LIKE AS A FATHER | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, Cal. · Jul 26, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 30.

"LIKE AS A FATHER."

THE life of a beautiful girl was nearing its close. The busy father, active in legal and political life, made short visits to his office to perform the most necessary duties, and hurried home again day by day to be near her in her last days. He spent every possible moment in granting every wish, and it was a comfort to him that his daughter was finding in her religion a source of strength that robbed approaching death of terror. He was an upright man, but one from whose busy life religion had been crowded out.

One day, as he sat by the bedside his daughter asked him to read to her. He found a magazine and read some bright bits of poetry and fiction. It pleased her, but she wanted something else.

"Father," she asked, "will you get my Bible and read from that?"

"Certainly, my dear," he answered, and was rather glad than otherwise of her request.

He was a strong man with a clear voice and with a good degree of self-control. He had mastered his own feelings in those days of patient and affectionate ministration, that he might bring to the sick room every element of cheer that was possible. And now he began, calmly and quietly, to read the Sermon on the Mount. He knew where to find it, and he knew that it was good, and he read with a growing appreciation of its beauty and its sublimity.

But the daughter grew more and more restless.

"Don't you like it?" he asked.

"O, father," she exclaimed, "it isn't that I want, about our righteousness exceeding that of the scribes and Pharisees! Can't you find the place where it says, 'Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him?'"

His voice trembled a little, but he said, "I will find it," and he turned to the concordance in the back of the Bible. But when he found the place and began to read, "Like as a father," he could bear no more.

"O, my child," he cried, "if God cares for me as I do—"

He bent over the bed and wept.

"It is the verse we both need," she said, softly, after a few minutes.

And he knelt beside the bed and said:

"Yes, my dear, that is the verse for us both. —Youth's Companion."