THE last rays of the setting sun shone into a room where a mother sat, keeping watch beside her sick child.
Her face wore an expression of hopeless anguish, for she was thinking of the parting which was too surely coming—of that hour 'which each setting sun was bringing nearer and nearer, when her only child, whom she had watched day by day fading from her side, must leave her; and she knew that not even the might of a mother's love could prevail to snatch him from the relentless grasp of death.
“When my baby-girl died," she said to herself, "they told me to take comfort—to think of my boy, and live for him; but now—" Sighing heavily, she rose and bent over the sofa where the sick boy lay. "I wonder," she thought, as she laid her hand tenderly against his hot cheek, "what he would say if he knew he was going to leave me.”
Charley had not been asleep, and as his mother touched him he looked up at her and smiled. He, too, had been thinking of the parting that was corning; for, though no one had said plainly, "Your short life of fourteen years in this world is nearly spent," he knew that God's call for him had come. Charley was ready, so ready that he did not need to think of himself; all his thoughts were for his mother, whose tears were falling fast as he looked at her.
“I almost wish, Mother," he said quietly,
"you could die before me.”
“Why, Charley?”
“Because, with what I believe, I could bear to live without you better than you could bear to be without me.”
Charley's words went straight to his mother's heart. "With what he believes," she repeated again and again to herself. Her chosen friends had been freethinking people, as those call themselves who count it a privilege to grope in the darkness of their own thoughts, while they shut their eyes to the clear light which shines from His Word, and she had listened to them only too readily.
“O God, teach me, too, to believe!" was now the cry of her soul. That cry was answered. Before her Charley was taken, where
“Pain and sickness ne'er can enter,”
his mother's sad heart had found a sure resting place; she knew and believed the love of God to her, and could look forward to the day when she should meet her boy again in the presence of the Lord Jesus, where all His redeemed will dwell with Him, and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things shall have passed away.