The Child's Leadership

“And a little child shall lead them.” — ISAIAH xi. 6.

THESE words are part of the prophecy of millennial peace. Under the rod which is to come out of the stem of Jesse and the branch that is to grow out of his roots, “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.” It is to be a peace under the control of the gentlest and most benignant of human powers. It is to be man in his simplest, his least elaborate, his most unsophisticated existence; man not artificial and complicated, but man in his intrinsic humanness; man with those principles and impulses that belong to his humanity; man in the form of a little child, that is to be the leader and harmonizer of the world.

It is with this idea that we will consider the text. We need not cling too closely to the literal words and circumstances. The leadership of the little child, which is to be the millennial condition, may represent for us the dominion of those primary and fundamental impulses, those simplest principles and powers of life, to which men are often so unwilling to submit; but in submission to which all the best life comes, in submission to which alone the complete life of man can ever come. I want to plead for the power of the primary and simple emotions, and to try to show how they lead up to the highest and most religious life. As society becomes complicated, as ideas become subtle and refined, there is always a tendency to abjure the simplest masters, and to establish other standards which are artificial. Here is really the test of the difference between the truly and the falsely cultivated man. The truly cultivated man has had the first healthy instincts of humanity developed and enriched by all his culture, but not altered in their character, made, on the contrary, all the more truly themselves as their character has been brought out. Such primary emotions as the love of family, the love of country, the love of fellow-man, the love of God — the domestic, the patriotic, the philanthropic, the religious emotions — have been purified and steadied and deepened and strengthened by his culture. They are stronger in him than they were in the savage. The man of false culture has grown ashamed of these primary emotions. He tries to make himself and other men believe that he does not feel them, that he has passed beyond them. A citizen of the world, patriotism has for him no meaning. A student of human nature and its weaknesses, any admiration or love for such a creature as man is has become a folly impossible for him. Having seen the world’s ingratitude, the first impulse of man to labor for his fellow-man has lost its power over him. Plenty of this false culture, this bad result of thought, of experience of life, there is everywhere around us. But wherever it exists, it is a blight. The men who are in its power feel the blight it brings. There is no millennium, no final perfection of humanity conceivable, except in the enthronement of the simplest and healthiest instincts and impulses of human life, purified and developed, but made more themselves by every culture that has come to them, no final peace or full attainment for men, until, in this sense, “a little child shall lead them.”

Let us take a few of these first principles and see how essential their dominion is, and to what dangers it becomes exposed with the elaboration of man’s life. And first, if you please, take the principle of confidence, or cordial and generous trust of man in man. Every reasonable man has some general conception, more or less clearly realized, about the humanity of which he is a part. He either holds that mankind is trustworthy, with frequent flagrant exceptions, of falseness and deceit; or else he holds that mankind is base and deceitful, with the occasional intrusion of an upright and honest man. How clear it is that according to which idea of humanity he holds will be every man’s constant attitude towards his fellow-men. If he holds the first idea, he will be wisely trustful; he will feel that the safest attitude towards men is confidence, combined with such a reasonable watchfulness as shall keep him from being a foolish and easy dupe. If he holds the other idea, he is suspicious, he dis trusts everybody at the first meeting. The first presumption is that every man is bad. He disparages humanity. Only the longest and most careful scrutiny will let him believe that any best-seeming man is an exception to the general depravity, and is to be trusted and esteemed.

Who of us does not know the different attitudes of these two men towards humanity? The first is the attitude of youth. The second is the attitude of age. Not that they always belong with these different periods of life. There are plenty of young people — especially, it sometimes seems, in these days of ours, though that is hard to judge — plenty of young people who have or who affect to have the old men’s spirit, who play the cynic, who sneer at and distrust humanity. And there are old men who believe in man, whose long experience, while it has made them watchful and not easily deceived, has only strengthened the belief with which their life began, that man is worthy of respect and honor, and that universal trust, if one had to choose between the two, is a safer attitude than universal disbelief. So there are always old young men and young old men; and yet it is in general true that skepticism about man is unnatural for youth, and that trust in man is a special and peculiar honor in old age. Life frets and wears and worries it away in hosts of men, and yet what would the world be without it? What leader to any good result did the world ever have who was not rich in it?

