At the threshold of Christmas the heart of the world is opened wide to its children, and all our hands are busied with the things they may do to multiply and sweeten the surprises of the year's dearest, because most unselfish, day. Time was when the "wee bairns" constituted a relatively unimportant factor in the home life, when they were remanded to silence, "waited for their betters," and were but infrequently accorded any special privilege; but a great change has taken place, and now, for the most part, they are not only given a chief seat in the household, but from the day when they are found nestled amid the dainty, perfumed products of a mother's sweet anticipation, to the rounding out of their dependent years, they are remembered in pleasure's every plan, and parental strength, time, and means are unstintedly placed upon the altar of their benefit or satisfaction.
All this we have done, and yet we are led to inquire if we have done our best and highest for them; if in any worthy degree we have fulfilled the Master's injunction when he said, Suffer the little children to come unto me. Have we assured them a normal life, a fair chance, an unobstructed path home? Have we done all we could to secure their escape from the disabilities that ill comport with innocence,—freedom to enter their Father's kingdom?
To-day as never before we are thankful for the illumination which has come to us through Christian Science and for every advance it has brought us in upright, wholesome living, and the thought of the children makes us doubly thankful, for we have come to understand, as not before, the meaning to them of our every triumph over sensuality, our every realization of a high ideal of purity of thought and life, and the right apprehension and persistent knowing of the falsity, the nothingness of those mortal laws which would bind the little ones from their infancy. Surely if paternal love makes the burdens light which we have assumed for the present joy and temporal welfare of our own, the thought of subserving their higher interests will be yet more welcome and inspiring.
