and rob your young life of these divine gifts, no man knows how, or when,
or where you will recover them, and become again as a little child.

And if we turn our thoughts from our own separate personal life, and look
for a moment at our duty as members of a society, how this picture of
Christ embracing the little child, and blessing those who receive or help
one such, should stir us to new and keener interest in social duty! Does
it not carry in it, this example and teaching of the Lord, does it not
carry in it the condemnation of a great many of our traditional notions
about our duty to the young? We see the Lord's tenderness and love and
care for the little child; we see how He values the childlike qualities;
and how He enjoins the nursing and the cherishing of these. If, then, we
have really learnt the lesson which He thus presses upon us, we shall
feel something like reverence for every young life, as it begins its
perilous and uncertain course on the sea of man's experiences; and with
this feeling we shall be eager to help and protect such lives whenever we
have the chance of doing it, and we shall be very careful to do them no
wrong.

But when we turn from the Gospel and these thoughts which it stirs in us
to our common life of every day, does it not rather seem sometimes as if
this teaching of the Lord were all a dream and had no reality? And yet
there is hardly one of us but would confess that, having once seen this
revelation of the Lord, we are put to shame if, as happens sometimes, a
young soul comes amongst us endowed with these very gifts of innocence,
and high purpose, and trust, and promise of all goodness, which so won
the Saviour's heart, and is met, when he comes, in school or house, not
by care, or sympathy, or guidance, or protection, as of an elder
brother's love, but by experiences of a very different sort. You would
agree that it is a shame to us if such an one comes only to find the