Twilight And Dawn by Caroline Pridham

C >> Caroline Pridham >> Twilight And Dawn

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24

This world of ours is a very old world, but there was a time when all was
new; not only the sun and moon, but all that you see around you had a
beginning--a birthday. There was a time when no such things were, and there
was a time when they began to be. Now it is about this beginning that I
want you to think a little.

[Illustration: "HOW PLEASANT THE LIFE OF A BIRD MUST BE!"]

As we open our eyes to-morrow morning and see the light come in at the
window, let us thank God that He has made His sun to shine upon us, to send
away the darkness and bring a new day. And as the light grows and grows,
and we lie awake and listen to the morning songs of the thrushes and
blackbirds and the chatter of the sparrows, do not let us forget that God
gave its own sweet note to every one of those warblers, and that the air
has been full of the songs of birds ever since the day, so long ago, when
the first little lark flew up, up, up into the blue sky and sang its first
song, so full of gladness. Then, as the pleasant sound of the lambs,
bleating after their mothers, comes to us from the fields, let us remember
there was a day when that sound, which you know so well, was heard for
the first time; and as we go for our walk and look around us at the green
fields and the trees with their leaves and blossoms, and then far away to
where the strong mountains lift their heads against the sky, let us say to
ourselves, "All these things, which seem as if they had been there always,
had a beginning; there was a time when there were none of them, and then
there came a time when they were there, for God had made them to be."

While we were talking about this, the elder children and I, the little boys
were very quiet; but I was afraid it was all rather difficult for them,
so I asked Leslie and Dick to tell me what we mean when we speak of the
beginning of anything.

I forget whether I got the answer from them or from one of the elder ones,
but I know I thought it a good answer when somebody said, "The beginning of
a thing is the first of it."

Then we spoke about the beginning of the table at which we were sitting--I
suppose we chose that to talk about because it was so close to us--how it
was made of wood, and the wood was once a tree; and if it was an oak, that
giant tree must have been long, long ago only a tiny acorn in its pretty
green cup. Each of those children, too, as they sat round the table, had
had a beginning. Have you ever thought of this? There was a time, not so
very long ago, and yet you cannot remember it, when your life had not
begun. And then your birthday came, the first of all the birthdays; that
day when your dear father and mother thanked God for giving you to them to
love and take care of, and everyone at home was so glad because God had
sent a little child to the house; someone who had never been there before.

Just think, you were that little child; only a tiny thing, but as you
opened your baby eyes to the light, and stretched out your little clasping
fingers, your first cry, and every movement of your little body, showed
that you were alive. Then, by-and-by, the nurse said, "Hush, baby is
asleep!" and everyone moved about softly, so as not to wake the little
creature, who had not been there yesterday, the baby whose life had just
begun, the little traveller who had just started on its journey through
time to the great eternity beyond.

But you knew nothing about this; only your mother knew, as she watched you
in your sleep, that one more tiny vessel had been launched upon that stream
which flows on, on, till it meets the ocean which has no shore--the time
which never ends.

I remember, a very long time ago, how fond I used to be of making boats.
Not far from where I lived a real ship was being built, and I used to watch
how it was made, and think that when I grew up I should like above all
things to be a shipwright, for I had heard someone say that was the name of
the man who was building this beautiful vessel. Of course, the boats which
my brother and I used to make were only toy boats--we generally made them
of paper--but however small they were, we were very particular to give each
of them at least three tall masts. Then, when it came to sailing them,
we had to be content with any water we could find, and generally these
three-masted vessels made very short voyages, from one side of a big tub to
the other; and though, by rocking the tub, we used to manage to make pretty
stormy weather for them, they generally reached the end of their voyage in
safety. It was quite another thing when we set our vessels afloat upon what
we thought a real river, like the Thames or the Severn; but it was only a
brown stream, which, ran along the bottom of a meadow, and was crossed, not
by a bridge, but by stepping-stones. Sometimes, on a lovely day in June, we
were allowed to go down to our river, and we used to sit for hours among
the flags which grew beside it, hidden by the tall reeds and the yellow
flowers, making little green boats out of the broad leaves of the flags,
while the sound of "Cuckoo, cuckoo" came from the orchard close by.

