p. 75 | Mutual Forbearance by Dr. Boardman

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 22, 1858

Mutual Forbearance.

By Dr. Boardman

THAT house will be kept in a turmoil where there is no tolerance of each other's errors, no lenity shown to failings, no meek submission to injuries, no soft answers to turn away wrath. If you lay a single stick of wood upon the andirons and apply fire to it, it will go out; put on another stick and they will burn; add half a dozen and you will have a grand conflagration. There are other fires subject to the same conditions. If one member of a family gets into a passion, and is let alone, he will cool down, and possibly be ashamed and repent. But oppose temper to temper; pile on the fuel; draw in others of the group, and let one harsh answer be followed by another, and there will soon be a blaze which will enwrap them all in its lurid splendors. The venerable Phillip Henry understood this well, and when his son Matthew, the Commentator, was married, he sent these lines to the wedded pair:

"Love one another, pray oft together; and see You never both together angry be; If one speak fire, t'other with water come; Is one provoked? be t'other soft and dumb."

So thought the excellent Bishop Cowper, of whom this remarkable anecdote is related: "The wife of this good man was afraid he would injure his health by close confinement. So, one day, like a kind-hearted, officious wife, she went into his library in his absence, and gathering up all the manuscript notes he had been eight years collecting for his dictionary, threw them into the fire. When he came home she told him what she had done. Assured of the kind motive which had prompted her to this act of vandalism his only reply to her was, 'Woman, thou hast put me to eight years study more.'"

This, it must be confessed, is carrying meekness about as far as flesh and blood can ordinarily be expected to go. But even a less measure of this quality would be found a great sedative to those ebullitions of passion which ruffle the serenity of households. Allied with a sound judgment, and with true affection, it would aim at shutting out from the circle such topics of conversation as were known to produce an irritating effect upon any of the group.

The same spirit would constrain a family from pushing a question, on which they differed, to the point of a peremptory decision. It would admonish them when the ice was beginning to quiver and crackle, and show them where they must stop, unless they meant to break through. There are too many who refuse to see, or at least to heed these indications, and whom nothing will arrest but an actual plunge into the wintry grave. They will insist upon their point with such pertinacity as to bring down at length that terrific "You shall," or "You shall not," which in conjugal life is as freezing as a bath in December. Happy are those families where discussions never reach this crisis. It is said that in the business meetings of that exemplary Christian society, the "Friends," there is no voting. The clerk gathers the views of the members from their observations, and frames a corresponding minute, which, unless excepted to, stands, without a vote, as the act of the body. This is a safe principle for households. The principles of those who wear the purple can usually be got at without a vote; and voting sometimes creates a difference of feeling, where there was simply a diversity of sentiment.