“A Boy’s Influence.”  Two families lived in one house.  In each of these families there was a little boy about the same age.  These boys slept together.  One of them had a good pious mother.  She had trained him to kneel down every night, before getting into bed, and say his prayer in an audible voice, and to repeat a text of scripture which she had taught him.  Now the first time he slept with the other little boy, who never said any prayers, he was tempted to jump into bed, as his companion did, without kneeling down to pray.  But he was a brave and noble boy.  He said to himself—­“I am not afraid to do what my mother taught me.  I am not ashamed for anybody to know that I pray to God.  I’ll do as I have been taught to do.”  He did so.  He let his light shine.  And see what followed from its shining!

The little boy who had never been taught to pray learned his companion’s prayer, and the verse he repeated, by hearing them, and he never forgot them.  He grew up to be an earnest Christian man.  When he lay on his deathbed, quite an aged man, he sent for the friend, whose prayer he had learned, to come and see him, and told him that it was his little prayer, so faithfully said every night when they were boys, which led him to become a Christian.  He repeated the prayer and the verse, word for word, and with his dying lips thanked his friend for letting his light shine as he did, for that had saved his soul.

Here is another illustration of a Christian letting his light shine and the good that was done by it.  We may call it: 

“The Shilling Bible, and what Came of It.”  Some years ago a Christian gentleman went on a visit for three days to the house of a rich lady who lived at the west end of London.  After tea, on the first evening of his arrival, he called one of the servants, and telling her that in the hurry of leaving home he had forgotten to bring a Bible with him, he requested her to ask the lady of the house to be kind enough to lend him one.

Now that house was beautifully furnished.  There were splendid pictures on the walls, and elegantly bound volumes in the library and on the tables in the parlor; but there was not a Bible in the house.  The lady felt ashamed to own that she had no Bible.  So she gave the servant a shilling and told her to go to the book store round the corner and buy a Bible.  The Bible was bought and given to the gentleman.  He used it during his visit, and then went home, little knowing how much good that shilling Bible was to do.

When he was gone the lady at whose house he had been staying said to herself: 

“How strange it is that an intelligent gentleman like my friend could not bear to go for three days without reading the Bible, while I never read it at all, and don’t know what it teaches.  I am curious to know what there is in this book to make it so attractive.  I mean to begin and read it through.”  She began to read it at first out of simple curiosity.  But, as she went on