“I’m not going,” said Ruth Barlow. “I know just how it will be. We’ll get together about the time we ought to go to bed, and then there’ll be joking with no point, and talking to no purpose; neither wit nor wisdom will be manifested. About ten or eleven o’clock refreshments will be served,—cake and ice-cream, fruit, etc. Then there’ll be some more chaff, and in the ‘wee sma’ hours we’ll go home, deluded for the moment with the belief that we have had a good time.”
“O, you’ll go all right when the time comes!” said Cousin Arthur.
Ruth thought she would not go, but she did; for, at the very last hour before the party, a temptation rose she did not wish to resist, for Mr. Alston was to be there, and Ruth had long desired to meet him. She had heard of his devotion to Christ, of his purpose to be a missionary to some foreign field, and, tho Ruth was a vacillating Christian, with high ideals and wavering practise, she admired a strong, determined Christian, and thought Mr. Alston was of this very character.
Of course it was just as Ruth had said, for it was really nine o’clock before the company assembled, and it was evident that they had come together for the glory and pleasure of self, rather than to glorify God. One need not judge thus because they were merry. The glory of God is the glory of His creatures. As a noble son honors his father, and his father’s honor shines out in the honor of his son, so does the glory of God reveal itself in the nobility of His creatures.
But somehow, these very people, who seemed so simple and natural in their homes, seemed less natural and dignified here. They laughed loud and harshly at jests that seemed trivial and pointless. Tho they were all intelligent young people, no topic of conversation was started but the most commonplace and trivial. Instead of that spontaneous outflow of thought that makes real fellowship, there was a jerky kind of conversation, consisting in the saying of smart things, and one could realize that there was an effort of mind to think of what must next be said or done. Uncomfortable pauses came that had to be filled up with chaff. And Ruth thought to herself, “How soon we come to the end of each other in these party gatherings!” Yet Ruth herself was no better than the rest. Her eyes shone with unnatural light, and her actions were excited, her words frivolous and light.
Some one proposed music, and all grasped at this diversion as a relief from the commonplace, but, alas! the heavenly muse was degraded in the songs they sang, and no higher thought was found than before.
Think of young men and women, well-read and intelligent, and most of them professing to be Christians, singing:—
“The man that has plenty of good peanuts,
And giveth his neighbor none,
He can’t have any of my peanuts,
When his peanuts are gone.”
“There was a man in our town,
And he was wondrous wise;
He jumped into a bramble bush
And scratched out both his eyes.
And when he saw his eyes were out,
He jumped with might and main
Into another bramble bush,
And scratched, and scratched, and scratched, and scratched,
And scratched, and scratched, and scratched, and scratched,
Them in again.”
Pliable, the pair to one another, but in fear and ...
A sudden shadow fell in Ruth’s face as this song was sung.
“What’s the matter, Ruth?” said one. “Have you got the blues?”
“Well, I don’t see why people want to set such words to a religious tune. It seems sacrilegious to sing such words to sacred music.”
For the rest of the evening Ruth said but little. The old sense of disappointment that she had experienced again and again, came creeping upon her.
The atmosphere of the party did not seem of the order to bring out precious thoughts in. Tho so many were professing Christians, no word was spoken of Him who is altogether lovely. Those, who might have had a heavenly sitting together, had only an earthly sitting together after all.
Ruth was disappointed in Mr. Alston too. Had he not promised to make dark Africa his field of labor? and had she not revered him as a young man of noble, self-sacrificing spirit, and hoped his influence would bring Babylon into peace and beauty? But he was as trivial as the others, for it was in the atmosphere. And he was not less disappointed in Ruth; for he had thought her a noble girl, and indeed had even taken his cue from her in regard to his actions of that evening.
As there was no feast of reason or flow of soul, the lack had to be supplied with more earthly material, and refreshments were brought in. At a late hour the company ate ice-cream and cake, fruit, etc.
Ruth could not help but notice how the light had left the countenance. Strange thoughts passed through her mind in a panoramic way. She had been reading Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and now she thought of Satan at the council, suddenly turned into the likeness of the medium he had used for the fall of Adam and Eve:—
“His visage drawn he felt to sharp and spare;
His arms clung to his ribs, his legs entwining each other,
Till supplanted down he fell, a monstrous serpent.
. . . A greater power now ruled him,
Punished in the shape he sinned,
According to his doom.”
And Ruth wondered if they too were not changed into the image of the temptation, lowering to what they had stooped to. She wondered how Adam and Eve had felt when they had sinned and looked into each other’s eyes when first they knew they had lost their robe of light. What was there now between these friends of hers and herself? Was the disappointment on both sides? Was not the unsatisfied longing in other hearts, and all this far below what they had thought of her, and below what she had thought of them?
“Ruth, come, what are you thinking of?” said one to her.
“I was thinking,” said Ruth slowly, “of how we all lose our gardens of Eden.”
“Well, how?” said the questioner.
“O, just by falling in little things, and finding all of a sudden that the glory is gone, and an angel stands with a flaming sword, barring us out of our lost innocence!”
“Well, I shall be barred out of my boarding-house,” said one gentleman, “if I don’t go home.”
So the party broke up with a laugh, and the revelers separated.
Ruth’s head and heart were both aching, but had ached before on similar occasions. She lay down to sleep, but neither her thoughts nor her late supper were conducive to sleep.
What went through her mind?—Passages of Scripture that condemned her, and condemnation is not best for health. She knew she had dishonored God. Almost horrified, she thought of those who were at the party, and of her profession. There were several who did not know, as she did, that the end of all things was at hand, when the apostle exhorts “to be sober and watch unto prayer;” when he asks, “What manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness,” “looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.” And she wondered what thoughts had passed through their minds, and what would be the result of her influence upon them.
