p. 130 | The Wrong Cross by Mrs. Chaplin

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 8, 1872

The Wrong Cross.

By Mrs. Chaplin

The expression, “take up your cross,” means, in the cant of some communities, to “talk in meeting;” and the persons whose persistent volubility at every meeting is an annoyance, often talk of “taking up their cross,” when by their course they only lay a cross on other people.

There was once a good lady, far up among the hills of New England, who felt herself competent to reprove, rebuke, admonish, and comfort; and so faithfully did she fulfill her imaginary mission that she and the minister had it all about their own way at the conference meetings. By the time the opening services were over, and she had talked, and a few hymns had been sung, it was time to go home. The brethren had to possess their souls in patience.

Our good sister was a widow, with broad lands and large flocks and herds, and not a little money in the bank. In the lifetime of her husband, who was not a professor of religion, she had really flattered herself that she desired to accomplish great things in the church and in the world, but was crippled in her work by the honest old farmer’s parsimony. But so deceitful is human nature, that when the estates became her own and there was none to check or to advise her, she at once curtailed all her charities, giving, as an excuse, that she was “a widow now, with no husband to work or to manage for her.”

But although sister Crane ceased giving, she did not cease talking; indeed, her volubility increased by the new field opened before her in her lonely lot. She took up “her cross” oftener and carried it longer than ever before. She invariably began her remarks by repeating the solemn statement concerning those who do not take up their cross and follow Christ, adding, “I feel that if I would be his disciple I must take up this cross.”

Sister Crane could do a great deal of work, for she was a wonderful manager; but she was not quite equal to managing two farms, a grist-mill, and a saw-mill. So, hard as it seemed to pay out ready money, she was obliged to hire a farmer; and very soon, a good, humble man, from another town, was installed, with his efficient wife and four bright boys, in the old cottage, a few rods from the large farm-house.

This farmer was a sensible, Christian man, but his usefulness in prayer-meetings and Sunday-schools was not a little hindered by a painful infirmity. He had an impediment in his speech, and when he tried to talk in presence of strangers, he became so nervous as to stutter, till his exhortations sounded as if delivered in an unknown tongue.

Being a stranger in the place, he was wholly ignorant of his new employer’s love for money and the tightness with which she drew her purse-strings. He knew her wealth, and looked on her as the chief pillar of this rather feeble church. Now to this good man, speaking in meeting, or, as he called it, “giving in his testimony,” was, indeed, a heavy cross. It excited his nerves and gave him a painful consciousness of making himself and his subject ludicrous by his efforts to get out his words.

Night after night he listened to Mrs. Crane as she talked of this heavy cross she was lifting and bearing after the Master, and he concluded at length that she was a timid, gracious soul, urging herself to a sacrifice which God did not require of her. And ere long, he got courage to set her right on the subject. One night, after her usual statement of the conflict between her soul and the adversary, in which he sought with diabolical temptations to smuggle her, but in which she always outwitted him, the humble man rose, and, as well as he could, sought to comfort her.

“I th-think,” he said, “the d-dear sister is wri-writing bitter things against herself, and lay-laying unjust bur-burdens on her s-soul. She’s g-got hold of the wr-wrong cross. She’s taken up mine in p-place of her own. I must crucify my-m-my p-pride by showing this th-thorn in my f-flesh. She must do it by gi-giving, and giving, and gi-giving, till the cross makes her sh-shoulders ache. That’s the cr-cross for her; but, oh, bearing my tes-testimony before a g-gainsaying world, that’s the cross that I’m tr-trying to c-carry up the hill, and that al-almost c-crushes me with its w-weight. T-take heart, sister; sh-shoulder up y-your own b-burden; it’s better fi-fitted to your sh-shoulder than mine is, and it’ll be easier borne and s-sooner b-blest.”

The innocent man only meant to say that her duty was to give of her wealth to the Lord; but that he, being poor, and having nothing else to give, must render the offering of his lips, however painful the effort might be to his pride. But the way he put it fell in so exactly with the ideas of the people that some were seen to smile, and others dropped their heads that they might not be seen to smile.

Sister Crane, good woman that she was, took the suggestion so innocently given. She went home asking herself, if, after all, it was a real cross for her to make herself a leader in the social meetings; and if she might not, perhaps, have been mistaken in the department of labor to which she had so nearly confined her efforts. She looked over her land, and herds, and flocks, and reckoned up their value; and then she looked around in vain for the being who needed them when she should be called to give account of her stewardship.

The truth her poor hired farmer so unwittingly stammered out awoke her from her delusion, and showed her that casting in of her abundance to the treasury of the Lord was her real cross—the one which Christ required her to take up and bear after him—and that the exercise which she in false humility had called her “cross,” had really been fostering her pride. Thenceforth she talked less and gave more; refrained from exhorting others; examined her own heart, and humbled herself before Him from whom she had withheld the treasures of which he had made her the steward. She laid down the wrong cross and took up the right one and carried it, until, day by day, it grew lighter, and soon it became a blessing to herself and others.—Mrs. CHAPLIN, in Watchman and Reflector.