Nor all the gods beside
Longer dare abide,
Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine;
Our babe, to show his Godhead true,
Can in his swaddling bands control the damnëd crew.”
To the Jew, childhood was the sign of fulfillment of glorious promises. The burden of psalm and prophecy was of a golden age to come, not of one that was in the dim past. A nation is kept alive, not by memory, but by hope. The God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob was the God of a procession of generations, a God of sons and of sons’ sons; and when we read, in the last words of the last canonical book of the Old Testament, that “he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers,”[25] we are prepared for the opening, four centuries later, of the last chapter in the ancient history of this people. In the adoration there of the child we seem to see the concentration of Jewish hope which had for centuries found expression in numberless ways. The Magnificat of Mary is the song of Hannah, purified and ennobled by generations of deferred hope, and in all the joy and prophecy of the shepherds, of Simeon and of Anna, we listen to strains which have a familiar sound. It is indeed the expectation of what this child will be and do which moves the pious souls about it, but there is a direct veneration of the babe as containing the hope of the people. In this supreme moment of the Jewish nation, age bows itself reverently before childhood, and we are able by the light which the event throws backward to perceive more clearly how great was the power of childhood, through all the earlier periods, in its influence upon the imagination and reason. We may fairly contend that the apprehension of the sanctity of childhood was more positive with the Jew than with either the Greek or the Roman.
It remains, however, that this third great stream of humanity passes out, in the New Testament, from its Hebraic limitations, and we are unable, except by a special effort, to think of it as Jewish at all. The Gospels transcend national and local and temporal limits, and we find ourselves, when considering them, reading the beginnings of modern, not the close of Jewish history. The incidents lying along the margin of the Gospels and relating to the birth of the Christ do, as we have seen, connect themselves with the earlier national development, but the strong light which comes at the dawn of Christianity inevitably draws the mind forward to the new day.
The evangelists record no incidents of the childhood of Jesus which separate it from the childhood of other of the children of men. The flight into Egypt is the flight of parents with a child; the presence of the boy in the temple is marked by no abnormal sign, for it is a distorted imagination which has given the unbiblical title to the scene,—Christ disputing with the Doctors, or Christ teaching in the Temple. But as the narrative of the Saviour’s ministry proceeds, we are reminded again and again of the presence of children in the multitudes that flocked about him. The signs and wonders which he wrought were more than once through the lives of the young, and the suffering and disease of humanity which form the background in the Gospels upon which we see sketched in lines of light the outline of the redeeming Son of Man are shown in the persons of children, while the deeper life of humanity is disclosed in the tenderness of parents. It is in the Gospels that we have those vignettes of human life,—the healing of the daughter of Jairus, the delivery of the boy possessed with devils, that striking antithesis to the transfiguration which Raphael’s genius has served to fix in the mind, the healing of the nobleman’s son, and the blessing of children brought to the Master by their fond mothers. Most notable, too, is the scene of the final entry into Jerusalem, when the Saviour appeared to accept from children the tribute which he shunned when it came from their elders.
Here, as in other cases, we ask what was the attitude of the Saviour toward children, since the literature of the New Testament is so confessedly a revelation of life and character that we instinctively refuse to treat it otherwise. In vain do we listen to those who point out the ethical beauty of the Sermon on the Mount, or the pathos of this or that incident; our minds break through all considerations of style and form, to seize upon the facts and truths in their relation to life. We do not ask, what is the representation of childhood to be found in the writings of certain Jews known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; we ask, what is there between children and the central figure disclosed in those writings. We ask purposely, for, when we leave behind this ancient world, we enter upon the examination of literature and art which are never beyond the horizon lying under the rays of the Sun of Righteousness. The attitude which Christ took toward children must contain the explanation of the attitude which Christianity takes toward the same, for the literature and art of Christendom become the exponents of the conception had of the Christ.
There are two or three significant words and acts which leave us in no doubt as to the general aspect which childhood wore to Jesus Christ. In the conversation which he held with the intellectual Nicodemus, he asserted the necessity of a new birth for mankind; in the rite of baptism he symbolized the same truth; he expanded this word again, accompanying it by a symbolic act, when he placed a child in the midst of his disciples and bade them begin life over again; he illustrated the truth by an acted parable, when he called little children to him with the words, “Of such is the kingdom of heaven;” he turned from the hard, skeptical men of that generation with the words of profound relief: “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes;” he symbolized the charity of life in the gift of a cup of cold water to a child.