“Oh, how joyful the bird must have been when allowed to fly free up—up high into the air!” exclaimed Elsie.
“Not more glad than the poor cleansed leper, of whom that bird was a type,” observed Mrs. Temple. “Think of his joy at being free to return to his family—his wife and his children; and his thankful delight when worshipping once more with his former companions in the court of the Tabernacle of his God!”
“It seems to me that there is a verse in one of the Psalms which shows that David had the cleansing of a leper in his mind when he prayed to the Lord to forgive him his sin,” remarked Lucius.
“I was just thinking of the same when mamma read about the hyssop,” said Amy. “It made me feel sure that Agnes was right when she chose leprosy as a type of sin.”
“What is the verse to which you allude?” asked the mother.
Lucius was the one to reply, but the lips of Amy silently moved, as she repeated the same verse to herself from the fifty-first Psalm—“‘_Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow!_’”
“Oh, mamma! I remember the story of the poor leper who came to the Lord Jesus,” said Elsie, “and how he cried, ‘_Lord if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean!_’”
“How much more deeply interesting is the Saviour’s reply, ‘_I will, be thou clean_,’ if we look upon leprosy as a type of sin,” observed Mrs. Temple. “The Lord was able and willing to heal, not the poor man’s body alone, but also his soul; and make him free from all stain of sin as well as from all taint of disease.”
“THE leper story which has always interested me most is that of Naaman the Syrian,” said Lucius, when he had put back Dr. Kitto’s large volume in its place in the bookcase.
“O yes, yes,” interrupted little Elsie; “I know that story too, quite well. I know that Naaman was a great man, and rich, and a famous general besides, but he had the dreadful sickness which no doctor could cure. I remember how Naaman came in a grand chariot with prancing horses to the house of the good prophet Elisha, and how angry he was when only a servant came out and told him to wash seven times in the river Jordan.”
Elsie stopped almost out of breath from the rapidity with which she had spoken. All the young Temples were familiar with the account of the cure of the Syrian, which was one of their favorite Scripture stories.