I used to live near a boy in Canada who did not like to go to school, and when the snow was deep and the weather was frosty he would find some excuse by which he got his mother to let him stay at home. When he grew up he found out what he had missed by not getting an education, and he tried to make it up, but he could not. He was running after the train. He soon got discouraged and gave up, and tried to get his living in some other way than by hard work. The last I heard of him he had just been arrested for stealing.
I have known other boys and girls who thought of joining the Church, but they just kept putting it off and putting it off, thinking that any time would do well enough. And then, as they got older, they felt that they weren't good enough, or that some of their friends might not approve, and so they have grown up and have not yet joined, and each year it keeps growing harder.
The two opportunities that you boys and girls ought to take "by the forelock," as we say, are, first: in getting all the schooling you can while you have the chance. You will never have such a good opportunity again, and if you let it slip you may never, never catch up. And second: in making as fine a start as you can in your Christian life by learning all you can about the Bible and by getting Christ's example into your hearts.
GOD IS NOW HERE
In a sermon which Dean Stanley, an English minister, preached to children in Westminster Abbey, he told the following story: "There was a little girl living with her grandfather. She was a good child, but he was not a very good man; and one day, when she came back from school, he had put in writing over her bed, 'God is nowhere,' for he did not believe in the good God, and he tried to make the little girl believe the same as he.
"What did the little girl do? She had no eyes to see, no ears to hear what her grandfather tried to teach her. She was very small. She could only read words of one syllable at a time; she rose above the bad meaning which he had tried to put into her mind, because her little mind could not do otherwise, and she read the words not 'God is nowhere,' but 'God is now here.'"
And she was right. She was wiser than her gray-haired grandfather. For God is now here. He is everywhere. And whenever even the smallest child speaks to Him in the simplest prayer He hears the child's voice. God is now here. That is a good motto for us to take with us to school, to keep us honest; to play, to keep us sweet; to our homes, to keep us unselfish.