p. 107 | GAVE HER CHOICEST

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 25, 1879

GAVE HER CHOICEST.

They who give only their poorer powers, and present only second-rate offerings, in religious service, sin against their better knowledge. How fixed in the human soul is the conviction that Heaven does not accept such, is seen in all the agonizing surrenders and tragic sacrifices of pagan faith.

The insane deed of blood of which the Freeman child, in Pocasset, Mass., was the victim, was a like convulsion of blind obedience—as utterly uncontrolled by the religion and spirit of Jesus as was the act of the poor Hindoo mother of Kedgeree.

This woman lived on the Ganges, near Sanger Island, and she had a pair of beautiful twin babes. But one of them was a girl, and blind, and the benighted mother on that account supposed herself under “Gunga’s” curse for some offense she had done.

A missionary’s wife heard her lamenting, and heard the story of her grief. The god must be appeased, the woman said. He was certainly angry, or the children would have both been boys, and with good eyes. She would have to make a sacrifice to soothe his wrath. The Christian lady did what she could to impress her with better teachings, but with little effect. She left her sadly, but not dreaming what the wretched mother meditated doing.

A day or two later the lady called again. As before, the mother sat beside the little basket-cradle weeping—but there was but one babe in the cradle. It was the blind girl. The other had been drowned in the Ganges! The Christian lady was horror-struck when she knew the truth.

“Unhappy woman!” she exclaimed; then after a silence she added with something more like pity, “If you were driven to do this, why did you destroy the one you loved, and spare the one you hated?”

The woman sobbed and beat her breast. “Oh, it is that that breaks my heart,” she said. “The god must have the best. When I had a perfect one, he would not take the other. Alas, my boy, my boy!”

Why should so many who live in this land of light be shamed—not by the deed—but by the devotion of such cruel heathen belief? Under the gentle law of Christ we know that God’s demand for the best we have only bids us use it for him, and devote it to him, not destroy it.

If we serve him selfishly, may not even the poor, dark-souled Hindoo mother of Kedgeree rise up and condemn us?—Youth’s Companion.