youngest.

Side by side with these conditions there is an increasing tendency to
regard human beings as protoplasm; to shake off the idea of Jesus as to a
living God, the Father of us all, and to account for human life by
molecules; to count His judgment day and a supreme judge of robust and
wholesome righteousness as superstitions. And this is all full of danger
to child life. Child life and happiness are bound up with the Kingship of
God. There is but one Supreme to whom they are "the greatest;" but one
hand which has a millstone for the necks of those who offend them, and the
depths of the sea. Church-goers and chapel-goers may sin against
childhood, and men who disclaim churches and chapels may love it. But,
though no hard-and-fast line can be drawn between men on this ground, it
remains certain that Jesus is the world's most august protector of a
child. The man who leaves its limbs naked, its sickness untended, He sends
down to hell.

I.

What, then, should His followers think of such deeds as these, taken more
or less at random, from the list of offences for which, through the action
of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, by its
London Committee alone, two hundred men and women have been tried and
convicted?

Making an ill and dying step-child live in a damp, dark back-kitchen,
while the "own" children in the front kitchen sit round a bright winter's
fire; shutting up another step-child to sleep in the coal-cellar, three
others to sleep next the unceiled roof with one quilt, in their
night-gowns, wind and sleet and rain finding them; sending a child at ten
o'clock on a February night, recovering from diphtheria, a mile to an inn
for beer; sending two starved, almost naked, little girls for half a
hundredweight of coals in rain and sleet twice the same December night;
laying a baby close to the fire to get rid of it through thirst; putting
another in a thorough draft to get rid of it through cold; leaving a girl
in bed covered with sores, infested with lice, under one scab a maggot,
never washed or tended, lying in her own excrements; strapping a deaf and
dumb boy because it was so extremely difficult to make him understand;
drawing a red-hot poker before the eyes of a blind girl, and touching her
hands with it (this was done by her brutal brother, but in the presence of
the parents, and for fun); after beating, locking-up for the night in a
coal-cellar with rats; immersing a dying