The Childrens Portion | Page 3

if he met the people hastening soiled and weary from their daily
toils, the joy would go out of his heart. He would begin to think of the
poor lives they were leading. And he would cry within himself, "Oh
that the lot of these toiling crowds had fallen on that happy Age! It
would have been easy then to be good. Goodness was in the very air
blessed by His presence. The people had but to see Him to be glad."
And sometimes his sorrow would be for himself. Sometimes,
remembering his own struggles to be good, and the difficulties in his
way, and how far he was from being as good as he ought to be, he
would say, "Would that I myself had been living when Jesus was on the
earth." More or less this wish was always in his heart. It had been in his
heart from his earliest years. Indeed, it is just a speech of his, made
when he was a little boy, which has been turned into the hymn we so
often sing:--
"I think when I read that sweet story of old, When Jesus was here
among men, How He called little children, as lambs, to His fold, I
should like to have been with Him then.
"I wish that His hands had been placed on my head, That His arms had
been thrown around me, That I might have seen His kind looks when
He said, 'Let the little ones come unto Me.'"
Goldmorrow's thoughts were different. They went forward into the
future. He had hardly any of Yestergold's difficulties about being good.
He did not think much about his own state. What took up all his
thoughts was the state of the world in which his brothers and he were
living. How was that to be made better? As he went up and down in his
father's kingdom, he beheld hovels in which poor people had to live,
and drink-shops, and gambling-houses, and prisons. He was always

asking himself, how are evils like these to be put away? Whatever good
any Age of the past had had, these things had never been cast out. He
did not think poorly of the Age when Christ was on the earth. He was
as pious as his brother. He loved the Lord as much as his brother. But
his love went more into the future than into the past. It was the Lord
who was coming, rather than the Lord who had come, in whom he had
joy. "The Golden Age would come when Christ returned to the earth,"
he said. The verses in the Bible where this coming was foretold shone
like light for Goldmorrow. And often, as he read them aloud to his
brothers and his sister, his eyes would kindle and he would burst out
with speeches like this: "I see that happy time approaching. I hear its
footsteps. My ears catch its songs. It is coming. It is on the way. My
Lord will burst those heavens and come in clouds of glory, with
thousands and tens of thousands in His train. And things evil shall be
cast out of the kingdom. And things that are wrong shall be put right.
There shall be neither squalor, nor wretched poverty, nor crime, nor
intemperance, nor ignorance, nor hatred, nor war. All men shall be
brothers. Each shall be not for himself but for the kingdom. And Christ
shall be Lord of all."
In these discussions Goldenday was always the last to speak. And
always he had least to say. I have been told that he was no great
speaker. But my impression is that he got so little attention from his
brothers when he spoke, that he got into the way of keeping his
thoughts to himself. But everybody knew that he did not agree with
either of his brothers. His belief was that the present Age, with all its
faults, was the Golden Age for the people living in it. And there is no
doubt that that was the view of his sister Faith. For when at any time he
happened to let out even the tiniest word with that view in it, she would
come closer to him, lean up against his side, and give him a hidden
pressure of the hand.
III.
SEARCH FOR THE GOLDEN AGE.
When these views of the young Princes came to be known, the people
took sides, some with one Prince, some with another. The greatest

number sided with Yestergold, a number not so great with Goldmorrow,
and a few, and these for the most part of humble rank, with Goldenday.
In a short time nothing else was talked about, from one end of the
kingdom to the other, but the time of the