Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing

by T. S. Arthur

"God is in heaven!" answered the little girl in solemn tones, while a sudden gravity gathered over her features.

From lips that burned with blasphemies, amid oaths from the vile, and revilings from the scoffer, had the boy first learned that name, and never before had it possessed aught of import for him. But now he knew it was the name of the Great Father that loved him, and again he asked very earnestly, "Where is the way to God in heaven? I am going to Him now."

The child shook her head as she looked on the boy with a sort of pitying wonder at his ignorance, and again she answered, "You cannot go to Him, but He will come to you if you will call upon Him, and He will hear, though you whisper very low, for God is everywhere."

"Come, come, Miss Ellen, you must not stay here any longer," called the servant, who had been very intent at ranging the cushions in the pew, and who now hurried her little charge through the aisle, apprehensive that some evil might accrue from her contiguity with a "street-beggar."

But the words of the little girl had brought a new and precious light into the boy's heart. That "cardinal explication of the reason," the wondrous idea of the Deity, had found a voice in his soul, and the child went forth from the church, while the golden-winged angel followed him to the dark alley, and the darker home; and that night, before he laid himself on his miserable pallet in the corner, he bowed his head, and clasped his hands, and whispered so that none might hear him, "My Father, will you take care of me, and come and take me to yourself? for I love you." And the angel folded his bright wings above that scanty pallet, and bent in the silent watches of the night over the boy, and filled his heart with peace, and his dreams with brightness.

Six months had rolled their mighty burden of life-records into the pulseless ocean of the past. The pale stars of mid-winter were looking down with meek, seraph glances over the mighty metropolis along whose thousand thoroughfares lay the white carpet of the snow-king; and Boreas, loosed from his ice caverns on the frozen floor of the Arctic, was holding mad revels, and howling with demoniac glee along the streets, wrapped in the pall shadows of midnight.

Twelve o'clock pealed from the mighty tongue of the time-recorder, and then the white-robed angel of death knocked at the door of two young human hearts, in the great city.

The tide of golden hair flowed over the white pillows of crimson-draperied couch. Shaded lamps poured their dim, silvery glances upon bright flowers and circling vines, the cunning workmanship of fingers in far-off lands, which lay among the soft groundwork of the rich carpet, while small white fingers glided caressingly among the golden hair; and white faces, wild with sorrow, bent over the rigid features of the dying child, and tears, such only as flow from the heart's deepest and bitterest fountains, fell upon the cold forehead and paling lips, as the lids swept back for a moment from her blue eyes, and the light from her spirit broke for the last time into them; the lips upon which the death-seal was ready to be laid, opened; and clear and joyous through the hushed room rang the words, "I am coming! I am coming!" and the next moment the cold, beautiful clay was all which was left to the mourners.

The other, at whose heart the death-angel knocked, lay in one corner of an old and dilapidated room, on a pallet of straw. No soft hand wandered caressingly among his dark locks, or cooled with its cold touch the fever of his forehead. The dim, flickering rays of the tallow candle wandered over the features now grown stark and rigid with the death-chill. No grief-printed face bent in anguish above him; no eye watched for the latest breath; no ear for the dying word; but through the half-open door, came to the ear of the dying boy the coarse laugh of the inebriate—the jest of the vile, and the frightful blasphemies of those whose way is the way of death.

None saw the last life-light, as it broke into the dark, spiritual eyes of the boy. None saw the smile that played like the light around the lips of a seraph, about his blue and cold lips, as they spoke exceeding joyfully, "Father! Father, I have called and you have heard me; I am coming to you, coming now; for the angels beckon me;" and the pale clay on that sunken pallet was all that remained of the boy.