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. |