About two years ago while visiting some friends in Virginia, I started reading a little bit of their copy of Elizabeth Prentiss' biography, and I've been wanting to finish it ever since. A few months later, I bought her book Stepping Heavenward and just now got around to reading it.
It is the most inspiring work of fiction I have ever read. OK, so I haven't read much fiction. But this book is incredible, and I'm planning on loaning out my copy or giving it as a gift to as many women as I can.
Here are some more quotes I would like to remember:
"'The best convent,' I said, 'for a woman is the seclusion of her own home. There she may find her vocation and fight her battles, and there she may learn the reality and the earnestness of life.' ... 'When you speak contemptuously of the vocation of maternity, you dishonor not only the mother who bore you but the Lord Jesus Himself, who chose to be born of woman and to be ministered unto by her through a helpless infancy.'"
"What I am, that I must be, except as God changes me into His own image. And everything brings me back to that, as my supreme desire. I see more and more that I must be myself what I want my children to be and that I cannot make myself over even for their sakes. This must be His work, and I wonder that it goes on so slowly; that all the disappointments, sorrows, sicknesses I have passed through have left me still selfish, still full of imperfections!"
"'I have made prayer too much of a luxury and have often inwardly chafed and fretted when the care of my children, at times, made it utterly impossible to leave them for private devotion - when they have been sick, for instance, or in other like emergencies. I reasoned this way: 'Here is a special demand on my patience, and I am naturally impatient. I must have time to go away and entreat the Lord to equip me for this conflict.' But I see now that the simple act of cheerful acceptance of the duty imposed and the solace and support withdrawn would have united me more fully to Christ than the highest enjoyment of His presence in prayer could.'"
"'But before I go, I want once more to tell you how good His is, how blessed it is to suffer with Him, how infinitely happy He has made me in the very hottest heat of the furnace. It will strengthen you in your trials to recall this dying testimony. There is no wilderness so dreary but that His love can illuminate it, no desolation so desolate but that He can sweeten it...I believe that the highest, purest happiness is known only to those who have learned Christ in sickrooms, in poverty, in racking suspense and anxiety, amid hardships, and at the open grave.'"
"This baby of mine is certainly the sweetest and best I ever had. I feel an inexpressible tenderness for it that I cannot quite explain to myself, for I have loved them all dearly, most dearly. Perhaps it is so with all mothers; perhpas they all grow more loving, more forbearing, more patient as they grow older and yearn over these helpless little ones with ever-increasing, yet chastened delight."
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