bed with his hat and boots on. Her comforter who swore at her as long as he could speak at all. Her protector, utterly unable to brush a fly from his face. Her companion, lying in the stupor of death, with none of its solemn dignity. As he is entirely unconscious, I wonder if she never employs the slowly passing moments in taking down her old idol, her ideal, from its place in her memory, and comparing it with the broken and defaced image before her. Of all poor, broken idols, scattered into fragments for the divine patience of womanhood to gather together and cement with tears, such a ruin as this seems the most impossible to mold anew into any form of comeliness. And if there is a commandment seemingly impossible to obey, it is for a woman to love a man of whom she is in deadly fear, obey a man who can't speak his commands intelligently.

The theory of recognizing our friends in a future world is a beautiful one, and worthy of much thought, but I think it is commendable to try to keep them in a condition to recognize us in this world, try to keep a man while he is alive so he will know his wife and children, and not, as often occurs, turn them out into the storm of a winter midnight, or murder them in his frenzy.—Anvil.