character and the things of the body than the things of the spirit. But
material improvements do not necessarily improve men. The locomotive has
little relation to character. It picks a man up at one point and drops
him at another the same man he was. If he is selfish and wicked at the
beginning of the journey, he is just as selfish and wicked at its end.
It is a simple fact that all our material progress works little
improvement in morals. At the hour Christ was born Rome had an amazing
material civilization, blazing with splendor, but all the more rapidly
was it rotting at the core.

But a child has in it the possibility of growth and of imparting
regenerating ideas and a new life to the world. Sir Isaac Newton did not
give any money or material gift to the world, but he gave it scientific
ideas and a scientific spirit, and in giving it this he raised the
intellectual level of the world and gave it the power of making millions
of money. Shakespeare gave the world no new machine, but he opened the
eyes of men to see heavenly visions and thus enriched them with
treasures above all the gold of the world. Martin Luther invented no
steam engine or sewing machine, but he taught men the rights of
conscience and created our modern liberties. No material thing, however
powerful and splendid, can make a better world: this work calls for
better men. Therefore when God brings into the world a child endowed
with superior intellectual and moral power, though his gift is only a
babe and seems insignificant and hardly worth counting among so many,
yet he has sent one of the greatest gifts of which his omnipotence is
capable. An old German schoolmaster always took his hat off to each new
boy that came into his school, never knowing what elements of genius
might have been mixed in his newly molded brain. When Erasmus came out
of that school his prophetic instinct was justified. Never despise a
child, for in it sleeps some of the omnipotence and worth of God.