“What are we to do?” said Andrew. “If the Lord is going about like that, looking after us, we've surely got something to do looking after Him!”
There was no help in Sandy; and it was well that, with the reticence of children, neither thought of laying the case before their parents; the traditions of the elders would have ill agreed with the doctrine they were now under! Suddenly it came into Andrew's mind that the book they read at worship to which he had never listened, told all about Jesus.
He began at the beginning, and grew so interested in the stories that he forgot why he had begun to read it One day, however, as he was telling Sandy about Jacob—“What a shame!” said Sandy; and Andrew's mind suddenly opened to the fact that he had got nothing yet out of the book. He threw it from him, echoing Sandy's words, “What's a shame!”—not of Jacob's behavior, but of the Bible's, which had all this time told them nothing about the man that was going up and down the world, gathering up their sins, and carrying them away in His pack! But it dawned upon him that it was the New Testament that told about Jesus Christ, and they turned to that. Here also I say it was well they asked no advice, for they would probably have been directed to the Epistle to the Romans, with explanations yet more foreign to the heart of Paul than false to his Greek. They began to read the story of Jesus as told by his friend Matthew, and when they had ended it, went on to the gospel according to Mark. But they had not read far when Sandy cried out:
“Eh, Andrew, it's a' the same thing ower again!”
“No a'thegither,” answered Andrew. “We'll gang on, and see!”
Andrew came to the conclusion that it was so far the same that he would rather go back and read the other again, for the sake of some particular things he wanted to make sure about So the second time they read St. Matthew, and came to these words:
“If two of you shall agree on earth as touching anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of My Father which is in heaven.”
“There's twa o' 's here!” cried Andrew, laying down the book. “Lat's try 't!”
“Try what?” said Sandy.
His brother read the passage again.