death, than that he should bring the blood of another’s soul upon his head.  It must needs be that occasions of stumbling come, but woe, woe to that man by whom they come, when he and the slain soul’s Saviour shall stand face to face!  Oh, if there be one among us who is playing the tempter, and doing the devil’s work, let him get to his knees, and cry with the conscience-smitten Psalmist, “Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God, Thou God of my salvation”; and peradventure even yet He may hear and have mercy.

(3) Let fathers and mothers ponder what this teaching of Jesus concerning man means for them in relation to their children.  There came into your home a while ago a little child, a gift from God, just such a babe as Jesus Himself was in His mother’s arms in Bethlehem.  The child is yours, bone of your bone, flesh of your flesh, and it bears your likeness and image; but it is also God’s child, and it bears His image.  What difference is the coming of the little stranger making in you?  I do not ask what difference is it making to you, for the answer would be ready in a moment, “Much, every way”; but, what difference is it making in you?  Does it never occur to you that you ought to be a different man—­a better man—­that you ought to be a different woman—­a better woman—­for the sake of the little one lying in the cradle?  Do you know that of all the things God ever made and owns, in this or all His worlds, there is nothing more dear to Him than the soul of the little child He has committed to your hands?  What hands those should be that bear a gift like that!  Perhaps we never thought of it in that way before.  But it is true, whether we think of it or not.  Is it not time to begin to think of it?  This night, as we stand over our sleeping child, let us promise to God, for the child’s sake, that we will be His.

(4) Last of all, we must learn to set Christ’s value upon ourselves.  This is the tragedy of life, that we hold ourselves so cheap.  We are sprung of heaven’s first blood, have titles manifold, and yet, when the crown is offered us, we choose rather, like the man with the muck-rake, in Bunyan’s great allegory, to grub among the dust and sticks and straws of the floor.  In the times of the French Revolution, French soldiers, it is said, stabled their horses in some of the magnificent cathedrals of France; but some of us are guilty of a far worse sacrilege in that holy of holies which we call the soul.  “Ye were redeemed, not with corruptible things, with silver or gold,” but with blood, precious blood, even the blood of Christ.  And the soul which cost that, we are ready to sell any day in the open market for a little more pleasure or a little more pelf.  The birthright is bartered for the sorriest mess of pottage, and the jewel which the King covets to wear in His crown our own feet trample in the mire of the streets.  The pity of it, the pity of it!

In one of Dora Greenwell’s simple and beautiful Songs of Salvation, a pitman tells to his wife the story of his conversion.  He had got a word like a fire in his heart that would not let him be, “Jesus, the Son of God, who loved, and who gave Himself for me.”