It is a happy thought that the children who climb upon our knees are fresh from the hand of God, living blessings which have drifted down to us from the imperial palace of the love of God, that they still hear some of the faint notes of the music of God's life, still bear upon their faces traces of the uncreated light. Heathen sage and Christian poet have enshrined the thought, each according to his knowledge, and though there is no proof of its truth, yet we cannot neglect as quite fruitless in wisdom so wide spread an intuition. It is vain to sncer at it as poetry, in vain at least for some of us. He cannot scorn this thought who feels, as his children's faces light up at his coming, not pleasure only, but an inner sense of gratitude that things so pure, so close to God, should give to him, with the sense of his unworthiness deep within, so much and so unsuspectingly. Their trust seems to carry with it something of the forgiveness of Heaven. The man sees the tolerant tenderness of God his Father in the child whom He has sent him-that his little one believes in him, bestows on him the blessing of an ever-renewed hope.

Nor can he scorn this thought who on philosophic grounds believes that all living beings are held in God, are manifestations of part of the Divine thought. He knows that a phase of that idea which God has of the whole race is incarnate in his child, that his child is destined to reveal it, that this is the purpose for which God sent it into the world. Therefore hidden within this speck of mankind he recognizes a germ of the Divine essence which is to grow into the harvest of an active life, with a distinct difference from other lives.

And if, born of these two thoughts, a sadness succeeds the first touch of joy and gratitude, when the parents think how soon the inevitable cloud of life will make dim the heavenly light; how long, how evil, may be the days of their child's pilgrimage; how far he may retreat from God—yet, we who believe, not in a capricious idol of power, but in a just Father who loves we who hold that there is nothing which is not in God, cannot distrust the end. Our children are in His hands; they will some time or other fulfill the work of revealing God; they must, for God does not let one of His thoughts fail. If all life be in God, no life ever gets loose from God; it is an absolute imperative of the philosophy which denies that anything can be which is not of God, that nothing can ever finally divide itself from Him. Our children, like ourselves, are aiready saved by right. Years of what we call time will be needed to educate them

*Child Life.-A Sermon preached in St. James' Chapel, London, by Rev. Stopford A. Brooke, Chaplain-in-Ordinary to the Queen. "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God."—Luke xviii, 16.

into unior with God in fact, but that end is as certain, if God exist, as God's existence.

This thought of what I may call the divinity of childhood is still further supported by the exquisite relation in which Christ put Himself to children. The heart of woman will never forget that beautiful wayside story where He consecrated the passion of motherhood. The religious spirit will never cease, when disturbed by the disputes of the worldlier life, to remember his words when, bringing the disciples back to the sweetness of early charity, He took a child and placed it in their midst. The soul distressed with questions of belief remembers with a touch of peaceful pleas. ure how Christ recalled his people to the natural simplicity of faith, to that higher and deeper religion which lives beyond the wars of the understanding, when He said, "Whoso shall receive one such little child in My name receiveth Me."

And when mistaken religious persons press hard upon the truth and tenderness of the relation of parents to children, and bid the one look upon the other as children of the devil-corrupting with their poison the sweetest source of feeling in the world and the love which of all human love links us closest to the heart of God, we fall back in indignant delight upon the words of the Saviour: "Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of My Father which is in heaven.”

And once more, when we think that God revealed Himself in the childhood of the Saviour, the thought of the divinity of childhood becomes still more real. To us it is much, in our stormy and sorrowful life, to think of Christ in his manhood conquering and being made perfect through suffering; but when we wish to escape into a calmer, purer air, we turn from the image of our Master as "the man of sorrows and acquainted with grief," dear as that is to us, and look with infinite pleasure on the earlier days at Nazareth, imagine Him playing in the meadow and rejoicing in the sunlight and the flowers, taking his mother's kiss, and growing in the peace of love-and so learn to dream of God, revealed not only as the Eternal Father, but, in some not unworthy sense, as also the Eternal Child.

It is a thought which bathes all our children in a divine light. They Jive for us in the childhood of Christ; they move for us and have their being in the childhood of God.

