“‘What did thee say, child?’ she inquired, with only a glance towards Clary.
“‘Tell mother what you want,’ said the child encouragingly. ‘Mother, she never heard about Jesus.’
[Illustration: “‘Tell mother what you want,’ said the child, encouragingly. ‘Mother, she never heard about Jesus!’”—P. 224.]
“‘Thee never heard about him, poor child,’ said the lady approaching Clary. ‘And how dost thou live in this world of troubles without such a Friend?’
“‘I don’t know, ma’am,’ said Clary, weeping. ‘We are very poor, and we never had any friends; and a long time ago in the winter I read a verse at the printing-office about some one who loved poor people,—and I thought maybe he would help us if he knew about us.’
“‘He knows all about thee now,’ said the good Mrs. Allen, with a look of strange wonder and pity on her pleasant face. ‘Sit down here child, and I will tell thee. Didst thou never hear about God?’
“‘Yes ma’am—’ said Clary, hesitatingly,—‘I believe I have. Mother says ‘God help us,’ sometimes. But we are very poor—nobody thinks much about us.’
“‘God is the helper of the poor and the father of the fatherless,’ said Mrs. Allen with a grave but gentle voice,—‘thee must not doubt that. Listen.—We had all sinned against God, and his justice said that we must all be punished,—that we must be miserable in this world, and when we die must go where no one can ever be happy. But though we were all so bad, God pitied us and loved us still—yet he could not forgive us, for he is perfectly just. It was as if we owed him a great debt, and until that debt was paid we could not be his children. But we had nothing to pay.
“‘Then the Son of God came down to earth, and bore all our sins and sorrows, and died for us, and paid our great debt with his own most precious blood.
“‘Yes ma’am,’ said Clary, whose heart had followed every word,—‘that’s what the verse said,—
‘Jesus the Saviour, is his name,— He freely loves, and without end.”
“She stood as if forgetting there was any one in the room; her eyes fixed on the ground, and the quiet tears running down from them,—her hands clasped with an earnestness that shewed how eagerly her mind was taking in that ‘good news’—‘peace on earth and good will toward men’—which was now preached to her for the first time.