us; all our interest is fixed on her widowhood. This work
of fiction now in our hands begins where all other works of fiction end;
for in the life of religion, you must know, our best is always before us.
Well, scarcely was her husband dead when Christiana began to accuse
herself of having killed him. To take her own bitter words for it, the
most agonising and remorseful thoughts about her conduct to her husband
stung her heart like so many wasps. Ah yes! A wasp's sting is but a
blade of innocent grass compared with the thoughts that have stung us all
as we recalled what we said and did to those who are now no more. There
are graves in the churchyard we dare not go near. "I have sinned away
your father!" she cried, as she threw herself on the earth at the feet of
her astounded children. "I have sinned away your father and he is gone!"
And yet there was no mark of a bullet and no gash of a knife on his dead
body, and no chemistry could have extracted one grain of arsenic or of
strychnine out of his blood. But there are many ways of taking a man's
life besides those of poison or a knife or a gunshot. Constant fault-
finding, constant correction and studied contempt before strangers, total
want of sympathy and encouragement, gloomy looks, rough remarks, all
blame and never a word of praise, things like these between man and wife
will kill as silently and as surely as poison or suffocation. Look at
home, my brethren, and ask yourselves what you will think of much of your
present conduct when it has borne its proper fruit. "Upon this came into
her mind by swarms all her unkind, unnatural, and ungodly carriages to
her dear friend, which also clogged her conscience and did load her with
guilt. It all returned upon her like a flash of lightning, and rent the
caul of her heart asunder." "That which troubleth me most," she would
cry out, "is my churlish carriages to him when he was under distress. I
am that woman," she would cry out and would not be appeased--"I am that
woman that was so hardhearted as to slight my husband's troubles, and
that left him to go on his journey alone. How like a churl I carried
myself to him in all that! And so guilt took hold of my mind," she said
to the Interpreter, "and would have drawn me to the pond!"

A minister's widow once told me that she had gone home after hearing a
sermon of mine on the text, "What profit is there in my blood?" and had
destroyed a paper of poison she had pur