place; but, thank God, the gospel remains! The little child, heedless
of his trailing cloud of glory, and looking about him aghast in an
unknown world, may yet see and run to the arms open to the children. How
often has not some symbol employed in the New Testament been forced into
the service of argument for one or another contemptible scheme of
redemption, which were no redemption; while the truth for the sake of
which the symbol was used, the thing meant to be conveyed by it, has
lain unregarded beside the heap of rubbish! Had the wise and prudent
been the confidants of God, I repeat, the letter would at once have
usurped the place of the spirit; the ministering slave would have been
set over the household; a system of religion, with its rickety,
malodorous plan of salvation, would not only have at once been put in
the place of a living Christ, but would yet have held that place. The
great brother, the human God, the eternal Son, the living one, would
have been as utterly hidden from the tearful eyes and aching hearts of
the weary and heavy-laden, as if he had never come from the deeps of
love to call the children home out of the shadows of a self-haunted
universe. But the Father revealed the Father's things to his babes; the
babes loved, and began to do them, therewith began to understand them,
and went on growing in the knowledge of them and in the power of
communicating them; while to the wise and prudent, the deepest words of
the most babe-like of them all, John Boanerges, even now appear but a
finger-worn rosary of platitudes. The babe understands the wise and
prudent, but is understood only by the babe.

The Father, then, revealed his things to babes, because the babes were
his own little ones, uncorrupted by the wisdom or the care of this
world, and therefore able to receive them. The others, though his
children, had not begun to be like him, therefore could not receive
them. The Father's things could not have got anyhow into their minds