“All right,” said Jack, settling back on his pillow, “go ahead; I like to hear you read the Bible better than anybody else, except mother, of course.”
This was no wonder, for Uncle Jack had a way of reading between the lines, something after this fashion: “‘And a certain man, lame from his mother’s womb, was carried.’ Just think of that, my boy! Forty years old, and never had walked a step! That is worse than being lame for two years, isn’t it?”
“How do you know he was forty years old? It doesn’t say so.”
“It does in another place; I hunted it up once, to see how long he had been a burden on his friends. And just listen to this as the best they could do for him: ‘Whom they laid daily at the gate of the temple, which is called Beautiful, to ask alms of them that entered into the temple.’”
“They were a mean lot,” said Jack; “they might have kept him at home and taken care of him.”
“Ah, my boy! that is much the way it is to-day in countries where Jesus Christ does not reign; still, we must not be too hard on these friends of his; they may have been miserably poor, and to carry the man to the gate and leave him there may have been the utmost that was in their power to give.”
DOLEFUL JACK.—(See “Jack’s Decision.”)
“Then they ought to have taken him to the hospital.”
“There was none, Jackie. No provision whatever was made in that country for the suffering poor; such things belong to Christianity. Well, ‘Who, seeing Peter and John about to go into the temple, asked an alms.’ He liked the appearance of those ministers, I fancy. I suppose he said, ‘They look kind, and I shouldn’t wonder if they would give me quite a lift.’”