When we had made as many boats as we could carry, each with a curly-whirly
bit of a leaf for its sail, we used to balance ourselves carefully on the
stones--for we knew that if we got wet we should not be allowed to go to
our river again--and launch our little fleet, one by one, on the brown
water, and then eagerly watch each green vessel upon its course. We wanted
them to sail across to the other side; but I need not tell you that the
river water was very far from being so calm as the water in the tub, and I
do not think many got safely over.

One little boat would start off very straight, and then suddenly stop
because it had run against some hidden rock; the greater number, in spite
of all our efforts to steer them, would get into the current, and so be
carried down the stream out of our sight; while some at once turned on
their sides, got filled with water, and became dismal wrecks.

I can remember well how happy we were in spite of all such disasters and
losses!

But we should have been surprised indeed in those days if anyone had told
us, as we launched our boats, and watched them sail away from land--to
"America" or "India," or any of those far-away places where we used to
pretend they were going--that we were like those boats of ours. And yet it
would have been true, for we too had been launched; the voyage of life had
begun for us; and every birthday that came found us a little farther from
the place from whence we had started--a little nearer to the end of the
voyage, the place whither we were bound. Yes, in this sense you and I and
all the people in the world are voyagers on the stream of time. But this
voyage of our life--how long will it be?

That is one of the things which no one can tell. God alone knows.

In one sense the story of your life may be soon told; your little voyage
down the stream of time may be very short, and your boat may reach the
great ocean of eternity before many birthdays have come and gone. But in
another sense it is a story without an end; and this is what makes your
beginning such a great thing to think of. It is a beginning which has no
end; the part of you which is most really yourself, must live on always.
You can never stop living for one moment; for there is on board your little
boat a wonderful passenger. God has put into you a living soul, which can
never die.

But how soon God may call that soul back to Himself, away from the body,
where it lives now, who can tell?

I am just now thinking of some young voyagers whose passage from time to
eternity was indeed short, but the story is so sad that I could not tell
you about it if I did not remember what the Lord Jesus once said, when He
was teaching His disciples. He called a little child to Him, and began
to speak to them about such little children, and one of the things which
He said was this, "The Son of man is come to save that which was lost"
(Matt. xviii. 11). And again He said (you will find this verse in the same
chapter), "It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one
of these little ones should perish."

Since even the very little children have gone astray from God, so that the
Lord Jesus spoke of them as "lost" and "perishing," how could I tell you
this story, if the Lord from heaven, He who called Himself the "Son of man"
when He was here in this world, had not come to save that which was lost?

This is the sad, true story:

It was on a beautiful Monday morning, in the bright June weather, that the
scholars belonging to a large Sunday-school in Ireland were travelling with
their teachers and friends from the town where they lived to spend the day
at a lovely place by the seaside. How proud and happy they were, all these
boys and girls, as they marched through the town waving their flags and
singing, and how much they had to say about the grand time they were going
to have! You may be sure they liked a long holiday out of doors, with games
and races, and buns and oranges, as much as you do, and so they got into
the train in high glee.

But that train never reached the lovely place at the seaside. Before it
had gone very far on its way there was a dreadful accident; some of the
carriages were crushed and broken, as if they had been matchboxes, and
many of those bright boys and girls were killed all in a moment--the short
voyage of their life was over; oh, how soon! By-and-by some doctors came
hurrying to the place where the ruined train lay, and began to look about
to find those who might not be dead, only hurt. It was a sad sight they
saw, and one they can never forget. While they were busy, giving help here
and there, someone noticed two little ones, sitting on the green bank,
beside the wreck of the train. A doctor went up to see if they were hurt.
No, they were picking the daisies which grew among the grass; they were too
young to understand what a dreadful thing had happened.

