Soldiers and servants by Thy grace, But helpless children first, We gather round our Father's board In hunger and in thirst. Bold through the love which Thou hast shown, But all our least and worst. The treasure worthless in our hands In Thy participating name, We pour out sorrows, tremblings, shame, The empty hope, the failing aim; And then we feast on Thee. It is for service that we live, Destroyer of our sin. It is to keep the children's place, But sweet be our communion song, A. L. WARING. SUNDAY EVENINGS WITH THE CHILDREN.* BY ALEXANDER MACLEOD, D.D. I once read a poem, by Mary Howitt, in which this good thought is put into the lips of a very little child. He was called Willie. One day Willie's mamma saw him sitting very silent in the sunlight, with all the men and women and the beasts and birds of his Noah's ark set out in a row. "What are you thinking about, Willie ?" said his mamma. Willie answering, said: "You know that God loves little children, It is true that it is only a very little child who would think of giving God pleasure in that way. But although the way of doing the good thing is a little child's way, the thing itself is good to do. It is good for everybody to try to give God pleasure. There was a great prophet in the world once, in the days before the ark, who tried to do this, and who did it all the days of his life. It was the prophet Enoch. At the end of his life, the story of his life told by God Himself was this: "He pleased God." Not himself, not his friends, but God. I have tried to see what it was he did that was pleasure to God, and I find it was this, that" He walked with God." Now you know why it is you walk with some young people and not with others. It is because you know them and love them, and know that they love you. Enoch knew all that about God. He knew that God loved him and he loved to be in God's presence, and to have God near to him in everything he did. He walked with God: the very way God did-the way of truth and right. "He walked with God:" he had God for his friend, and told Him by prayer all that was in his heart. "He walked with God:" he went about with God doing good, helping the helpless and trying to bring people to God. Every day he would say to himself, "How can I please God to-day?" And day by day, he kept doing the will of God, and walking out and in with God for his friend. But there was a greater than Enoch Who pleased God. You remember this is the very thing which the voice from heaven said of Jesus: "This is my Beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." And God was very well 66 pleased with Jesus. He began to be pleased with Him even when He was a child. It is said that Jesus, when He was a little boy at Nazareth, grew in favour both with God and man." Could anything better ever be said of a child's life? To be in favour with. God! To have God well pleased with you! That is to be like Jesus Himself. And you may really be like Jesus in this very thing if you do as He did. He set himself so to give pleasure to God that it became his meat and his drink to do God's will. Now I give you this good thought. I ask you to admit it into your hearts. I advise you to take it for the rule of your lives. Say in your own heart to God, "O my Father, from this time forth I will try to give pleasure to Thee." In the fairy stories, the young prince or princess who is setting out in the world always meets a kind fairy who gives a cap, or a ring, or a flower, or a ball, which must never be let go or lost, and it will be help by the way. But this which I am offering you is a better gift than any fairy could give. This will be better than wishing-cap or ring, better than gold or silver. The child who shall say, "I will from this day live to please God," will live a happy, good life. And at the end, God will tell the same thing about the life of that child as He told about Enoch's and Christ's. He will say, "I have been well pleased with this child." You want to know now you can live this life of pleasing God? There is one thing we all must have if we would please Him. We must have faith in Himself. "Without faith it is impossible to please God." Now as this is the very beginning of the way to please God, I must try to make it plain to you. "To have faith" means, to believe that God loves you, that He has sent His Son Jesus to bless you, and that He intends you to come up to His home and live with Him for ever, when you have lived your life upon earth. Next there are some things which are a grief to God-bad things, untruth, hatred, deceit, meanness; these must not be let into the life. There are other things which give joy to God; these you should seek from God in your daily prayers. Obedience and love to parents are things which are well pleasing in His eyes. And He loves to be asked for faith and truth and goodness of every kind. But the great secret after this is a very simple one; a little child can understand it. It is letting God please you. Indeed, one of the very best ways of giving pleasure to God is just being pleased with the things with which God is pleased. And God has set Himself to give us pleasure by giving us things to be pleased with. He begins by giving us Christ. He Himself, as we saw, is well pleased with Christ. And He says to you and me, "Take pleasure in my Son in Whom I am well pleased." And whoever enters into this and is able to be pleased with Jesus, and with his love, and his life, and his death, in that very way begins to give pleasure to God. To be pleased with Jesus is a child's first step in giving pleasure to God. can see homes over wide seas, and the people living in them, and baptisms, and