We have had a great spiritual blessing. Only three of my thirty-three Sunday-school boys are not Christians. Sometimes the responsibility almost overpowers me. They have so little help at home, but find so much to hinder and discourage. One bright, smart boy of fifteen has within a few months come into my class, and has accepted Jesus as his Saviour. For nine years he has been smoking, following the example of his father and older brother. Since his conversion he feels he cannot follow this habit, and he is making brave efforts to overcome it. Young as he is, the habit has a very strong hold upon him, and he finds it hard work. But God is helping him, and I know he will succeed. He comes to me each night to report his progress, and for a week has met me every night with a glad smile and the words: “God has helped me, and I haven’t smoked to-day.” One day he got so far as to light the cigarette a boy had forced upon him, but he remembered the verse he had just learned—I Corinthians x, 13—and he threw the cigarette away. There are many equally interesting cases, where help and encouragement are so much needed.
ONE OF OUR SCHOLARS.—He is in the Third Reader class, and is learning the simplest questions in arithmetic. This is his first year in school, and instead of being a little boy, as you might suppose, he is thirty-five years old, and a “Baptist preacher.”
When he first came, he said: “I ain’t got no learning; what I knows, I just picked up myself.”
One of the boys said: “I advised him to come, so that he can learn to explain, and when he gets up to preach, folks won’t sniggle in their sleeves.”
“Yes, I always give for missions and everything else,” said Phil. “I give something every Sunday; don’t you?”
“Why, no; I give five or ten cents when I think I can spare it, when I have a good deal of money and don’t want it for anything,” said Tom.
“I give whatever papa or mamma gives me for it,” said James. “Sometimes it’s more, and sometimes it’s less.”
“Oh, I always give my own money!” said Phil. “I don’t think it’s any giving at all unless you do that.”
“Yours is the best way, I’m sure,” said Tom, soberly. “They say it’s the regular giving that counts.”
“And then, of course, what you give is just so much out of what you’d like to spend on yourself.”