"Were you in the train, my dears?" said the kind doctor.

"Yes," said a little girl of six years old, "we were in the train, and she
was too," and she pointed to where another child lay quite still upon the
grass; not picking daisies--no, she could not speak or move, she was dead.

Put your finger on your wrist, and keep very still for a moment. Listen.
You feel something, do you not? Something alive, and it goes beat, beat;
one, two, three, like the ticking of a watch. As long as you live, that
tick, tick will go on; but for this little girl it had stopped, because her
heart had ceased to beat. When the doctor put his hand upon her wrist, he
could feel nothing moving there. "She is quite dead," he said, as he took
her body up from the grass that it might be carried back to her home, the
home which she had left that morning, so happy and gay.

At the Sunday-school these children had been taught about the "wondrous,
glorious Saviour," of whom you sometimes sing, and we may believe that the
spirit of this dear child, redeemed to God by the precious blood of Christ,
went straight from that wrecked train to spend its long for ever with the
One who had loved her and given Himself for her; and that God, who takes
care of the poor little body which was laid low in the grave with many a
sad tear, will raise it in glory, one day, when "death is swallowed up in
victory."

But there were not only very little children in that wrecked train. We are
told of a boy who was terribly hurt, but lived an hour after the crash
came. As he lay by the wayside, a young girl with a pitiful heart came and
knelt beside him.

"I will pray you up to heaven," she whispered.

"I am going there!" said the dying boy; "Lord Jesus take me, I am ready."

Of another his poor mother said--

"I asked him before he started--'Well, dear, have you committed yourself
to your heavenly Father?' 'Yes, mother, I have,' he said. So I gave him
my blessing and sent him off, and that was the last time I ever saw him
alive."

These boys did not think as they left their homes that morning that they
would never return, but they had learned to know the Lord Jesus Christ as
their own Saviour, and so when danger and death came, they were ready to
leave this world and go to Him: their boats were not wrecked; they sailed
right into port.

And now that we are coming to the end of our lesson for to-day, let us
"think back," and see if we can remember what it is all about, and then we
will mark the subjects (_a_), (_b_), (_c_), (_d_), to help us to keep them
in mind.

The subjects were--

(_a_) That very far away time which God speaks of as "the beginning."

(_b_) It is God alone who can tell us about this time.

(_c_) God, who made all that has a beginning, Himself had no beginning.
This means that there never was a time, no matter how long ago, when God
was not. If you think back, back, even to the time when there was no sky,
no earth, no great ocean, you can never come to a time when there was no
God.

(_d_) "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God." The "Word" is one of
the names of the Lord Jesus Christ, who came to this world that He might
show us how very much God His Father loves us, and who could say, "He that
hath seen Me hath seen the Father."

For He who was once born a little child in this world and laid in the
manger at Bethlehem, and who grew up in the home of Joseph and Mary at
Nazareth, is the Same who was "in the beginning with God," for He "was
God."

This is what God has told us about His great Eternity, when Time, with its
days and weeks and months and years, had not begun.

"TIME AND ETERNITY.

"How long sometimes a day appears!
And weeks, how long are they!
Months move as slow as if the years
Would never pass away.

"It seems a long, long time ago
That I was taught to read;
And since I was a babe, I know
'Tis very long indeed.

"Days, months, and years are passing by,
And soon will all be gone;
And day by day, as minutes fly,
Eternity comes on.

"Days, months and years must have an end;
Eternity has none.
'Twill always have as long to spend
As when it first begun.

"Great God! no finite mind can tell
How much a thing can be:
I only pray that I may dwell
That long, long time _with Thee_."

JANE TAYLOR.

RUIN AND DARKNESS.

"_Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word
of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do
appear._"--HEBREWS xi. 3.

"_Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did He in heaven, and in earth, in the
seas, and all deep places._"--PSALM cxxxv. 6.