marriages, and sick-beds and funerals. By these signs commands come from far countries, and merchants in this land rise and go to the market, or the exchange, or the bookstore, or the house of a neighbour, and do the biddings of those who wrote them down. And by these signs the secrets of one heart are carried into another; and two hearts know the secrets instead of one. What Paul says in one of his letters is, that Christian people are, in the same wonderful way, letters of Christ. Christ tells the secrets of his heart by means of them. And they carry his commands. And those who meet with his people and come to know SECOND EVENING. Opening Hymn: "One there is above all others." Lesson: Mark v. 1-20. Concluding Hymn: "Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me." We have often spoken of Paul's letters and Peter's letters, which you know are printed in the Bible; now let us talk about Christ's letters; for Paul tells us that Christ does write letters. Is there anything in the world more wonderful than a letter? When the English missionaries first went to Africa, nothing surprised the black people more than the letters they wrote. "Does the person you write to hear you speak ?" said a chief to one of the missionaries. "No." "Does he see your lips move?" "No." Then he ranged a long line of his people in a field, asked the missionary to stand at one end, and stood with a second at the other end. "Now write what I bid you." The missionary beside him put down the chief's words, and the bit of paper was passed on by a messenger to the other end. At that end the missionary standing there read the words to the messenger. The messenger repeated them to the chief, and the chief cried out, "It is just magic!" And a letter is really a kind of magic. It is only a sheet of paper with some signs on it. But it tells what is going on ten, twenty, a hundred, or a thousand miles away. Through these signs, we, sitting at our breakfast tables, them learn the secrets of the heart of Christ, and what is taking place in Christ's home in the heaven. Christ has always been a letter writer. He has written his letters on the blue sky and on the green earth. Summer and winter, springtime and harvest are sentences from one of his letters. He wrote ten words once, thousands of years ago, on sheets of stone at Mount Sinai, and those words are read still in every part of the earth. He has written two long letters to men in the Bible: the one is called the Old Testament, the other the New Testament, and those letters have been copied thousands of times and are being sent to and fro among all the nations of mankind. But from the beginning He said: "It is not enough for me that I write on the sky and the field, or on leaves of stone, or paper. I want something better still to write my letter on. I will only be satisfied when men allow me to write my letters on their hearts; and when I can lay my heart with all its secrets on the hearts of men and women and boys and girls, and leave the imprint of these secrets there." So Paul gives that name to the boys and girls and the men and women who have let Christ write the secrets of his heart on theirs. He calls them epistles of Christ-letters written on the fleshy leaves of the heart. And there is nothing better in the world for a boy or girl than to be a letter of this kind for Christ. stories in the newspapers which went to every heart. A poor actor left Inverness for the town of Cromarty, where he was engaged to play. He had his little girl with him, a child of seven or eight. Snow had already begun to fall when he set out. But by-and-by a storm arose, and the snow fell so thickly that all the sky became dark with it, and the poor travellers lost their way. In a day or two, half way to Cromarty, at a lonely turn of the road, where there was some shelter, the two were found buried in the snow, and dead. But it was noticed that the child was wrapped round with the father's overcoat, which he had taken from himself to keep her warm. The cold was so great that year that many poor people died of it in their very houses, where they had neither fire nor food. Among those who died was a lonely mother in one of our cities. She was found cold dead on the floor of her home, and nearly naked, but beside her was her living child, living and warm, well wrapped up in the clothes which the mother had taken from her own body. What were those two: the poor actor who stripped himself of his coat to keep warm his child: the poor mother who went nearly naked to keep her baby alive? They were letters written by Christ and sent out to be Two or three years ago the people living in Paris were surrounded by the German army, and could neither get out themselves nor have anybody coming in. They were besieged by that army, and all the while the siege lasted neither bread, nor milk, nor coals, nor wood, nor horse, nor cow could get in. It was a hard time, and the people suffered for want of food. But there was another thing they greatly suffered for want of-and that was news of dear ones in other parts of the world. At last those dear ones wrote letters on the first page of the Times newspaper in London. Then a photo-read of all, letters written with one of the grapher made a copy of that first page so small that it was only the size of a penny stamp. Then those tiny pages were tied under the wings of doves (whose feathers were even stamped like a letter, as you may see in the picture on p. 201) and carried by them over the heads of the German army into Paris. There the photographers made the tiny papers large again. And in this way the people in Paris got letters from the dear ones far