Part 3
He could not delay an instant to tell his boy the truth.
“Cecil,” he said very gently, “I think that story you were reading in the library, has been troubling you all these long weeks. It was no fairy tale, my boy!”
The child looked up eagerly.
Oh! strange that the sweet, old, old story of the cross, with its depths of infinite love and compassion, should have so laid hold of this lonely little boy, shut up in the gloomy old mansion, far away among the Scotch mountains!
“Who was it, Father?” he asked.
“It was Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Cecil,” answered the anxious, heartbroken father.
What a world of meaning he had never seen before, now shone in those words, “Jesus Christ the Son of God!” If He is the Son of God, then He must be the gift of God, and if the gift of God to a ruined guilty world, then with God there must be mercy, pity, love to the poor sinner. Was Christ the expression of that love? The whole story of the cross, the Just One suffering for the unjust; Christ, the Lamb of God, the sinner’s substitute, bearing the judgment of God; these and a thousand wonderful thoughts came like a flood of blessing through the father’s soul. His heart believed, and his mouth had confessed; salvation was his.
“Jesus Christ!” echoed the boy dreamily, while his thoughts wandered back through the past. How familiar that name seemed to him! How often it had sounded in his baby ears, spoken by the one who was now with Him in the golden city—home.
“Why did they kill Him?” he asked.
“Oh Cecil!” replied his father, clasping the boy in his arms and burying his face in his curls, “He died for you, and me, that we might never taste death—that we might go to heaven.”
And there in that darkened chamber, into which the grim presence of death had so nearly entered, the father told his boy the old sweet story that brought floods of light and joy in the telling, into his own heart that had been so hard. O how precious that dear old book that had lain so long unused, became to both father and son.
Each day they learned to know more and more of the great love of Him who left the Father’s home to tread this weary world, and who died, that all who believe in Him might live.
ML 10/25/1953