There are three words which God has used to tell us about His work which we
call "The Creation."

We read, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."

"And God made two great lights."

"And the Lord God formed man."

"Created," "made," "formed," these are the words; and it is of the first of
them we shall speak a little to-day.

Before my children came, I had been thinking how I could make it plain to
the little ones that there is a very great difference between being able
to create and being able to make anything. It happened that when they came
in they were all talking so fast, of something which had greatly delighted
them, that it was some time before I could find out what it was all about.
At last Sharley told me that as they were racing along with their hoops a
strange dog had followed them, and rubbed his nose against their hands,
wanting to make friends with them.

"We are quite sure it is nobody's dog," she said; "or at any rate it is
a dog that has lost its master, and has no home now. So after lessons we
are going to call it, and get it to follow us home. It is waiting for us
outside the door this minute."

"And I am going to make a kennel for it," said Ernest, who was very fond of
sawing and hammering away in the shed behind, the house, and wished to be
a carpenter, when he grew up; "at least, I am going to try, and I think I
can."

I may as well tell you at once that this little stray dog soon got tired of
waiting, outside the door. When lessons were over, and the children went to
look, no doggie was to be found; and as they did not know his name it was
not easy to call him. I have no doubt he found his own master and his own
home again, and was much better off there than he would have been in the
best kennel Ernest could have made, with seven boys and girls to take him
for a walk every day.

However that may be, I tell you of this dog because it was while Ernest was
talking about making a house for it that I was saying to myself, "I wonder
whether this plan of Ernest's about making a kennel will help them to
understand, what I so much want them to learn, about the difference which
there is between the words make and create."

First of all I had to tell them not to talk any more just then, but to
repeat their verses. Then we read--more than once--for Leslie and Dick
would not have liked to miss their turn, and there were not enough verses
for each to read one--what God has told us in the first five verses of His
book.

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

"And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face
of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

"And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

"And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from
the darkness.

"And God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And the
evening and the morning were the first day."

When we had finished I asked Chrissie what it means when we read that "God
created the heaven and the earth." Why is the word "created" used? Would
any other word have done instead of that one?

Chrissie said no other word would do, because to create means to make out
of nothing. He was right, was he not?

The next question was, "Why is create a word which can never be used except
when we are speaking of God?"

I don't know who answered, but someone gave the right reason--"Because only
God can make a thing be when there was nothing before it; nothing to make
it out of."

This seems quite plain, does it not? But do you know there was once a boy,
who did not believe that he could not create things until he had tried to
make something out of nothing, and found that only nothing came. He was
quite sure he could create anything if he only told it to come; so at last
his teacher said, "You had better try."

He was only a very little boy, so he thought he would try, and up he got
and stood as straight as he could on his chair, while he said with a loud
voice, "Fishes, be!"

Perhaps it was a good thing that this boy should thus prove for himself
that it is only God who can create anything; only God of whom it could be
said, "He spake, and it was done."

I did not tell this little story to the children, but I said to Leslie,
"You heard Ernest say just now that he was going to make a kennel for your
stray doggie; do you think he could make one?" Leslie thought perhaps he
might if he worked very hard; and then I asked them all whether, if he
worked very hard, day and night, for a long, long time, Ernest could create
a kennel?

"No, indeed he could not. He never could, no matter how hard he worked."
Everybody was sure of this; for even little Dick quite understood that if
the cleverest and handiest boy in the world were told that he must make
a box, he could not even begin to make the commonest box unless he had
something given him to make it out of, and something too to make it with.
"He would need wood," they said, "and nails, and a hammer and saw; and if
it were to be a nice box, to last long, he would want paint, and a lock and
key, and hinges; and if he wished everyone to know that it was his own box,
he must mark it with his name when it was finished."

