How we should love them and care for them! Above all seek to hear from their young lips that they love the Saviour. Think of the countless homes with a child’s empty chair in the corner of one of the rooms. The little one who used to sit there has gone to heaven; upstairs are the little garments and the broken toys and the empty cot. The little voice that made such music in the home will be heard on earth no more. There is a little grave in the cemetery, flower-decked by loving hands, and the epitaph reads, “Of such is the kingdom of heaven.” And when in the evening they talk of the babe in Paradise, the photograph is brought out. There are marks of tears upon it, and the sunny eyes look out from the cloud of curly hair about the brow, and the half-opened lips seem almost speaking, and the mother cries, “My little boy! my little boy.” Guthrie speaks of the children,
THE BABES IN HEAVEN
Dr. Guthrie, of Edinburgh, says: “Heaven is greatly made up of little children — sweet buds that have never blown, or which death has plucked from a mother’s bosom to lay on his own cold breast, just when they were expanding, flower-like, and opening their engaging beauties in the budding time and the springtime of life. ‘Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ How soothing are these words by the cradle of a dying infant! They fall like balm-drops on our bleeding hearts, when we watch the ebbing of that young life, as wave after wave breaks feebler, and the sinking breath gets lower and lower, till, with a gentle sigh, and a passing quiver of the lip,
OUR SWEET CHILD LEAVES ITS BODY
lying like an angel asleep, and ascends to the beatitudes of heaven and the bosom of its God. Perhaps God does with His heavenly garden as we do with our own. He may chiefly take it from nurseries, and select for transplanting what is yet in its young and tender age―flowers before they have bloomed and trees ere they begin to bear.”
And how sweet is the simple confidence of children.