A Father's Lesson

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 21, 1907

A Father's Lesson

The Sunday School Times contains the following choice editorial:— “It is the child who sends his parents to school—not so much the parents who send the child. And every disciple of the Master Teacher, whether parent or not, must go to school to the child if he would learn the ways of the kingdom. A father sat by his little boy's bedside at night, trying to soothe into quiet a wakeful and restless mind, busy with a hundred child-interests that the night did not seem to shut out. Suddenly the little fellow disclosed the deeper cause of his troubled thought. ‘Father,’ he said, with a sob, ‘I'm afraid to tell you things sometimes, because you speak so quickly!’ ‘Why, what do you mean, little boy? I don't intend to speak quickly to you, and I never want you to be afraid to tell me anything you please,’ was the earnest response. ‘Yes, father, but you do speak quickly sometimes, and you say “No,” so that I am afraid, and don't ask you lots of things I want to ask.’ That father was in school, and a hard schooling it was. He came to his knees beside the bed then, and he made some promises to the boy which are to be kept. But when the father was alone, this lesson began to come out of the schooling: ‘What if my Father in heaven should answer me quickly, and say “No,” so that I should be afraid to ask him lots of things I want to ask? If he can be so patient as he is with my questionings, what right have I to be other than that with a child's questions?’ The little boy had not been wakeful in vain.”—Home Herald.