sank to her knees beside him. "Pray with me, David."
"What shall I pray?"
She said: "How do you pray now, my son?"
"Mother, I haven't prayed for years."
"Yes," she said, not rebuking him at all. "Yes, I supposed so. I've come to pray differently, David; I say our Lord's prayer and now four words, mostly, and they are from our Lord's prayer. 'Thy will be done,' I say. 'Thy will be done.'"
She whispered the prayer and he tried to repeat it with her but a mighty guilt filled him. He thought of his father and mother praying beside him when he was a baby and consecrating him to God, if God spared his life; and after God had spared him, he had cheated God. And who could cheat God, the Lord God to whom vengeance belongeth? For God, if he was God, must have done this thing to his mother and for no fault of hers but for David's.
What did God say of himself in his own commandment? "I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children."
But suppose there were no children; suppose your sin saw to that? Suppose, defying God, you lived after your desire but denying children. Then God struck your mother.
David heard his mother's voice repeating the beautiful words of the twenty-third psalm:
The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want;
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. . .
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me. . . .
