IN the street of a certain village stood a kind of skeleton waggon, of the sort used for the cartage of heavy timber. A few loose boards were laid across the axles, and a little boy, four or five years old, sat upon them.
The driver had gone away for a few moments to transact some business, when something occurred which frightened the horses and started them running furiously down the street.
As the passers-by stood and looked on with consternation, a woman who saw the awful danger of the child clasped her hands in anguish and cried out with all her might: “Stop that waggon and save the child! Stop the waggon! Stop it! Stop it!” A man, standing near, looked at her with an amused expression on his face, and coldly said:
“Silly woman, don’t fret yourself. It isn’t your child.”
“I know it,” cried the woman, “but it’s somebody’s child. Stop it, oh, stop it!”
In a far more real sense, thousands of children all around us are in terrible danger. They are growing up without God, without knowledge of the Saviour, wandering farther and farther in the paths of sin. Some of us Christians have children of our own, and we are keenly anxious to see them saved. But what about other people’s children? We see their peril; have we no responsibility towards them? It may be that seeking their salvation may be the means of bringing that priceless boon to our own loved ones.
I have read of a gentleman who lived in the city of Rochester, U.S.A. He had just arrived by train, after a long journey, and was anxious to go home and meet his wife and children. He was hurrying along the street with a bright vision of home in his mind, when he saw on the bank of the river a lot of excited men.
“What is the matter?” he shouted. They replied, “A boy is in the water.”
In a moment, throwing down his bag and pulling oft his coat, he jumped into the stream, grasped the boy in his arms, and struggled with him to the shore. As he wiped the water from his dripping face and brushed back the hair, he exclaimed, “Oh, it is my own boy!
He had plunged in for somebody else’s boy, as he thought, and had saved his own! Can it be that sometimes the children of Christian parents remain unconverted because those parents are doing nothing for the salvation of other people’s children?
Do not imagine because children attend a Sunday school that they have no further need. In some schools the teachers are themselves unconverted. How can they win those who attend their classes for a Saviour whom they do not know?
Besides, many Sunday-schools are leavened with the wretched doctrines of the “Higher Criticism.” The children are taught to look upon the stories of Adam and Eve in the garden, their fall and expulsion, the Flood, the call of Abraham, etc., as mere myths and fables. The seeds of unbelief are thus sown broadcast in their hearts. The fact that children attend such schools as these increases, rather than diminishes, our responsibility to reach them with the gospel.
If there is no Sunday-school where you may help, is there nothing else that you can do? A Christian lady, known to the writer, gathers a few little children into her house once a week, and sings and prays with them, and tells them simple stories from the Bible.
If your circumstances do not permit of your doing anything of this kind, could you not get a few hundred gospel papers, specially suited for children, and give them to the boys and girls in the neighborhood where you live?
Above all, will you not carry the burden of the children into the presence of your Lord, and earnestly pray Him to show you in what way He would have you to help?
Those who preach the gospel will do well not to forget the children in their audiences.
“O God,” said a little girl one Saturday night, as she was praying before going to bed, “do help the preacher to-morrow to say something that I can understand.”
Savonarola, the Italian Reformer, used to say, “We must fish with nets that have meshes small enough to catch the smallest fish.”
Martin Luther, too, never forgot the boys and girls in his congregation. Says he: “When I preach, I sink myself deep down. I regard neither doctors nor magistrates... but I have an eye to the multitude of young people, children, and servants, of whom there are more than two thousand. I preach to those, directing myself to them who have need thereof.”
The late C. H. Spurgeon was wont to say that of all the hundreds of conversions that took place as the result of his preaching, those of children were, generally speaking, the most satisfactory.
The Lord Himself welcomed and blessed children. Alas, that any of His servants in this day should resemble those of long ago, who imagined that their Master could be better occupied than with a lot of boys and girls, and would have driven them away but for the Saviour’s gracious words: “Suffer little children to come unto Me.”
We have reprinted the above from an old volume of Simple Testimony, moved to do so by reading an incident related quite recently at a meeting in London by no less an authority than the Dean of Canterbury. As some of our readers may not have seen it we repeat it in our own words.
Just before last Easter the headmistress of a school for girls, thought it would be fitting to relate to a class of her girls, aged 11 to 13 years, the story of the last week of our Lord’s life. She began, and the class followed with keen interest. Time failed her however to finish the story. She got as far as the moment when the Lord Jesus was led by the priests into Pilate’s judgment hall. She broke off at that point, saying she would resume the story in the class the following day. Almost with cue voice the class cried out, “Oh, do go on. Tell us what happened. Did He get off?”
We need not add any comments— EDITOR.