* Anna Bunstou, The Porch of Paradiu, 25.
RUTH I. i6, 17 231
be than religion ? It is religion that makes our earthly friend- ships eternal ; love, which is the soul of friendship, is the fruit of religion. " Beloved, let us love one another : for love is of God ; for every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God." God did not come between Naomi and Kuth as a barrier to separate them, but as a spiritual power to bind them more closely together. Their friendship reached its perfection only when Euth said : " Thy God shall be my God."
^ Philip Henry's advice to his children regarding marriage was, " Please God, and please yourselves, and you will please me " ; his usual compliment to his newly married friends : " Others wish you all happiness. I wish you all holiness, and then there will be no doubt but you will enjoy all happiness."
5, " Where thou diest, will I die." So Euth had no thought of returning. She had no idea of simply going to inspect the land of Israel, and then returning to her own. " Where thou diest I will die"; or, in other words, Euth made a life-gift of herself to the people.
Love loves for ever. And finds a sort of joy in pain, And gives with nought to take again, And loves too well to end in vain:
Is the gain small then?
Love laughs at "never," Outlives our life, exceeds the span Appointed to mere mortal man: All which love is and does and can
Is all in all then.^
^ I shall tell you the story of a daughter who dearly loved her father and stuck by him to the end. Her name was Margaret Eoper, and her father was Sir Thomas More. When he was imprisoned, she loved him the more for his misfortunes. When he lay in the Tower under sentence of death, his chief comfort was the visits and letters of Margaret, and the night before his execution he wrote her a letter with a bit of charcoal saying, " I have never liked your manner better than when you kissed me last night (before the guard of soldiers), for I am most pleased when daughterly love has no leisure to look to worldly courtesy."
1 0. G. Rossetti.
232 A WOMAN'S CHOICE
^ Two or three years ago, in a book by Professor Stearns, an American theologian of great promise, who, to the loss and regret of the universal Church, was carried away in his prime imme- diately after the publication of this book, I came across a phrase which struck me much at the time and has dwelt in my memory ever since. It was " permanent choice." I never had heard that phrase before, and I never had reflected on the thing very much until I found it designated by that happy phrase. Now what do you think permanent choice may mean ? You know how will is always at work every day. To get up in the morning is an act of will, and it is not always a very easy one. In dressing there are many acts of will, and in taking breakfast, and so on, all through the day. But most acts of will must be about trivial things and be soon forgotten. There are other acts of will that cannot be forgotten. Their effects are permanent, and they imply hundreds of thousands of other acts of will which are, so to speak, involved in them. I think it was of these that Professor Stearns spoke, but there is something else in this remarkable phrase. I think he meant that the will in a permanent choice stands to this choice, approving it, believing in it, glorying in it, and never wishing to change it.^
Oh, surely, love is higher, deeper.
Than human smile and human speech;
So high, so deep, the angel-reaper Cannot reach.
6. "And there will I be buried." This is not a useless addition to the resolution to die with Naomi. To be buried in the sepulchre of some family is to be recognized as of the family kinship. There is no other recognition that is so hard to obtain or so difficult to lose. When she said, "And there will I be buried," Euth threw in her lot with Naomi and Naomi's people fully and finally. To offer to be buried with Naomi's kinsfolk was the last and most whole-hearted act of surrender.
^ The ancients were wonderfully devoted to the sepulchres of their fathers. I confess that I should not have been mucli surprised if Euth had said, " Well, Naomi, I am willing to live in your country, and I am willing to die there ; but, after I have breathed my last, would it be asking too much to request that my bones be sent back to the sepulchre of my father and mother in the land of Moab ? " Yes, she would have said that, if she had ^ Professor James Stalker.
RUTH I. i6, 17 233
not been the Euth that she was ; but, altogether consecrated, she would not even have her bones go back into her old country. No, dead as well as living, she would have fellowship with the Lord's people.^