About This Book
About This Book
Our Island Saints
There was once a child who spent many happy hours in a beautiful garden. She loved to play among the flowers, to stand on tiptoe and look up at the stately white lilies, or bend down to search among the fragrant leaves for sweet-scented violets. Such rare and exquisite flowers blossomed all around her, that it was difficult to decide which was the fairest, and the child used to fancy as she passed along that each one whispered to her 'choose me.' But she would only shake her head and hurry on, until she reached her own little plot of flowers in a corner of the garden. It was not so sunny or so gay, perhaps, as some of the other flower-beds, but it belonged to her, and that made it beautiful in her eyes.
'It is you I love best, dear flowers,' she would say, bending down lovingly over the velvet pansies and sweet pinks, 'because you are my very own, and grow in my very own garden.'
It is with us, as with that child. We walk through God's garden and look at the fair flowers we call His saints. Although they are all most fair and we love them all, yet we have a special love for those that have lived in our own dear land, because they seem to belong more particularly to ourselves. The saints of every land belong to God; but as He has given us our island home, so we feel that the island saints are our special possession, and like the child we say, 'We love you best, dear saints, because you are our very own.'
by Amy Steedman, Edinburgh, 1912
About This Book
In God's Garden
Stories of the Saints for Little Children
There is a garden which God has planted for Himself, more beautiful than any earthly garden. The flowers that bloom there are the white souls of His saints, who have kept themselves pure and unspotted from the world.
In God's garden there is every kind of flower, each differing from the other in beauty. Some are tall and stately like the lilies, growing where all may see them in their dress of white and gold; some are half concealed like the violets, and known only by the fragrance of kind deeds and gentle words which have helped to sweeten the lives of others; while some, again, are hidden from all earthly eyes, and only God knows their loveliness and beholds the secret places where they grow. But known or unknown, all have risen above the dark earth, looking ever upward; and, although often bent and beaten down by many a cruel storm of temptation and sin, they have ever raised their heads again, turning their faces towards God; until at last they have been crowned with the perfect flower of holiness, and now blossom for ever in the Heavenly Garden.
In this book you will not find the stories of all God's saints. I have gathered a few together, just as one gathers a little posy from a garden full of roses. But the stories I have chosen to tell are those that I hope children will love best to hear.
Let us remember that God has given to all of us, little children as well as grown-up people, a place in His garden here on earth, and He would have us take these white flowers, the lives of His saints, as a pattern for our own. We may not be set where all can see us; our place in God's garden may be a very humble and sheltered spot; but, like the saints, we may keep our faces ever turned upward, and learn to grow, as they grew, like their Master, pure and straight and strong - fit flowers to blossom in the Garden of God.
Saints are like roses when they flush rarest,
Saints are like lilies when they bloom fairest,
Saints are like violets, sweetest of their kind.
by Amy Steedman
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