The Little Coat
His mother made him a little coat, and brought it to him from year to year.” — I. Sam. ii. 19.
You may smile at this text. Well, it is but a little text, about a little garment that turned to dust many hundred years ago. We cannot always be discussing the great central and commanding themes, such as the Divine attributes, redemption, regeneration, immortality, and the judgment to come. Life is largely made up of small things, and the small things are often very great in their influence upon character and destiny. This little text about a lad’s “wee” coat has a connection with some of the most vital concerns of life, and is suggestive of many important truths — especially for parents.
In a parent’s eye there is no greater personage in this world than a little child. As the least of the planets floats nearest to the sun, so the baby of the household gets the central place in the home and the warm chimney corner in the heart.
What a marvel of beauty — nothing short of a miracle — is a first-born child! With what a glow of honest pride has many a young mother made for her infant treasure the tiny garment in which it was to be presented to the Lord, in the beautiful rite of baptism! And in many a home there is carefully packed away — as above all price — the little white dress in which was baptized the dar-Hng one whom Jesus took home long ago.
There is a sweet touch of nature in the passage which I have chosen to-day. Away back in those distant lands and ages there was a young wife, whom the Lord remembered and to whom He gave a son. How overflowing was her joy! (For Hannah was not like some heartless women of our day who regard children as a burden and a nuisance, and would rather risk child-murder than become mothers.) The grateful soul of Hannah broke forth in thanksgiving: “For this child I prayed; and the Lord hath given me my petition which I asked of Him. Therefore also I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the Lord.”
As soon as the infant Samuel was weaned, Hannah goes up to Shiloh, the sacred city, to perform the vow which she had promised in the days of her childless affliction. With a happy heart she makes her pilgrimage to the shrine of Jehovah — not only presenting her beloved boy to the Lord but also offering several costly sacrifices. God had remembered her sorrow and had made her weep for joy. He had given her a son, and she consecrates him to the service of the temple. He could not have been more than three or four years old when Hannah placed him under the care of Eli the high priest, and he found his home thenceforward in the dwelling place of the Most High.
Moreover, his mother made him a little coat (or tunic), and brought it to him from year to year when she came up with Elkanah to offer their annual sacrifice. What sort of a garment could the little tunic have been? Well, I cannot satisfy your curiosity; but we may well believe that so sensible a mother as Hannah did not degrade her child into a doll, to be bedecked with fooHsh fineries. It must have been a modest and becoming garment which the godly mother made each year for the appareling of her child. I wish that I could say as much of the apparel which thousands of Christian parents now load upon the forms of their children; as if God did not make a child beautiful enough without the aid of elaborate fineries and expensive upholsterings. I tell you that this overdressing of the body strikes through into the mind and heart — poisoning the mind with affectation and with most unchildlike greed of admiration and vain-glory. How can a check ever be put upon the crop of fops and fashion-worshipers if children are trained into fopperies and fooleries from the nursery? How can a child be instructed to frugality, humility, self-denial, or any sort of spiritual-mindedness while its free young graces are smothered under the artificial trappings of pride and extravagance? I entreat you, Christian parents, that if you lend your children to the Lord, not to disfigure the sacred loan by turning an immortal being into a doll. That wise Hebrew mother made for her son such a garment as became his station; for Samuel was devoted to the service of God, and not to the “lust of the eye and the pride of life.”
Going now more deeply into the spiritual suggestions of our text, let me remind you that clothing has a figurative signification in the word of God. We are exhorted to be clothed with humility, and to keep our garments unspotted from the world. Christianity is hkened to a vesture; and believers are commanded to “put on Christ,” so that they need not be found naked or disfigured with the “filthy rags” of self-righteousness. As our dress is the part of us most visible to everybody, so should our Christ-likeness be visible at first sight to all whom we meet. This illustration of character by clothing extends even into the heavenly world; for we are told that “whosoever overcometh shall be clothed in white raiment,” and the saints shall be attired in robes that have been washed to spotless purity in the blood of the atoning Lamb of God.
Nor is it a mere pulpit pun that the very word “habit” is employed to signify both the dress of the body and the moral tendency and disposition of the mind. We parents clothe our children in both senses of the word. We provide the raiment for their bodies, and, in no small degree, we provide the habits of their thought and conduct. We make for them coats that will last — which no moth can eat nor time deface — coats which they may never outgrow as long as life endures.
