WOMAN'S PATIENCE | AdventAI

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 12, 1860

WOMAN'S PATIENCE.

It is pre-eminently in woman that this virtue of patience is exemplified, as indeed her sphere gives more occasion for the passive virtues than for active and noisy heroism. Often it is given to her to suffer, where it is given to man to toil; and too often does woman suffer without due sympathy from that sterner nature whose very toil she sweetens with her gentle assiduities. The noblest pages of heroism and martyrdom are unwritten, save in God's book of remembrance; for who could write the patience of a wife's devotion, of a mother's love, in seeking salvation for her house? Where there is one Miriam to lead the song of the exultant host, there are a thousand Marys living in obscurity, pondering in their hearts the promised redemption, and through ignominy, and disappointment, and delay, and sorrow piercing like a sword, still magnifying the Lord, and waiting for salvation, beside the cross and at the door of the sepulcher. Where there is one Deborah to arouse the tribes to battle with her war-chants, there are a thousand Hannahs, who, with silent but agonizing prayer, wait upon God, and who bring their Samuels to his altar as the sacrifice of love, and faith, and hope. The mother of the great Augustine, who for fifteen hundred years has so largely molded the creed of the church, the devout Monica, had in her own household the most bitter trials. Her husband, a proud and sensual Pagan, hating the cross, and hating her for having embraced the cross, would not only annoy her by all manner of heathen orgies in the house, but being a man of most violent temper, would turn upon her the fury of his passion. Especially did he seek to thwart her religious influence over their son. He brought up Augustine in pagan schools, and even allowed him in the vices of the times. But though all this Monica was so gentle, so kind, so meek, so patient, so faithful, that at length she softened the tiger to a lamb, and her husband before he died accepted the faith of Christ. But his evil example outlived him in his son; and Augustine, at twenty, beautiful in person, brilliant in intellect, had all the ungodly impulses of his father's fiery nature, strengthened by indulgence, and now left without restraint. But Monica had given him to God; she had scattered divine truth along his path from infancy upward; and clinging to the unfailing promises of grace, she followed him still with her patient love. One day she stood before her pastor, "the tears streaming down her careworn cheek," and besought him to use his influence to reclaim her son. "Wait," said the man of God, "wait patiently; the son of these tears cannot perish."

Now a popular teacher of rhetoric—Augustine leaves Carthage, which he had found a "caldron of unholy loves," to seek his fortune at Milan, the court of the empire. There, while winning applause as a rhetorician, he pursues the same godless and dissolute life amid the gayeties and dissipations of the capital. But his mother followed him across the sea and into strange lands; and for thirteen years of his manhood, she carries this great sorrow of an apostate son, waiting upon him in love, waiting upon God in faith, saying, "I will see him a Christian yet before I die." At length patience has its perfect work. Before she dies, Augustine lives. And as her star of hope, which had been the only light of his stormy seas, sinks to its peaceful rest, his sun arises to illumine the church of God from age to age.—Thompson's "Christian graces," pp. 123–126.