In the directest opposition to all this to the poetic instinct of Greek and Christian poetry and philosophy, to the natural instincts of the human heart, to the teaching and acts of Christ, to the revelation of God in childhood—is the dreadful explanation which some have given of original sin. Children are born, we are told, with the consummate audacity of theologi. cal logic, under the moral wrath of God, are born children of the devil. I have already denied this from this place, and stated instead of it the fact -that we are born with a defective nature which may and does lead to moral fault, but in itself it is no more immoral than color-blindness. have said that this imperfectness is the essential difference of human nature; that which makes man differ from God, from angels, from brutes; that which makes him, so far as we know, the only being in the universe

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capable of progress. It is a defectiveness distinctly contemplated, distinctly initiated by God, who wished for a being in His universe the hist ory of which should be the attainment of perfectness through struggle and defectiveness. As such, the defectiveness of our children, as well as our own, has in it a thought which glorifies it. We see in it first developments, and in the way in which the spiritual element meets it, the beginning of that noble struggle in which the soul will have the glory and pleasure of advance, the delight of conquest as well as the misery of failure; the interest of a great drama, and the final resurrection into freedom from weakness, error, and restraint.

Whatever way we look, then, upon our children, our first feeling should be reverence for the divine within them, infinite desire to help them to recognize that divine idea, and to express it through life, in a noble form. This should be the basis of education. If it were, we should have less bad men and bad women.

For we should remember that children on whom we can make almost any impression we please, so ductile is their wax, will become what they are believed to be, will reverence their own nature when they feel that it is reverenced, will believe that they are of God, and know and love him naturally when they are told that God is in them.

But the other basis of education has an irresistible tendency to degrade them, and it only shows how near they are to God that it does not degrade them more. What conceivable theory is more likely to make them false, untrustful, cunning, ugly-natured, than that which calls them children of the devil, and acts as if the one object of education was, not to develop the God within them, but to lash the devil out of them? Let them think that you believe them to be radically evil, and the consequences be on your own head. You will make them all you think them to be. Every punishment will make them more untrue, more fearful, more cunning; and instead of day by day having to remit punishment, you will have to double it and treble it, and at last, end by giving it up altogether in despair, or by making your child a sullen machine of obedience.

Instead of trusting your child, you will live in an atmosphere of constant suspicion of him, always thinking that he is concealing something from you, till you teach him concealment and put lies in his mouth and accustom him to the look and thought of sin; and then-having done this devilish work and turned the brightness and sweetness of childhood into gloom and bitterness, and having trodden into hardened earth the divine germs in his heart-what happens? You send him into the world already a ruined character, taught through you to live without God in his soul, without God in the world, to believe in evil and not in good.

Do not complain afterwards if he disappoint you, if he turn out a cruel, or a dishonorable, or a miserable man. It is you who have made him so, and God will have a dreadful reckoning with you. "I mistook," you will say, as you tremble before His judgment-seat; "I did it for the best." Alas! there will be no possible excuse for you, but this, which links you with the slayers of Christ, "Father, forgive me, for I knew not what I did." Teach your children to believe in the goodness of his nature, in his nearness to God. And this leads me to the first characteristic of childhood, faith; faith. the quality whose outward form is trust.

It speaks well for the beauty of the human quality of faith that it is so lovely a thing to us when we see it pure in childhood. No picasure is so great as that which we receive when, in their hours of joy, stili mer : when sorrow or disease attack them, we see the light of our childrens aith in us shining in their eyes.

It speaks well for the spiritual power of this quality that it has on us such winning force. We grant to it as we recognize it, what we should grant to nothing elsc-we cannot hold back from its often mute request anything which is not wrong for us to give. It overcomes the word in us: it leads us to make a thousand sacrifices. It charms our weary me, it attracts and softens our sated heart. It makes us feel our own relation to God, and what it should be, for it is its earthly image. The pents who have not encouraged and loved this quality in children towards themselves, will have but little of it in their own relation to God. They will give no pleasure to the Divine Father, they will have no natural power with Him.

Having this faith, the child is, as long as it is unspoilt by us, fearless, and fearless under the difficulties of a vivid imagination, not the nigh imagination which composes images towards an artistic end, but the untu tored quality which works without an impulse or an aim. On the child's receptive heart everything makes a strong impression, numberless images are received. And at night, when no new impressions are made by outward objects, these images rise up a thronging crowd in the brain. And the work of the brain, just beginning to learn itself, and as yet under no ordinance of the will, composes, combines, contrasts these images into a thousand fantastic forms.

