A MAN enlisted in the U.S. Civil War, leaving his wife and two children, the wife not in good health. One cold November day, during the first year of the War, she heard that he had been killed in battle. As she looked at her two fatherless children she was in great sorrow. The landlord came for his rent and she told him her trouble, saying that she would not be able to pay her rent so regularly as before as she had only her needle. Sewing-machines were just coming in, and as she could not buy one she stood a very poor chance. The heartless wretch said he would turn her out if she did not pay the rent regularly.
After he went away, the mother began to weep. Her little girl, not quite three years old, came up to her and said, “Mamma, is not God very rich?” “Yes, my child,” she answered. “Can’t God take care of us?” “Yes!” “Then what makes you cry? Mayn’t I go and ask Him?” “Yes, if you like.”
The little one knelt at her cot, where she usually knelt, and said, “Oh Lord, You have taken away my dear papa, and the landlord says he will turn us out of doors, and mamma has no money. Won’t You please lend us a little house to live in?” Then she came back to her mother and said, “Jesus will take care of us, I know He will for I have asked Him!”
That was nearly forty years ago and that mother never paid any rent from that day. A little cottage was provided for her and her children where she lived rent free, and when the Chicago fire burnt it down another little house was put up for her where she remained as long as she lived.
This had a glorious sequel. A few weeks after the above occurrence, I was going to the army. The mother and her two children came to bring me a few pennies, all they had, the widow’s mites. At first I thought I would not take the money, but I saw that God had prompted them. They wanted me to take it down to the army, buy a Bible, and give it to a soldier, and tell the soldier who got it that the children who gave it were going to pray for him as they used to pray for their father. They wanted some soldier to pray for. God bless such children!
I bought two Bibles and one night I was preaching to the soldiers, and when I had finished I told them the story of these Bibles. Holding up one of them I said: “If there is a man here who is not a Christian, who has the moral courage to rise and take this Bible, and have the prayers of these two fatherless children to follow him through the war, let him step forward!”
To my surprise sixteen men sprang to their feet, and came forward, and knelt around me: it seemed as if heaven and earth had come together. The prayers of those little children had followed the Bibles.
D. L. MOODY.