"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.

No one with half a heart could wrong them knowingly, and yet, in believing and declaring for the laws of heredity and of disease the human sense of every one of us has certainly been a party to this despicable business. Yes! let the fact be uncovered in all its repulsive nakedness, that "the exceeding sinfulness of sin" may appear and beget in us a revolt no less strenuous and outspoken than was that of the psalmist when he said of the enemies of Israel, "I hate them with a perfect hatred."

Humanitarians may provide the most favorable conditions, the most highly recommended alleviations, and the most kindly care for these sufferers, but in its ignorance of spiritual law material sense is ever bearing false witness against them; day by day it is multiplying and enforcing those exactions of mortal law which bind their tender limbs to the rack,—that law of disease and death which cannot be of God, and which Christ Jesus specifically declared and demonstrated that he came to annul and overthrow.

Christian Science reveals the relation of material sense—the false beliefs we have both indulged and maintained—to this torture of gentle innocency, and if Mrs. Eddy had wrought no other work than that of awakening humanity to the more spiritual apprehension of Truth by which men recognize their responsibility in these wrongs, she would have merited the loving appreciation of every present and prospective parent in the world.

To be kind to the cripple means very much more in Christian Science than to supply him with an improved crutch. It means that our every thought shall be his advocate and helper. It means that at all times and in all things we shall abhor and separate ourselves from that consent to materiality and sin which has registered and still registers its wicked and unjust rule in the faces of the unnumbered little ones who think longingly of our freedom as they see us passing by.

John B. Willis.

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Letters

LETTERS TO OUR LEADER

August 10, 1907

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