Nothing escapes those clear brown eyes. That morning, in the midst of the confusion, one of the temple women called out that the child was a wicked thief. This is an ordinary charge. They think it will compel submission. "We will make out a case, and send the police to drag you off to gaol!" they yell; and sometimes there is risk of serious trouble, for a case can be made out cheaply in India. But this did not promise to be serious, so we inquired the stolen sum. It came to fourpence halfpenny, which we paid for the sake of peace, though she told them where the money was, and we found out later that she had told the truth.
I never thought she would remember it—the excitements of the day crowded it out of my mind—but weeks afterwards, when I was teaching her the text, "Not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and gold," and explaining how much Jesus had paid for us, she interrupted me with the remark, "Oh yes, I understand! I know how much you paid for me—fourpence halfpenny!"
And now to turn from small-seeming things to large. Ragland, Tamil missionary, is writing to a friend in 1847. He is trying to express astronomically the value of a soul. He asks, "How does the astronomer correct the knowledge of the stars which simple vision brings him? First, having discovered that the little dot of light is thousands of miles distant, and having discerned by the telescope that it subtends at the eye a sensible angle, and having measured that angle, a simple calculation shows him the size of the object to be greater perhaps than that of the huge ball which he calls his earth." Then, "Take the soul of one of the poorest, lowest Pariahs of India, and form it by imagination into, or suppose it represented by, a sphere. Place this at the extremity of a line which is to represent time. Extend this line and move off your sphere, farther and farther ad infinitum, and what has become of your sphere? Why, there it is, just as before. . . . It is still what it was, and this even after thousands of years. In short, the disc appears undiminished, though viewed from an almost infinite distance. Oh, what an angle of the mind ought that poor soul to subtend!"
The letter goes on to suggest another parallel between things astronomical and things spiritual. He supposes an objector admits the size as proved, but demurs as to the importance of these heavenly bodies. "They are, perhaps, only unsubstantial froth, mere puffs of air, vapoury nothings." But the astronomer knows their mass and weight, as well as their size: "Long observation has taught him that planets in the neighbourhood of one given heavenly body have been turned out of their course, how, and by what, he is at first quite at a loss to tell but he has guessed and reasoned, has found cause for suspecting the planet. He watches, observes, and compares; and after a long sifting of evidence, he brings it in guilty of the disturbance. If it be so, it must have a power to disturb, a power to attract; and if so, it is not a mere shell, much less a mere vapour. It has mass and it has weight, and he calculates and determines from the disturbances what that weight is. Just so with the Pariah's soul. Oh, what a disturbance has it created! What a celestial body has it drawn out from its celestial sphere! Not a star, not the whole visible heavens, not the heaven of heavens itself, but Him Who fills heaven and earth, by Whom all things were created. Him did that Pariah's soul attract from heaven even to earth to save it. Oh that we would thence learn, and learning, lay to heart the weight and the value of that one soul."
And just as the majesty of the glory of the Lord is shown forth nowhere more majestically than in the chapter which tells us how He feeds His flock like a shepherd, and gathers the lambs with His arm, and carries them in His bosom, so nowhere, I think, do we see the glory of our God more than in chapters of life which show Him bending down from the circle of the earth, yea rather, coming down all the way to help it, "attracted by the influence" of the need of a little child.
CHAPTER XX
The Elf
"You remember what I said once, that you could not, perhaps, put a whole crown on the head of Jesus—that is, bring a whole country to be His—but you might put one little jewel in His crown."