Suffer the Children

AM Psalm 119:97-120 • PM Psalm 81, 82
Isa. 59:15b-21 • 2 Tim. 1:15-2:13 • Mark 10:1-16

For worshipers at St. Paul’s, probably the most familiar sight is the stained glass window behind the altar. It shows three children gazing up at Jesus. Below them are the words, “Suffer the Children.” The scene depicts the story in our gospel today when Jesus scolds his disciples for trying to shoo away the children they think are pestering their master. The words are from the story as told in Matthew (19:14) in the King James Bible: “Suffer [that is, allow] the little children…to come unto me.”

The lovely window has a poignant connection to our church and town. The woman providing it, Clementine Watson Boles, was part of two prominent Fayetteville families. Watson and Boles streets run parallel to and between Dickson and Lafayette just east of the railroad. On June 19, 1877 her marriage to Thomas D. Boles was the first performed in our present church. Thomas’s first wife, Amanda, had died four years earlier almost to the day, leaving six children.

A year and a half later came the first of a long list of tragedies when one of them, Edmund, fourteen, died of what would the family plague of “consumption,” probably tuberculosis. Scarcely three months later Clementine’s first child, Watson, died at a year and two weeks. She was pregnant with her second, Turner, but almost exactly a year after Watson’s death she lost him at eight months. Only nine months later, in November, 1881, Minnie, nineteen, passed.

After seeing four children die, Thomas followed them four days into the new year of 1883, again of consumption. A fifth child, twenty-three-year-old Carrie in turn followed him half a year later. At her husband’s death Clementine was carrying their third son. Charles was born two months later. He died two months shy of his third birthday. St. Charles Street between Collier Drug and the post office is named for him. It was only sixteen months later when Charles’s half brother, Benjamin, sixteen, died.

Clementine would live until 1921, well to do and socially prominent but understandably bereft. “You never saw anyone so lonely and desolate,” she wrote an aunt after Charles’s death. Mortality among the young was far more common in those years than in ours, but her story and Thomas’s is unusual for the extent and depth of its raw pain.

“Suffer the Children.” Any parent who loses a child will tell you that it leaves a terrible and unhealing wound, but losing seven in nine years is beyond imagining. Our window tells me we should cherish our daughters and sons when we are still together on earth, and it testifies that from its first years until today St. Paul’s has been a family itself, a source of comfort and solace for those who meet at its altar rail.

Written by Elliott West

Elliott teaches history at the University of Arkansas. He has been a member of St. Paul’s for more than twenty-five years.