A LITTLE CHILD SHALL LEAD THEM.
"MAMA!" said a little yellow-haired fellow of four summers, "Mama! I wish God hadn't made yions, and tigers, and bears." "Because," continued this young reasoner of the golden curls, "because they are kuel, and kill yambs, and sheep, and yittle childyen yike Flora and me—I don't yike animals that kill and eat each other, and I do wish that God had not made them." "But," replied the mother, "little Harry must remember that the time will come when 'the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.' The time is coming when the wild animals will no longer hunt flesh and blood for their prey, for the Scriptures say that, 'the lion shall eat straw like the ox.'" Then, at these words, up stood Flora, a little girl of six. The word had evidently been spoken which opened the fountain of her heart, and her tongue was unloosed. The sense of justice and right often seems stronger in children than in grown men and women. "Mama!" she said, "if the time is coming when wild animals will not kill and eat, but will feed like cows and sheep, on corn and grass, then, mama, we ought not to eat beef and mutton." The child said no more, but the mother was struck with her little girl's words. How dense some of us are! She had not, herself, noticed the drift the argument was taking. She saw not, till now, that when we pray, "Thy kingdom come," that prayer includes man's conversion to a bloodless diet, quite as much as it includes the wolf's conversion from its ferocious habits and life of cruelty, to a life of gentleness and peace. What a pity it would be if the wolf should lose its taste for blood before man loses his!—Selected.