Now I am sure you quite understand that this word "created," which you find
in the very first verse of your Bible, is a word which you must not forget
to notice whenever it is used, because it is a wonderful word, which can be
used only in speaking of God, the Creator, and of the Son of God, by whom
and for whom all the things that we can see, and all that we cannot see,
were created; and in whose power they stand together.

Now I want you to read again very carefully the verses which we have read,
and to notice that we have only one verse to tell us what God did at the
beginning; this one verse explains that it was then that He created the
heaven and the earth. This is all that God has told us, and it is just what
we need to know; for how could we ever have found out by what means this
earth of ours came into being, at the very first, if God had not been
pleased to tell us that He created it?

But what a happy thing it is just to listen to the account which God
Himself gives us, telling how the heaven and the earth came into being!

One who simply receives God's word into his heart will understand more than
the cleverest man who ever lived, who tries by his own mind to search into
the beginning of things, and to account for all that we now see around us
by any other way. We read, "By faith we understand that the worlds were
framed by the word of God." Faith does not wait till it sees, but believes
what God says, because He says it. We may say that we cannot understand
what creation is, but we can find rest for our restless thoughts by saying
"Yes" to all that God has told us--and the very first line of His Book
explains all that we need to know about, how the heaven and the earth came
into being, when it tells us that God created them in the beginning.

We read next, "And the earth was without form and void." We are not told in
the verse which follows anything more about the "heaven"; that means the
vast universe of which our earth is but a tiny part; but of the earth we
read two things which are very surprising, when we think of what it is like
now:

"Without form and void"--what does that mean?

After I had explained to the elder children that these words, which are
used to describe the earth, mean that it was waste and desolate and without
order, we looked for a verse in the New Testament which tells us that "God
is not the author of confusion" (1 Cor. xiv. 33); and then we spoke about
how we can be quite sure that the earth, which is part of God's creation,
was not in disorder, not a waste and desolate place in the beginning; and
we found in the Old Testament this other verse:

"For thus saith the Lord that created the heavens; God Himself that formed
the earth and made it; He hath established it, He created it not in vain,
He formed it to be inhabited; I am the Lord; and there is none else"
(Isaiah xlv. 18).

The reason why we found this verse was because I wanted to show Sharley and
Chris and Ernest that there the same word is used about the earth as in the
verse in Genesis of which we had just been speaking. The words "in vain"
are the same which were there translated "without form" by the people who
turned the Hebrew, in which most of the Old Testament was first written,
into English, that we might be able to read it. So you see how very
important words are, and learn that when God tells us in one part of His
Book that He created the earth not "without form," and in another part
that it was (or became) "without form," the state of the earth as it is
described in the second verse of the first chapter of Genesis was different
from its condition when God created it in the beginning. Between these two
verses, so close together in your Bible, ages upon ages may have run their
course; a distance of time may have passed so great that we cannot measure
it by any thoughts of ours.

What happened between the time, which God calls "the beginning," the time
of the earth's creation, and that time when what He created had become
"waste and desolate," we do not know. What this earth was like, when God
first created it, we do not know. How the plants and animals, which now lie
buried deep beneath the ground upon which we tread, and shut up within the
rocks, lived and died, we do not know. How confusion and desolation came,
we do not know. And why do we not know?

Because God has not told us. People have thought a great deal about it, and
they say that upon the earth itself may be read, as in a book, marks of
the many changes which it went through during that far, far away time; but
what we have to remember is that God does not tell us anything about it in
His Book; it is with the days and weeks and years of Time and the "from
everlasting to everlasting" of His great Eternity, about which He does
speak to us, that we have to do.

God speaks to us, the inhabitants of the earth, of what it concerns us to
know--and the first thing we learn about this earth upon which we live is
that it was created by Him.

The next thing that we learn is that the earth which He had "formed to be
inhabited" was "without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of
the deep." This was the state of the earth which God had created, when He
began the work of His wonderful "Days," and brought what had become a scene
of desolation into order and beauty, a place prepared for men to dwell in.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24