away. The Lord Jesus does something like this in writing His letters on young hearts. He has a great deal to say: but the hearts of children are too small to receive all his words. So the Lord makes His letter small, so small that it can all be printed on a child's heart. And then as years go on and the body grows tall, the heart grows larger and larger, and the letters grow with the growth of the heart, and when boys and girls come to be young men and women they find that the loving Jesus has written nearly all the Bible on their hearts. But sometimes it is only a single sentence He writes. During a very cold winter, between twenty and thirty years ago, there were two deepest secrets of His heart. What He wrote on those two hearts was sacrifice, pity, love, like God's. Just as those two acted, Christ would have acted if He had been in their places. It was even so He did act, when on the cross He died for man. He took His own life and wrapped us round with it, that we might not die but live. And He would have every one of us to act to others as He acted towards us. And on our hearts, as on the hearts of those two of whom I have told, He desires to write pity and self-sacrifice, and kindness and love. THIRD EVENING. Opening Hymn: "I'm but a Stranger here." Lesson: John iv. 1-14. Concluding Hymn: "Jesus, tender Shepherd, hear me.' There is one very beautiful sentence in the New Testament which I should like you to think about to-night. The beautiful sentence is, "THINGS WHICH GOD HATH PREPARED." We are living in a world which is full of things prepared. The sun, the moon, the stars, the sea, and hills and fruitful fields; we come into the world and find them ready for us. It is a way God has. He first makes ready His good things, and then He brings His children to enjoy them and use them. One day a mother and her son were travelling in an Eastern land. It is quite different there from what it is in England. In this country we have dew and rain and wells and rivers, and our rivers never run dry. But in the East the sun is sometimes so hot that it dries up the dew and rain and wells and rivers; and the grass is burned up, and the leaves fall from the trees, and there is no water to drink, and people die of thirst. It was Hagar and Ishmael, her son, who were travelling in that hot land. They had been sent away from Abraham's tent. The water they had brought with them in their no father to care for him; and he was about to die in the wilderness. What was she to do? She could not carry him, he was a big grown up lad; and she could not be beside him when she was not able to give him help. Poor Hagar! She did the best she could. There was a little clump of brushwood near, and she laid him down there, in the shadow. And she herself drew back a little, and burst into tears; she could not bear to lose her boy, or to see him die. But just then, when things were at the worst, she heard a voice. It was the voice of an angel sent by God. "What aileth thee, Hagar?" the voice said; "God hath heard the cry of thy child." And suddenly, it was as if scales fell from the poor mother's eyes, and she saw there, in that very place, the thing she most wished to see, a well with water in it. Oh, but her heart was glad and her tears dried up, and she made haste and brought of the water to her boy, and he drank and did not die. Now God did not make that well that day; the well was there, although Hagar did not see it at first. The well had been there, perhaps, from the beginning of the world. It was prepared by God, and prepared for Hagar and her boy. Just there where it was wanted by these two, God had prepared it, preserved it from being filled up, kept the water in it, all ready, for years and years, till the day when Ishmael should need to drink of it and live. In the hymn we have just sung, "I'm but a stranger here," it is said, "Earth is a desert drear." That means, that earth is like a desert to people who lose sight of God in it, or who have great sorrow because those they love are taken away from it by death. In this very earth God has prepared a well skin bottle was all spent; and the hot sun more wonderful than Hagar's. Jesus was beat upon their heads, and poor Ishmael speaking of this well when He said to the grew sick for want of water, and was near to woman of Samaria, "whosoever drinketh of die. It was a wilderness into which they had the water that I shall give, shall never come. There were no roads, nor houses, nor thirst." Jesus Himself is this well. This is inns in all that waste. And what was worse, the well in which the water of life springs up they could find no wells with water, no cool-the well which the saints in heaven drink rushing streams, no green pastures, no shady trees. There was only the hot earth, with the blistering rocks and the burned up grass beneath their feet, and above their heads the blazing sun. When people are very sad they are often not sure about their way; tears blind the eyes. Hagar was very sad. She loved Abraham. He was the father of her boy. His tent had been her home for many years. It was the only home the boy ever knew. And now she was homeless, and her boy had of, out of which God Himself drinks. And it has been prepared for us, prepared in Jesus, into Whom for us the living water has been poured by God. And Jesus, thinking of Himself as this well of heaven, calls upon us all to come unto Him and drink. I read once of a young German student who found out this well. He was like one in a wilderness where he could not find God. Like Ishmael, he was dying for thirst, but it was the sight of God for which he was thirsting. Day and night his cry was, "Oh, that |