Sorrows

Sorrow Changed to Song. — There was a woman whose life was exceedingly sorrowful. She was an Eastern wife, and her husband had been foolish enough to have a second mistress in the house. The woman of whom we speak, a holy woman, a woman of refined and delicate mind, a poetess, indeed, of no mean order — this poor woman, having no children, was the constant butt of her rival, whose sneering spiteful remarks chaffed and chafed her.

Her adversary, it is said, “vexed her sore to make her afraid.” Tho her husband was exceedingly kind to her, yet as with a sword that cut her bones did she go continually. She was a woman of a sorrowful spirit, her spirit being broken. Still, “she feared the Lord ex ceedingly,” and she went up to God’s house, and it was in God’s house that she received, what was to her, perhaps, provided we take all the circumstances into consideration, the greatest blow of her life.

If it was from her rival that she received the harshest word, it was from the High Priest of God that she received this hardest blow. As she stood there praying, using no vocal sound, but her lips moving, the High Priest — an easy soul, who had brought his own family to ruin by his easiness — little knowing her grief, told her that she was drunken. A woman to whom the thought of such sin would have been bitter as gall, it must have smitten her as with the chill blast of death, that God’s priest had said she was drunken.

But, as you will all remember, the Lord did not break the leaf that was driven to and fro. To her there came a comfortable promise. Ere long that woman stood there to sing.