JOSEPH and I were again returning with a group of believers on the same road from the preaching in his father’s house one Sunday evening. In the front of us, as we started out for home, was a young couple who had attended the preaching. The young woman was carrying a heavy baby of about a year old. I asked Joseph who they were, and he replied that they were a couple recently converted at the meetings. I suggested that we should take it in turns to carry the baby. The baby was duly handed over, and we trudged on, for some miles, each taking a turn with the load. After some three miles, we neared the parting of the ways, and a big black bachelor brother handed the baby to the child’s father to carry up the steep hill to their home. We said “goodnight,” and went on our way. Said Joseph, “We have taught that young man a lesson without speaking a word.” “How?” I inquired. “Well,” explained our brother, “he never helps his wife with the baby. They walk a league to the meeting, and a league back, and she has to carry the burden all the time, but now that he has made a start, and we have shown him an example, he will probably continue to do the right thing.” “He is better than he used to be before his conversion,” chimed in another. “Before then he used to beat her, but he has now ceased to do that.” Here, mine host, Senhor Luiz broke in, “As to that, we all did something in that way before we were converted.”
Thus it will be seen that family and matrimonial relationship are changed when the Gospel enters the heart and home. When Senhor Luiz was converted a few years before this, he opened his house to the Gospel, and at first had to direct the meeting by himself. The country is sparsely populated, and his house Isaiah 10 miles from a city. Within a few years there were 80 participants at the Lord’s Supper, and these come in from a radius of several miles. The Gospel is now preached in several points around, and so the light spreads.