A minister’s widow once told me that she had gone home after hearing a sermon of mine on the text, “What profit is there in my blood?” and had destroyed a paper of poison she had purchased in her despair on the previous Saturday night.  It was not a sermon from her unconscious minister, but it was far better; it was a conversation that Christiana held with her four boys that fairly and for ever put all thought of the pond out of their mother’s remorseful mind.  “So Christiana,” as we read in the opening of her history—­“so Christiana called her sons together and began thus to address herself unto them:  My sons, I have, as you may perceive, been of late under much exercise in my soul about the death of your father.  My carriages to your father in his distress are a great load on my conscience.  Come, my children, let us pack up and be gone to the gate, that we may see your father and be with him, according to the laws of that land.”  I like that passage, I think, the best in all Christiana’s delightful history—­that passage which begins with these words:  “So she called her children together.”  For when she called her children together she opened to them both her heart and her conscience; and from that day there was but one heart and one conscience in all that happy house.  I was walking alone on a country road the other day, and as I was walking I was thinking about my pastoral work and about my people and their children, when all at once I met one of my people.  My second sentence to him was:  “This very moment I was thinking about your sons.  How are they getting on?” He quite well understood me.  He knew that I was not indifferent as to how they were getting on in business, but he knew that I was alluding more to the life of godliness and virtue in their hearts and in their characters.  “O sir,” he said, “you may give your sons the skin off your back, but they will not give you their confidence!” So had it been with Christian and his sons.  He had never managed, even in his religion, to get into the confidence of his sons; but when their mother took them into her agonised confidence, from that day she was in all their confidences, good and bad.  You who are in your children’s confidences will pray in secret for my lonely friend with the skin off his back, will you not? that he may soon be able to call his sons together so as to start together on a new life of family love, and family trust, and family religion.  That was a fine sight.  Who will make a picture of it?  This widow indeed at the head of her family council-table, and Matthew at the foot, and James and Joseph and Samuel all in their places.  “Come, my children, let us pack up that we may see your father!” Then did her children burst into tears for joy that the heart of their mother was so inclined.