Mothers, the Creator puts into your hands an unclothed spirit as well as an unclothed body. You make a garment for the one; and in many a home there is hardly a rest for your busy needles through all the year. But shall the mind — the immortal spirit — be left S naked, or be compelled to pick up at random its habits of thinking and acting? This were impossible. Our children will put on our ways and our habits in spite of us. Our character streams into our children, entering through their eyes and ears and every faculty of observation. What they see us do, they will do; what they hear from us lodges in their memory, and, like seed dropped from a parent stock, will come up in their conduct, for good or evil. We are forming their habits; and, in the primary school of home, we are educating them every hour. Upon their plastic, susceptible minds we are printing constantly the impressions which come out in character. No photographic plate is so sensitive to the images which lodge upon it as are the receptive minds of our children to whatever they are seeing or hearing. The sagacious Dr. Bushnell has happily said that “every sentiment which looks into the little eyes looks back out of the eyes, and plays in miniature on the countenance. The tear that steals down a mother’s cheek gathers the little face into a responsive sadness. A fright in the mother’s face will frighten the child. Our irritations irritate them; our dissimulations make them tricky and deceitful.”
If a boy is handled harshly, is thumped or jerked into obedience, he will probably turn out a sulky, obstinate, and irritable creature — just what our impetuous impatience made him. If malicious gossip or scandal sour our talk at the table or fireside, our children’s “teeth will be set on edge.” Give your boy a dollar for the toyshop or the place of amusement, and only a dime for the Lord’s contribution box, and you will teach him that self-indulgence is ten times more important than charity. If we live for the world, it is very likely that our children may die of the world. If we set our affections on things above, and seek first the kingdom of God for ourselves and for them, we may reasonably hope to win them into the upward pathway we are treading. And thus, my fellow-parents, are we making “little coats “for the younger children, and the larger coats for the older ones, all the while. When they go away from home they will wear the habits which we put upon them. We really send ourselves to the boarding school or the college in the bearing and breeding which our sons and daughters carry thither. Our older children are wearing now the coats of character which we cut out for them ten or twenty years ago. How do we like their dress? Is it after the good Bible pattern? Mr. A. used to think it a genteel and hospitable practice to set the decanter on his table; and his sons learned to love the wine too well. They have practiced on these home lessons until their “redness of eyes” and thickness of tongue prove their too great familiarity with the bottle. How does he like the coat they wear?
Brother B. thought that, after all, the theater was not so perilous a place as his pastor or other Puritanic people had pictured it. So instead of providing unexceptionable recreations for his children he gave them carte blanche for the playhouse, with all its lascivious attractions and salacious seductions. Some of them have gone too often for their purity of heart or peace of conscience. Can he now pull off the “habit” which he permitted or encouraged them to put on? Mrs. C. insisted that the assembly room was the best place to acquire gracefulness of carriage and elegance of deportment. Her daughters learned everything that the ballroom teaches — even to that style of dance that is “the last sigh of expiring modesty.” As she looks now upon their gay apparel of fashion and frivolity, so different from the “ornament of a meek and quiet spirit,” her motherly eyes are sometimes moistened at the sight.
Here is a father who spends his Sabbath over his cigar, his Sunday morning newspaper, and his business letters. His sons put on the coat and wear it to their soul’s peril; they are not likely to lay it aside unless the grace of God shall open their eyes to the solemn fact that to lose the Sabbath is to lose the soul. In one family the prevailing topic is “money — money “; in another dress and parade; in another sporting; in another music and fine art; in another the tone of daily conversation is toward the best things worth living for; and the pattern which the parents set the children copy. How will all these “habits” of thought and conduct look when they are subjected to the test of experience and the searching light of the day of judgment? Ah, these mindgarments, which beautify and adorn, or else disfigure and deprave, are very apt to last for a lifetime; they will be worn by our offspring long after many of us have turned to dust. They will be garments of light and loveliness, or else of shame and sorrow.
Do not imagine, therefore, that the “little coat” is worthy of only slight attention. The sum of life is made up of little things. They determine character and often decide destiny. As the peasant’s coarse frock and the monarch’s
o A MODEL CHRISTIAN
robe are both made up of many small threads woven together, so is the garment of character woven out of the innumerable thoughts and words and deeds of each person’s daily existence. It is in the little things that Bible piety makes itself most winsome; and the mischief wrought by inconsistent Christians arises from the indulgence of petty sins that are as destructive as moths upon the garment. Dr. McLaren pithily says that “white ants pick a carcass clean sooner than a lion will.” I fear that you and I are often great sinners in little things. The little meannesses of word and look, the irritations of temper, the small duplicities of speech, the “white lies” that are only whitewashed, the small affronts and petty spites, the thoughtless neglect of other people’s welfare, and the paltry excuses by which we strive to excuse ourselves from painful duty — all these make up an awful aggregate of sin. A snowflake is a tiny thing, that might melt in an infant’s hand. But enough of these may be heaped up by a blizzard on a railway track to stall the most powerful engine and its train. So is it the aggregate amount of inconsistent acts and neglects of duty that impair the influence of the individual Christian; they may accumulate into snow banks that block up revivals and bring a whole church to a standstill. No sin is a trifle; no sin can be safely allowed to get headway. “Let that worm alone and it will kill your tree,” was said once to a gardener in a nobleman’s park. Sure enough; the gardener neglected the little borer, and the next year’s yellow leaves showed the slow assassination of the tree.
