In a sermon which Dean Stanley, an English minister, preached to
children in Westminster Abbey, he told the following story: "There was a
little girl living with her grandfather. She was a good child, but he
was not a very good man; and one day, when she came back from school, he
had put in writing over her bed, 'God is nowhere,' for he did not
believe in the good God, and he tried to make the little girl believe
the same as he.
"What did the little girl do? She had no eyes to see, no ears to hear
what her grandfather tried to teach her. She was very small. She could
only read words of one syllable at a time; she rose above the bad
meaning which he had tried to put into her mind, because her little mind
could not do otherwise, and she read the words not 'God is nowhere,' but
'God is now here.'"
And she was right. She was wiser than her gray-haired grandfather. For
God is now here. He is everywhere. And whenever even the smallest child
speaks to Him in the simplest prayer He hears the child's voice. God is
now here. That is a good motto for us to take with us to school, to keep
us honest; to play, to keep us sweet; to our homes, to keep us
unselfish.