The Head of the Household
I charge you, my sister, that you take your husband along with you to heaven. Of course this implies that you yourself are a Christian. I must take that for granted. It cannot be possible that after what Christianity has done for woman, and after taking the infinitely responsible position you have assumed as the head of the household, that you should be in a position antagonistic to Christ. It was not a slip of the tongue when I spoke of you as being at the head of the household. We men rather pride ourselves as being at the head of the household, but it is only a pleasant delusion. To whom do the children go when they have trouble? When there is a sore finger to be bound up or one of the first teeth that needs to be removed to make way for one that is crowding it out, to whom does the child go? For whom do children cry out in the night when they get frightened at a bad dream? Aye, to whom does the husband go when he has a business trouble too great or too delicate for outside ears? We, the men, are heads of the household in name, but you, O wives! are the heads of the household in fact, and it is your business to take your husband with you into the kingdom of God, and see that house prepared for heaven.
You can do it! Of course God’s almighty grace alone can convert him, but you are to be the instrument. Some wives keep their husbands out of heaven, and others garner them for it. If your religion, O wife! is simply the joke of the household, if you would rather go to the theatre than the prayer-meeting, if you can beat all the neighborhood in progressive euchre, if your husband never sees you kneel at the bedside in prayer before retiring, if the only thing that reminds the family of your church relations is that on communion-day you get home late to dinner, you will not be able to take your husband to heaven, for the simple reason that you will not get there yourself. But I suppose that your religion is genuine, and that the husband realizes that there is in your soul a divine principle, and that, though you may be naturally quicker tempered than he is and have many imperfections that distress you more than they can any one else, still you are destined for the skies when the brief scenes of this life are over. How will you take him with you? There are two oars to that boat—prayer and holy example.
But you say he belongs to a worldly club, or he does not believe a word of the Bible, or he is an inebriate and very loose in his habits? What you tell me shows that you don’t understand that while you are at the one end of a prayer, the omnipotent God is at the other end, and it is simply a question whether Almightiness is strong enough and keeps His word. I have no doubt there will be great conventions in heaven, called for celebrative purposes, and when in some Celestial assemblage the saints shall be telling what brought them to God, I believe that ten thousand times ten thousand will say: “My wife.”