Marigold Hunt - Life of Our Lord for Children

A Life of Our Lord for Children

MARIGOLD HUNT

SOPHIA INSTITUTE PRESS
Manchester, New Hampshire

A Life of Our Lord for Children was originally published by Sheed and Ward (New York, 1939). This 2003 edition by Sophia Institute Press contains new illustrations and minor editorial revisions to the original text.

Copyright 2003 Sophia Institute Press

All rights reserved

Jacket design and illustrations by Theodore Schluenderfritz

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Sophia Institute Press
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Nihil obstat:
Arthur J. Scanlan, S.T.D.
Censor Librorum

Imprimatur:
Francis J. Spellman
Archbishop, New York
New York, June 16, 1939

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hunt, Marigold.
A life of our Lord for children / Marigold Hunt.
p. cm.Originally published: New York : Sheed & Ward, 1939.
Summary: Describes the life of Jesus Christ and the establishment of his Kingdom as the Catholic Church.
ISBN 1-928832-64-4 (alk. paper) 1. Jesus ChristBiographyJuvenile literature. [1. Jesus Christ. 2. Catholic Church. 3. Christianity.] I. Title.BT302.H87 2003
232.9'01dc222003018721

One

The Church Is the Kingdom

W hat is the Church we belong to? Is it just like other peoples churches, only the right one? No, it is much more than that. It is a kingdom, the kingdom of Christ the King.

This book is about how the King came into this world and about the Kingdom He founded while He was here. It does not tell you all about the things He did. There is only room in a small book for a few of them; but when you have read it you will know at least one very important thing about Him and about us. He did found a Kingdom, and it is to that Kingdom that all of us belong.

Some countries have kings ruling over them, some have presidents, some have still other arrangements. But in whatever way the country we belong to is managed, we all belong to the Kingdom our Lord founded; it is called the Catholic Church.

Two

Before the King Came

Y ou know that God made the world we live in, and the sun and stars and everything else that we can see, besides all the other things that we cannot see. He made them perfectly, and He was pleased with what He had done. Then He made Adam and Eve, a man and a woman, and put them to rule over His world and to look after it and enjoy it.

But Adam and Eve fell into sin the first and worst of all the sins in the world; it spoiled everything, and made the whole world begin to go wrong. If only they had behaved themselves, we would have had no pain or sorrow or worry, and we would have gone straight to Heaven when we died. It is a pity they sinned, isnt it?

But they were sorry, and as soon as they had told God so, He promised that it would all come right someday because He would send Somebody who would make up for what they had done. But they did not know when this would happen or that the Person who came to save the world would be God Himself.

Now, if God was to come into the world, the world had to be made ready to receive Him. If men were not to forget all about Him, and about the promise of a Savior in the meantime, there had to be some people in the world whose special business it was to remember those things.

God arranged for this by choosing a family who were the beginning of a whole race of people, the same people we call Jews. The race that this family grew into called themselves the Chosen People, because God had chosen them to keep alive the two great truths: that there is one God not no god or dozens of gods, as people always begin to think if they are left to themselves and that there was Somebody coming who would be of their race and who would save the world.

The first part of the Bible is called the Old Testament, and it is all about the things that happened to the Chosen People and how God dealt with them. In it you can read about all kinds of curious men and women who led very adventurous and interesting lives.

I have to tell you a little about them here; otherwise reading our Lords life will be like coming into a movie when it is half-finished, and never finding out what happened in the first part.

Abraham is the first of them. God told him that his descendants would possess a beautiful new country and that they would grow to be so many that they would be as uncountable as the stars in the sky. Abraham had a son called Isaac, to whom God repeated these promises, and Isaac had a son called Jacob, who was given them again, too. These three, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are the ancestors of all the Chosen People.

There is something else you should know about Jacob. His name was changed to Israel, and that is how the Chosen People came later on to be called Israelites, or just Israel. Jacob, who was called Israel, had twelve sons, and one of them was called Joseph. Jacobs other sons were very jealous of Joseph; in fact they couldnt stand him, so they sold him as a slave to traders who were going into Egypt, and told his father that he had been killed.

Joseph did so well there that he became the greatest man in Egypt except for Pharaoh. (The kings of the Egyptians were called pharaohs.) So when presently there was a famine in the country where his father and brothers lived, they were thankful to be allowed to come and live in Egypt, too.

When Jacob was dying he foretold what would happen to the descendants of each of his twelve sons. One of his sons was called Judah; the prophecy for him was that when the Chosen People had kings, they would all be descended from Judah, right down to the time when the promised Savior came.

Well, Jacobs descendants stayed in Egypt for a long time. Presently there came to be such a lot of them that the Egyptians began to think that soon there would be no room in the country for anyone else. Then a pharaoh who knew nothing about Joseph came to the throne; he was very hard and unjust to the Chosen People, and passed a terrible law that all their boy babies were to be killed as soon as they were born. But it is easier to make a law like that than to get people to keep it, and a lot of boy babies were allowed to live.

One of the babies who lived to grow up was given the name Moses. When Moses was a baby, his mother put him in a basket and hid him in the bulrushes along the edge of a river where Pharaohs own daughter found him. She took Moses home and raised him herself.

When Moses had grown up, God chose him to lead His Chosen People out of Egypt and into the land He had promised to Abraham so long ago. When it was time to begin doing this, God spoke to Moses and told him His plan. Moses was an astonishing person. He was afraid to do what God asked him, but he was not afraid to ask God what His name was. God gave him this mysterious and interesting answer, I am who am, and He said that the Israelites were always to remember that that was what God should be called.

Then Moses said, I cant go and make Pharaoh let Your people go, because I stammer, and cant talk impressively! So God let him take his brother Aaron with him to do the talking.

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