Alice Cross Wins Her Husband to Christ
AMONG the strongly marked characters of the heroic age of English Methodism, was a comely farmer's wife named Alice Cross. After her conversion, her quiet, sober husband refused for a season to obey the truth. She strove hard to win him to Christ. When leaving home for the Wesleyan meeting, she would pause at the door, with her straw hat in one hand, and the other on the door-latch, while she said: "John Cross, wilt thou go to Heaven with me? If thou wilt not, I am determined not to go to hell with thee." These blunt sentences, had they been spoken in an acrid tone, might have wrought more powerfully on John's temper than on his conscience. But being the utterance of an earnest woman, the expression of profound conviction, the voice of a soul full of tenderness and of the spirit of heaven, they were finally effectual, and John Cross sought to go to Heaven with his devoted wife. If every Christian wife were as earnest as Alice Cross, there would be few homes with one of its heads traveling toward Heaven and the other toward perdition. Her spirit, not her peculiar method, cannot be too highly commended, or too faithfully emulated by Christian wives.—Zion's Herald.