“Now mine, papa,” said Elsie:  “’He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life.’  Doesn’t that mean that to believe on Jesus will take us to heaven at last—­when we die?”

“Yes; and as soon as we really and truly believe on him—­trust and love him, giving ourselves to him and taking him for our Saviour—­he gives us a life that will last forever, so that we will always be his in this world and in the next, and dying will be but going home to our Father’s house on high, to be forever there with the Lord, and free from sin and suffering and death.”

“Never any more naughtiness, and never any more pain or sickness,” said Elsie thoughtfully.  “Oh, how delightful that will be!”

“Yes, and to be with Jesus and like him,” said Grace softly.  “This is my verse:  ‘We love him because he first loved us.’”

“Oh, what love it was!” exclaimed her father. “’Beloved, let us love one another:  for love is of God; and everyone that loveth is born of God.  He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.’”

“I have the next three verses, papa,” said Lucilla:  “’In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.  Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.  Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.’”

“Yes,” said her father; “if we would be followers of Christ, he must be our example; he who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth; who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to Him that judgeth righteously:  who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness:  by whose stripes ye were healed.”

“What does that mean?” asked little Ned.

“That the dear Lord Jesus suffered in our stead; taking the punishment due to us for our sins, the punishment we deserved, and letting us have the life bought with his righteousness and his blood.”

“What is righteousness, papa?” asked the little fellow.

“Holiness, goodness.  Jesus was perfectly holy, and those who truly love him will be ever trying to be like him; will go from strength to strength till everyone of them in Zion appears before God.  That is, till they get to heaven; and there they will be so like Jesus that they will never sin any more.”

“And what does that other part, ‘by whose stripes ye are healed,’ mean, papa?” asked Elsie.

“That Jesus suffered for the sins of his people (there was no sin of his own for him to suffer for), and that because he bore the punishment in their stead they will not have to bear it, and will be delivered from the love of it; that is the healing—­the being made well of that disease—­the love of sinning, the vile nature that we are all born with, because our first parents disobeyed God there in the garden of Eden.”