Читать книгу Amy Harrison; or, Heavenly Seed and Heavenly Dew - Unknown - Страница 3

AT length the children reached the school before the hymn was learned, and Kitty felt very much ashamed when, after stammering through three verses, Mrs. Mordaunt gave her back the book, saying, “I would rather have no lesson from you, Kitty, than one learned so carelessly as this.” However, it was too late to repair the fault, so Kitty resolved to give her very best attention to the chapter they were going to read. It was the parable of the sower and the seed, in the thirteenth of St. Matthew. I cannot tell you all that Mrs. Mordaunt said about it, but it was something of this kind:—

“The Saviour was sitting on a little strip of level land by the side of the Sea of Galilee. Behind him were high mountains, towering one above another to the clouds; before him, the waves came rippling quietly against the low shore. Around him were crowds of people gathered together from the villages and towns many miles around to listen unto him. Had all these people come to Jesus for the same thing, do you think, Jane Hutton?”

Jane Hutton started at the question. She had been playing with her new parasol, and her thoughts were very far from the Sea of Galilee. Mrs. Mordaunt repeated the question in another way. “Do you think all the people who came to Jesus came because they loved him, and wanted to be his disciples?”

“No; there were the Pharisees,” said Kitty.

“Yes; they came to try to find fault with him.”

“And the sick,” said Amy timidly, “who came to be healed.”

“True,” said Mrs. Mordaunt. “And then there were very many, doubtless, who came from mere curiosity, because they had heard their friends talk of his wonderful power of healing, or the new, wise, and strange words of him who seemed to them only the son of a poor carpenter of Nazareth. But were there any who gathered close around him, and loved his words for their own sake, not because they were new or interesting, but because they were true and God’s words, because they had sins to be forgiven and Jesus could forgive, and sick souls which only Jesus could heal?”

“Yes; there were the disciples.”

“What do you mean by disciples?”

“Does it not mean those who love Jesus?” asked Amy.

“No; don’t you remember it means scholars?” said Kitty, who was quicker than her sister, and rather proud of her better memory.

“You are both right,” said Mrs. Mordaunt. “The disciples of Jesus are those who come to learn of him; and the first lesson every one who comes to Jesus learns is to love him. Nothing can be learned of Christ without loving him.

“Well,” she continued, “our Lord looked round on the crowd: the proud and clever men who stood knitting their brows, and eagerly watching his words, and from time to time whispering to one another; the eager multitude, who listened in mute wonder to his wonderful lessons; the little group of disciples who gathered affectionately about him; the sick whom he had healed; the possessed and mad whom he had restored to reason; the despised sinners whom he had received and forgiven; and perhaps there were some pious mothers there with little children who were not afraid to come close to him, for he loved little children. But he saw more of that crowd than we should have seen if we had been there. What was it that he saw which we cannot see?”

The children were silent a minute, and then Amy murmured, “Was it their hearts, ma’am?”

Mrs. Mordaunt replied kindly, “Yes; and he saw how differently his words would tell on the hearts of the crowd around. And so he taught them a lesson in this story which we call—”

“The parable of the sower,” said Kitty quickly.

Then Mrs. Mordaunt examined the children about the parable, and finding they had attended to it and understood it, she talked to them about it.

“Now, dear children,” she said, “this school-room, with its whitewashed walls, is a very different place from the shores of the Sea of Galilee; and you, little children, with your pleasant English homes, and your Bibles, and your Sunday schools, I daresay think yourselves very different from the grave priests, and clever lawyers, and rough Hebrew labourers and farmers, and Roman soldiers, who gathered around the Saviour then. But among you, as among that multitude, who have so long since gone the way of all the earth, the eye of Jesus Christ (for he sees here as well as there) sees two great divisions, not of rich and poor, or clever and stupid, but of those who are his disciples and those who are not. Which class would you like to belong to?”