And I've got such a blessed plenty of life
while waiting for more, that I am quite content to wait. But I do
wonder that some people I know, should cling to what they call
life as they do. It is not that they are comfortable, for they
are constantly complaining of their sufferings; neither is it
from submission to the will of God, for to hear them talk you
must think they imagine themselves hardly dealt with; they
profess to believe the Gospel, and that it is their only
consolation; and yet they speak of death as the one paramount
evil. In the utmost weariness, they yet seem incapable of
understanding the apostle's desire to depart and be with Christ,
or of imagining that to be with him can be at all so good as
remaining where they are. One is driven to ask whether they can
be Christians any further than anxiety to secure whatever the
profession may be worth to them will make them such."
"Don't you think, though," said Joseph, "that some people have a
trick of putting on their clothes wrong side out, and so making
themselves appear less respectable than they are? There was my
sister Ann: she used to go on scolding at people for not
believing, all the time she said they could not believe till God
made them--if she had said _except_ God made them, I should
have been with her there!--and then talking about God so, that I
don't see how, even if they could, any one would have believed in
such a monster as she made of him; and then, if you objected to
believe in such a God, she would tell you it was all from the
depravity of your own heart you could not believe in him; and yet
this sister Ann of mine, I know, once went for months without
enough to eat--without more than just kept body and soul
together, that she might feed the children of a neighbor, of whom
she knew next to nothing, when their father lay ill of a fever,
and could not provide for them.
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