Children all live in a fairyland and God our Father would have us never outgrow our childhood. To Him we must all be "children of a larger growth." All around us in our toddling years was a world of marvels; dreamland adventures skirted our lives and we all but tripped on the garments of unseen happy folk. But with the lapse of cruel years that world has been out-traveled and its happy dwellers found all false. Yet we are still in fairyland, a fairyland we shall never outgrow, for death will but fix our homes therein forever.
What wonderful dwellers in our fairyland! Sweet home it is of our living dead. For some there were who played with us a while or maybe guided us in our playing time and then the years swung round and we clasped their whitened hands and kissed their frozen lips and bid them low beneath the mounded sod. But the magic touch of God has quickened them and they are yet alive on the farther shore. Deathless knights there are, strong Angels from the great white Throne, who stand on guard over our souls all the waking day and on through the watchless hours of the night. Unseen they are, as enchanted knights must be, but how they care for us their mortal charges!! There is a Cinderella too, in our later magic land, a Cinderella from an Eastern village, the gentle Maid of Galilee, who won the heart of God and rose to be the Mother of our King and then became our Mother too. No queen so good, no mother with a love like hers!
In the well-thumbed books of our younger days page after page was scanned for the story of gentle princes in disguise seeking the love of other hearts and now when the princes have lain long years with the buried past of the earth, we find another King in meanest guise suing for the hearts of His wayward friends. Our Lord, "silent in His love," conceals Himself behind the veil of bread, is locked within His narrow cell. What age-long suit for hearts, what patient waiting for our love! And the hidden King is rich with priceless gifts that mortal eyes can never find. He anoints men with the ointment of His grace-and lo! priests are made, His "other Christs." Like Midas, strange, storied monarch of old, their very touch turns all into eternal gold. With simple words they drive the death of sin away, and call God's grace to contrite hearts. They kneel by dying bed and pour the sacred oil on tired limbs and the weary feel come safe to Father's home. But oh! their power as they stand in vestured majesty and hold the whitened wafer in their trembling hands and whisper soft the magic words - and lo! the hidden King comes down among His folk.
So while we work and while we play and while we kneel in prayer and while we live our simple lives, fairy gifts of God's high grace steel silently in upon our hearts and the wonder of God's later fairyland is ever new!
O Jesus, dearest God, I thank You for this fairyland, fairest fairyland of Your own making. Childhood's dreams were very bright; but oh! how poor and mean and frail now that I dwell so really in this Your land of wonders ever new. Who but You, my God, could have built it all! Who but You could have thought it all! Thanks, yes, thanks a thousand times! Thanks for my Angel-guides, for my ransomed dead, for the priceless treasures of Your unseen grace! Thanks for Mary, best of Mothers, tenderest of queens! Thanks too Lord Jesus, deepest thanks for your own dear hidden Self. Oh, keep me ever in Your fairyland.
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