On the other hand, it is the sum total of daily good deeds that make up the “beauty of holiness.” The richest crops of grace spring from tiny seeds — especially when they have been watered by prayer.
Let no one despise the day of small things. The noblest Christian lives often have their origin in some faithful word spoken in love, or in the reading of a tract, or in some small occurrence, or in a single resolution to break with some besetting sin. One sentence seems to have brought the ardent Peter and the beloved John to their decision of discipleship. One sentence converted the jailer of Philippi. The outcome of those few words has been felt in the spiritual history of thousands of others since that day. Paul little knew how many souls, in all time, he was addressing when he said to the frighten ecy jailer, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” In fact, nobody ever knows how much good he is doing when he does just one good thing.
A word of praise from his mother made Benjamin West a painter and president of the Royal Academy. A kind sentence or two of commendation, bestowed in a short talk in a prayer meeting, led me to enter the sacred ministry. From that incident I learned never to underrate the influence of a few words spoken at a critical moment.
A godly wife told her husband that she “trembled for him “; and that single sentence spoken in love sent him trembling to the cross. Dr. Payson, of Portland, once asked a group of young men to let him read to them a hymn; and when it was ended they were all in tears. The Divine Spirit was in that tender voice. Harlan Page, reared like his Master to the humble trade of a carpenter, became a marvelously successful winner of souls to Christ by uttering a few “words in season” with an emphasis of love that penetrated to the core.
That noble Boanerges of the western New York pulpit. Dr. Wisner, of Ithaca, said that he stopped, on a hot summer day, at a farmhouse for a glass of water. The farmer’s daughter handed him the refreshing draught, and he repaid her by a kind, tender word about Jesus as the water of life. Several years afterwards a middle-aged woman recognized him on the deck of a steamboat, and thanked him for the few plain, faithful words which led her to Christ. It is a sin and a shame that we Christians let slip so many opportunities to drop a word of truth through an open ear into an open soul. Grant that many a truth thus dropped has not sprouted; neither has every sermon preached been the means of converting a soul. But the awakening power of a discourse has often lain in a single point pressed home. It is the tip of the arrow that penetrates the “joints of the harness.”
The great lesson in the saving of souls is never to “despise the day of small things,” never to lose an opportunity, and never to underrate the power of a single truth spoken in love. Revivals in a church commonly start in one or two hearts. The first revival in the little church in which my own early ministry was spent began in the heart of a little girl. Her few words awakened one woman, and that woman came at once to me, and proposed special meetings; they were worth more to me than any year in a theological seminary.
I might multiply these illustrations of the greatness of the littles; for nothing is small that has God’s Spirit in it and working through it. In conclusion, I would impress once more upon the hearts of all parents the prodigious importance of all those numberless words and deeds by which they weave those garments of character that shall be worn long after they are in their silent sepulchers. No office is comparable to that of parentage; no trust is so sacred as that of an immortal spirit in the plastic period of childhood. When the Creator lays a newborn babe in the arms of its parents, He says to them, “Take this child and nurse it for Me and I will give thee thy wages.” The answer of gratitude and faith ought to be: O God, Thou hast put Thy noblest work into our hands. We accept the precious trust. We will shelter this young life under Thy mercy seat. We will nurse this soul in its infancy with the sincere milk of truth, that in after years it may bear strong meat, for strong service of God and righteousness. Help us to order our own lives in harmony with Thee, so that this young life may reflect Thine image in reflecting ours!
To such conscientious fidelity God offers the only wages that can satisfy the claims of love.
He pays the heart’s claim in the heart’s own coin. Faithful, painstaking, prayerful Hannah found her rich reward in the sight of Samuel’s after-career as Israel’s upright judge. Timothy’s “little coat” outlasted his mother Eunice. The mother of the Wesleys was repaid for all her patient, loving discipline when her sons reared the world-wide tabernacle for Methodism. God never breaks His covenant with those who fulfill their covenants to Him.
Fathers, mothers, we are weaving the habits of our children every hour! We do it, as clothes are fashioned, stitch by stitch; and most of all by the unconscious influence of example. The estate which we can bequeath to them may be small. We may not all be able to afford them the costly education of great schools or universities. But day by day we can be patiently weaving for them that garment of godliness that, by Divine grace, shall grow brighter and fairer until they shall walk in shining apparel before the throne of God.
V
THE JOURNEY OF A DAY