“No; I am afraid to die. I know that I am sinning every day in weeping for my poor lost bairn, and yet I am that way made that I cannot help but weep for her. For it is my fault, David, all my fault. Why, then, did He pursue the child with His anger from the first hour of her sorrowful life to the last? And where is she now? O David, where is she? If God would only let me go to her!”
“Whist, Nanna! You know not what you are saying. You might be asking yourself away from His presence.”
“I would rather be with Vala. If that be sinful, let me thole the wages of my sin. Where is my dear bairn?”
“I heard Elder Kennoch say we may have a hope that God will eventually take pity on those babes who have done no actual sin.”
“But when will he take pity? And until he does, how can the wee souls endure his anger? O David, my heart will break! My heart will break!”
“Nanna, listen to this: when Elga Wick’s child died, the minister said there was a benign interpretation of the doctrines which taught us that none but elect infants died. It would be unjust, Nanna, unless the child was elect, not to give it the offer of salvation.”
“What good would eighty years of ‘offers’ do, if there was no election to eternal life?”
“Nanna, your father was a child of God, and you have loved him from your youth upward.”
“Can that help Vala?”
“Even so. He keeps his mercy for children’s children, to the third and fourth generation of them that fear him. Vala was in the direct succession of faith.”