The New Northwest

UNOBTRUSIVE HEROISM

We saw an article in the Baptist Beacon a few days ago with the somewhat startling head, "A Wife Wanted." A lady of Boise had written stating the need of a minister—a single man, as the parish was poor and could not support two. The editor wisely calculated that employing a single man was poor economy, as his usefulness could not be more than half that of a man with a capable, loving, self-sacrificing wife at his side, whose interest in his labor made the labor hers as well. The article closed with the following earnest exhortation: May God give us pastors' wives on our field. Thank God, we have many noble and devoted ones now. But we need more. Young men, coming from the East, bring a wife: only don't delay on that account. The Lord has them here, as attractive, intelligent, devoted and desirable as in the East. This, only to show that in coming to the North Pacific Slope, you are neither going out of the world nor out of good society.

Reading the above, there come before our mind visions of self-sacrificing women, pinched by poverty, worn with care, and harassed by fault-finding members of their husbands' flocks; women who shrank from no duty, however severe, and who bore constant impress on their faces of a yearning for rest that could never be theirs until the gates of Paradise unclosed for the entrance of their tired feet; women who stayed through Summer's heat and Winter's snows in comfortless and lonely homes, caring for the numerous olive branches that flourished around their meager boards, while the minister was "riding the circuit;" regarded by the parish in the unenviable light of almoners; the minister pitied because of the wife's presumption in adding frequently to the family. The records of every neighborhood are thickly written with incidents in these lives: but who cares to read them? Buffeted all their days by adversity, they went uncomplaining to their final rest long before their time.

Those who have read Edward Eggleston's "Circuit Rider" will recognize in the following closing paragraph his touching tribute to one of these women, the "Patty" of his story, and will readily find its counterpart in more than one nook of their own memories:

"There rise before me, as I write these last lines, visions of circuits and stations of which Morton was afterward preacher in charge, and of districts of which he came to be presiding elder. Are not all these written in the Book of the Minutes of the Conferences? But the silent, unobtrusive heroism of Patty and her brave and life-long sacrifices are written only in the Book of God's Remembrance."

"With mean subjections and small recompense."

The frontier circuits of a quarter or half century ago "Entertained these angels, unaware."

Perhaps to no other class of women does the following verse of Elizabeth Akers Allen more truthfully apply than to these lonely, self-sacrificing wives of ministers who rode the long, backwoods circuit in the years now gone:

"Hedged in by alien hearts, unloved, alone,
With slender shoulders bowed beneath their load,
They trod the path that fate had made their own,
Nor met one kindred spirit on the road."