Chapter 57—Attitude Toward an Unbelieving
Companion
[
Note: this chapter is largely communications to distressed believ-
ers seeking counsel.—Compilers.
]
Should a Christian Wife Leave an Unbelieving Husband?—
Letters have come to me from mothers, relating their trials at home
and asking my counsel. One of these cases will serve to represent
many. The husband and father is not a believer, and everything is made
hard for the mother in the training of her children. The husband is a
profane man, vulgar and abusive in his language to her, and he teaches
the children to disregard her authority. When she is trying to pray with
them, he will come in and make all the noise he can and break out
into cursing God and heaping vile epithets upon the Bible. She is so
discouraged that life is a burden to her. What good can she do? What
benefit is it to her children for her to remain at home? She has felt an
earnest desire to do some work in the Lord’s vineyard and has thought
that it might be best to leave her family rather than to remain while the
husband and father is constantly teaching the children to disrespect
and disobey her.
In such cases my advice would be, Mothers, whatever trials you
may be called to endure through poverty, through wounds and bruises
of the soul, from the harsh, overbearing assumption of the husband and
father, do not leave your children; do not give them up to the influence
of a godless father. Your work is to counteract the work of the father,
who is apparently under the control of Satan
[349]
Give a Living Example of Self-control—You have trials, I know,
but there is such a thing as showing a spirit of driving rather than of
drawing. Your husband needs each day to see a living example of
patience and self-control. Make every effort to please him, and yet do
not yield up one principle of the truth....
1
Letter 28, 1890
.
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