Spoil the child's faith in the world being good to it and pleasant; frighten it with falsehoods to keep it quiet, tell it a single lie, and let it lose a grain of its divine trust in you; show yourself violent, unreasonable, harsh, or cruel, and every one of these images may take a frightful form. What it has suffered from you, the distrust it has gained from you, will creep like a subtle element of fear into the creations of its fancy, and terror is born in its heart.

Again, this unquestioning faith makes the child think that everything is possible, and as many things are possible which the fear which reasons deters us from attempting, the child often does feats which astonish us. So nations in their childhood, and men inspired by intense faith, have believed in themselves and done things called miraculous.

It is unwise to attack too rudely even this self confidence of childhood. Lessen the child's faith in his own powers, and you will check the growth of that happy audacity which in boyhood and youth wins afterwards so much-that easy daring and self-confidence which, when it is limited by good manners, is so charming in society.

Nature herself will teach him humility soon enough, and you had better let him find out his limits in this direction for himself. She has a way of teaching which is irresistible; which, though it stops audacity with firm. ness, yet shows that she is pleased with the audacity; which points out a way of conquering herself. And in the child's relation to his home and society, you yourself can check the fearless self-confidence when it degenerates into impertinence or thoughtlessness, not by harsh rebuke, but by

appealing to the natural impulse of affection

The limit placed by saying and enforcing this "Do nothing, my child, say nothing, which will give pain to others "is not a limit which will crush the natural boldness of the heart. It is a limit which appeals to love, and the desire to be loved is an element in the child's nature as strong as faith. It will be scen to be natural and reasonable; it will be accepted.

Again, as to this faith in its relation to God, how does it take a religious form? The child's religious faith is, first, faith in you-mother, father, guardian; to early childhood you are God. And when you come to give a name to the dim vision of the growing child, and call it God, it will grow into form before him, clothed with your attributes, having your character. If the child learn to worship an idol-a jealous, capricious, passionate God-it is not his fault half so much as yours. What were you to him when he was young? Were you violent, sulky, exacting, suspicious, ruling by force and not by love? Whatever you were, his God in boyhood will wear your shape and bear your character, and he will grow like the character he contemplates. As he grows older, he needs more direct teaching. He asks who is God, what is His character, what His will. For He cannot but desire to know these things, through a vague curiosity, if through nothing more. For by and by, God touches him. Spiritual impulses, slight, but distinct, come to him in hours of temptation; voices make themselves heard in his heart; passion renders life exalted, and in the more wakeful state it genders, the germs of spiritual life push forth; nature speaks her dim message in some lonely moment on the hills or in the wood, and he is conscious of an undefined want. What has he to fall back on then? What ideas have you given him to which he may now fly for solution of the growing problem? what forms of thought which the new powers of spiritual faith and love may breathe upon and make a living God? The whole spiritual future of his youth then trembles in the balance. Fathers and mothers, you do not know often what you are doing; what misery, what bitterness, what hardness of heart, what a terrible struggle, or what a hopeless surrender of the whole question you have prepared for your child by the dismal theology and the dreadful God, and the dull heaven, which you have poured into the ear of childhood. Long, long are the years, before the man whose early years have been so darkened can get out of the deadly atmosphere into a clear air, and see the unclouded face of God.

So far for the faith of childhood; on its love I need not dwell, the same things apply to it as apply to faith; but on its joyfulness and the things connected therewith we speak as we draw to a conclusion.

The child's joy comes chiefly from his fresh receptiveness. His heart is open to all impressions as the bosom of the earth is to the heavenly airs and lights. Nothing interferes to break the tide of impressions which roll in wave on wave-no brooding on the past, no weary anticipations of the future. He lives, like God, in an eternal present. The world is wonderful to him, not in the sense of awaking doubts or problems, but as giving every moment some miraculous and vivid pleasure, and it is pleasure in the simplest things. His father's morning kindness makes him thrill; his food is to him the apples of paradise. The sunlight sleeping on the grass,