Southern Christian Advocate

SUNDAY SCHOOLS.
I WILL VISIT MY ABSENTEES.

Toward the close of school, a few Sabbaths since, I had been urging upon the teachers, from a variety of considerations, the importance of visiting the absentees of their respective classes. After school, one of them came to me and said, "Sir, I am going to do my duty, and visit my absentees." "Go, brother," I replied; "God will reward you for your work of faith and labor of love."

He went. A day or two afterward I saw him again. "Brother," said he, "I am glad you urged it upon me last Sabbath, to visit my absentees; for when I called to see little Robert—who had been absent two or three Sabbaths—I found him nigh unto death. He had been sent to school, as usual, by his mother, but had played truant, and gone swimming with some seductive companions. Having entered the water when overheated by exercise, and stayed too long in it, he was seized with cramp,—was with difficulty rescued from a watery grave, and had been ever since in a state of high fever and delirium, with occasional intervals of returning reason.

He was asleep when I entered, but his mother's sobs, as she told me the cause of his sickness, awoke him from his feverish slumbers, after I had sat by his bedside some ten or fifteen minutes. He immediately recognized his teacher, and with joy beaming in his countenance, asked me how I was, and why I had not been to see him before? It would be difficult for me to express the emotions of my breast at that moment. True I was not to blame that he had played truant—that he had broken the Sabbath, that he had gone into the water—and that he had in consequence been sick; but I knew and felt that I was censurable in the highest degree for not having gone to inquire into the cause of his absence on the afternoon of its first occurrence, and for having deferred doing so until aroused to a sense of duty by your remarks, while in the mean time he was dangerously ill, and at the point of death."

"Well," said I, "what reply did you make?" "I told the dear boy that I was not aware that he was sick. He looked in my face, and with tears in his eyes, said, 'But, teacher, I always thought you loved me; how could you let me be away three whole weeks, and never once ask, Where is Robert?'" I never before saw conviction and contrition for the neglect of duty more strongly depicted in any countenance than in that of his teacher. With an energy that bespoke the most sincere regret and the sternest resolution, he added, "I have learned a lesson that I shall never forget. So long as I am a Sabbath-school teacher, I will 'visit my absentees.'"