"About Lily?"
"No; it was written long, long ago. But about heaven."
"Is it true, muddie?"
"Oh yes! God wrote it; that is, He told His servants what to write in it."
"Do read to me about heaven, muddie. Lily was good, wasn't she? I'll be good, too."
Janet had a beautiful Bible, one of her wedding presents. It lay on a little velvet-covered table, and it was not dusty, because Janet kept everything very neat and nice. But it was quite as new-looking as when she first had it, and she had no other. However, she opened it now, and after much turning over its leaves, she read some verses from the last two chapters of the Revelation.
But either this was above the child's comprehension, or some strange instinct told him more than Janet could say, for he set up a terrified cry, and declared with tears and sobs that "he did not want to go to heaven—it was too grand and big. And oh, Lily would not like it either."
It was long before Janet could quiet her boy; and as she sat beside his little bed that evening, and saw how disfigured his pretty little face was, all tear-stained and red, and how every now and then a great sob shook his slender frame, she began to wonder what on earth she could say to quiet him when next he "wanted Lily."
Moreover, his cry that "Lily would not like it" had awakened an echo in her aching heart. That little timid, loving girl of hers, so easily frightened, so apt to cling to "muddie"—ah, what a poor little thing to go all alone into a strange place, however beautiful, where she knew no one! Janet lived to see that these thoughts were very ignorant, and even now she had a dim feeling that she was wrong to think, thus; and so, between a desire to comfort Frank and a terrible need of comfort for herself, she began to turn over the pages of her neglected Bible, and to read a little here and there.
And if ever people tell you that there is no comfort and no help to be found in the Bible, just remember that this is generally said by people who do not read it. Janet presently came upon the story of the little ones brought to Christ for a blessing, taken up in His arms, welcomed and loved. "Suffer little children to come unto Me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." Yes, Lily was a lovely, innocent, good child; her mother could quite believe that "of such are the kingdom of heaven." And Christ was there; Lily would have been "suffered" to go to Him. It was a ray of comfort—just a ray of that "Light that lighteth every man"—the first that had shone into Janet's heart. But the rays of that Sun have a most wonderful power of increasing and brightening. Janet soon read her Bible for other things besides a need of comfort. She was not clever, but she had plenty of good sense; and before long, she was a different woman, and her two little boys were carefully taught and trained.