“How do you know that? If you disobey him you will be lost.”
“Oh, no! He will not let me be—no, never, not even if I was to steal away from my work and go and play in the garden. He would forgive me like he did Peter; and then I should feel sorry, and cry, and then he would make it all right again,” said the quaint little infant Theologian with an air of positive conviction.
“Child! where did you learn such bad doctrines? Not at Sunday school, I know,” said the widow, in dismay.
“Yes, I did, in the Sunday school, in the Bible texts, and they are good. Our Saviour was good and all that he did was good. Don’t he say that he was sent to seek and to save them that were lost? And I know he will never let me be lost, no nor the old lady neither, even if she does take her ease, because she is so good-hearted.”
“Miss! don’t you know it is wrong to contradict your mother? And you have contradicted me several times.”
“Yes, I know—but—I must say what is true about Our Saviour when we talk of him.”
“Well, you shall sew one hour longer this evening, as a punishment for your disrespect to me.”
“Well, mamma, I will sew all day and all night, if that will do you any good, so you will let me say what is true about Our Saviour. Sewing is easy enough, the dear knows—easier than being scourged and stoned, and all that, like some of his poor friends were for his sake,” said the child, as she carefully fitted the little squares of her patch-work together.
“Only six years old and to talk like that! She is one of the children who are doomed to die early,” thought Mrs. Sterling.
And indeed any one looking at that child, with her delicate frame, large brain and active intellect, must have come to the same conclusion. But they would every one have been mistaken. There was a wonderful vitality and power of endurance in that little slight nervous frame. No one is faultless. And if this little atom had a fault, it was that of being just a “wee bit” self-opinionated. She was a very promising pupil in a very orthodox Sunday school; yet from the very texts they had taught her she had received impressions that the teachers certainly never had intended to give her, and these impressions had become convictions in defence of which she was willing at six years to suffer the baby martyrdom of—“sewing all day and all night.”