Editorial August 10, 1907 Issue

"AND FORBID THEM NOT."

John B. Willis

She was just a little girl, lying on a cot by one of the windows of a great hospital, and over the wan cheeks and big brown eyes there flitted the lights and shadows of joy and sadness, patience and pain, laughter and longing,—the signs of ever-buoyant hope as well as of long-time trial. One hand supported her head as she looked out into that sunny world whose flowering paths she might not hope to enter, and with the other she toyed with a little flag, an emblem of the coming Fourth. The picture was touchingly pathetic, and it appealed to a passer-by in a way that well-nigh moved him to tears. He stopped a moment, and, raising his hat, waved a kindly greeting to the little sufferer. A sweet, sad smile and a gentle nod came back in swift return, and the bonny flag waved him a brave and cheery good-by as he went upon his way.

It was another glimpse of that torture of innocence with which human life so abounds, and which in all history, as in all the world to-day, records the refinements of error's cruelty. It led him to think of the vastness of the array if from the world's hospitals and homes there were gathered all these children of suffering. They belong to God's open air as surely as do the birds and the water brooks, and yet they are not only denied their heaven-willed freedom, they are manacled with the fetters of a felon! Why this iniquity, and by whom?

Jesus said, "Suffer the little children to come unto me," and can any Christian question what that coming would mean for such as these? Is the essential Christ absent from the world to-day? If not, who has dared to "forbid" to innocency the liberty and happiness which belong to it by every right of divine inheritance, of promise, and of desert? Surely "an enemy hath done this," and none other can he be who perpetuates the unspeakable tragedy by hindering the response these children would so gladly make to the Master's loving call and beckoning hand.

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