AT SCHOOL.
AT length the children reached the school before the hymn was learned, and Kitty felt very much ashamed when, after stammering through three verses, Mrs. Mordaunt gave her back the book, saying, “I would rather have no lesson from you, Kitty, than one learned so carelessly as this.” However, it was too late to repair the fault, so Kitty resolved to give her very best attention to the chapter they were going to read. It was the parable of the sower and the seed, in the thirteenth of St. Matthew. I cannot tell you all that Mrs. Mordaunt said about it, but it was something of this kind:—
“The Saviour was sitting on a little strip of level land by the side of the Sea of Galilee. Behind him were high mountains, towering one above another to the clouds; before him, the waves came rippling quietly against the low shore. Around him were crowds of people gathered together from the villages and towns many miles around to listen unto him. Had all these people come to Jesus for the same thing, do you think, Jane Hutton?”
Jane Hutton started at the question. She had been playing with her new parasol, and her thoughts were very far from the Sea of Galilee. Mrs. Mordaunt repeated the question in another way. “Do you think all the people who came to Jesus came because they loved him, and wanted to be his disciples?”
“No; there were the Pharisees,” said Kitty.
“Yes; they came to try to find fault with him.”
“And the sick,” said Amy timidly, “who came to be healed.”
“True,” said Mrs. Mordaunt. “And then there were very many, doubtless, who came from mere curiosity, because they had heard their friends talk of his wonderful power of healing, or the new, wise, and strange words of him who seemed to them only the son of a poor carpenter of Nazareth. But were there any who gathered close around him, and loved his words for their own sake, not because they were new or interesting, but because they were true and God’s words, because they had sins to be forgiven and Jesus could forgive, and sick souls which only Jesus could heal?”
“Yes; there were the disciples.”
“What do you mean by disciples?”