Your Own Little Girl

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jul 7, 1903

Your Own Little Girl

MR. MOODY tells how he was sent for by the mother of one of his Sunday-school pupils who had been drowned in the Chicago River. He went to the house, and talked with the woman; told her he would see that a coffin was sent up, and that he would come on the day appointed to conduct the funeral. Then, accompanied by his own daughter, who was about the age of the one drowned, he started for home. They walked in silence for a time, when the child said: “Papa, suppose we were very, very poor, and I had to go to the river every day to get wood; and suppose I should slip in and be drowned, wouldn’t you be awful sorry?” Mr. Moody says it was then and there that he awoke to the fact that he was getting “professional.” Folding his darling to his bosom with a strong embrace, as if it were indeed she who lay in death, instead of the other, and lifting his heart to God in prayer, he turned and retraced his steps to the poor woman’s door. On being admitted he grasped that weeping mother’s hand, wept as if his child, and not hers, had been snatched away by death, and got down to pray. This time professionalism was gone; now he really took a part in the “fellowship of her suffering.”—Selected.