Mark 10:13-16 And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them.… The whole case of the death of babes seems at the first thought to be indeed a marvel; yet what is there in life which is not a marvel? How few things there are which we can regard in any other light than that of unintelligent, though not unreasonable, wonder. Still, few things seem more marvellous in the rough aspect than that a little child should be allowed to suffer pain and die. Here is a little bud, a tender nursling of the spring, in the fairest way for flower, fragrance, and fruit, nipped by that bitter envious frost before a single leaf unfolds itself. Here is a little barque, freighted with costly wares for the markets of earth and heaven, bound for eternity, launched into life and wrecked at the very harbour mouth. A work nobly simple, yet beautifully complex, with God's fresh breath of life inspiring its every look, and the power of the sweetest nature swaying its every movement; lo! it drops from His hand, as it might seem, in the very act of His holding it up to show its beauty to the world. It falls to pieces in an hour. The high art of its creation is negatived in a moment; its lovely mechanism siles off into dust; all its myriad contrivances for life — no one of which any man since the world began can imitate with the slightest effect, no, nor even rightly understand — in a few days are crumbled into mould, and as if they never had been at all. In fine, a work designed for duties of seventy or eighty, or perhaps a hundred years, capable of beautiful deeds, and of filling happy places in the house, the neighbourhood, the State, and all along in the family of the Church, is destroyed, as it might seem, by some slight accident, before any one of those duties has been met; and, to outward view, annihilated as though it had never been meant for anything whatsoever in the world. (W. B. Philpot, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. |
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