Easy enough it is to misrepresent and caricature such trust as blind, silly optimism; easy enough to picture it as if it were an abdication of all true discrimination and intellectual responsibility. Easy enough, also, it would be to show that it is nothing of the kind. But now I only ask you to remember that practically no man has largely led or ruled the world without it. Christ Jesus had it perfectly. How gloriously He trusted men! The fervor of His terrible denunciations of the wicked gets its vividness from the background against which it stands of honor for and confidence in the soul of man. And the whole Bible, with its large, unguarded, unsuspicious utterance of God to man, laying itself open to a thousand misconceptions, always trusting itself cordially to men’s wish to understand it — there could be nothing like the Bible, with its regal influence, to illustrate how all true leadership of men has for its first principle confidence in the men it tries to lead.

Then take another of the primary principles of human life and see how simple it is, and how essential it is to any complete and powerful humanity — the principle of absolute morality, the principle that the right is to be done because, simply because it is the right. All history of the world and of the individual continually shows how life, as it grows complicated, tends to get away from the simplicity of that principle, and shows also how, just so far as it gets away from it, it becomes weak. There grows up, in elaborated communities and in elaborated men, a disposition to dwell upon the advantages of good living, rather than upon its intrinsic goodness. “Honesty is right,” says the child, and the childlike community. “Honesty is the best policy,” says experience, trying with laborious ingenuity to disguise its conscience in the robes of selfishness. The principle itself appears too simple, too young, too freshly out of the soul. Men who are in its power, even, do not dare to own their master by its name. How often you and I have done right things be cause we knew they were right, because we did not dare and did not want to disobey that simple, bare authority of righteousness; and then we have made up for our own souls and for the ears of other men other ingenious reasons for doing them that did not sound so fresh and simple and unsophisticated as that bare reason of morality. So it has come to this: that a man who, in a mixed company of practical men, debating what is profitable and what will pay, says quietly, “We must do this, whether it pays or not, for it is right,” makes a stir run through the company as if a breath out of the fresh open heaven blew in through the suddenly opened window of a close and overheated room.

Let me name yet another principle, the power of which is the strongest that our human nature can submit to, and yet the dominion of which is constantly pushed out of sight as men grow more and more complicated in their living and thinking. I mean the principle of religion. Indeed, the whole case, as concerns religion, is very strange indeed when we think about it. That men should be wholly irreligious is conceivable; that, counting themselves completely creatures of this brown earth on which they live, they should go on with neither hope, nor fear, nor care, nor love which did not find its source and satisfaction here — I do not say that this is possible, but it is perfectly conceivable: we can picture such a race crawling over the mountains and the fields of earth, like moles or lizards taking the color of the ground they crawled on. And then, we can conceive of just the opposite, of a religion frankly and simply acknowledged, set openly on the throne over every act, for every man to see; of a relation to an unseen power perfectly accepted and continually referred to, so that the man goes through life looking up, and with his conversation in the heavens.

Both of these conditions are conceivable; but another condition would be unconceivable if we did not see it constantly: a man religious and yet hiding his religion even from himself, full of the fears and hopes, the loves and hates, that belong to the spiritual world, and yet all the time trying to make him self believe, and to make other men believe, that it is here upon the earth that he finds his motives and his standards; knowing of God by some pervasive witness of Him which he finds spread all through his life, and yet never mentioning His name aloud, never frankly referring life to Him in whose Hands, if He exists at all, the reins of all life must immediately be held.

I said that such a man would be incredible if we did not see him every day; and tell me, do we not see him? What is the condition of nine men out of ten, whom you meet on the street or in society? They are not unbelievers, surely. They know of God; they think of Him; and yet, what are the conscious motives by which they rule their lives? Are they God’s will and God’s standards? Do they ever take their lives up and frankly give them over as a whole to Him? Have they not surrounded and swathed religion with secondary explanations, saying to themselves that it cultivates beauty, that it is good for social order, that it brings out parts of man’s nature which would not otherwise be developed? Never once, in all their lives, letting their souls go simply, freely, spontaneously, lovingly, as the bird goes to the nest, as the child goes to the mother; and being religious, being Christian, out of mere love and fear of God and Christ! The religion of a grown Christian man, or of an old Christian race, so loses simplicity and hides its life-principle under some disguise!

These are the principles whose dominion over mankind must be restored in its simplicity and majesty, before mankind can come to its millennial completeness; whose dominion over any man must be established before his life can become a true part of the Kingdom of God. The principle of confidence in man, the principle of absolute morality, the principle of direct and impulsive religion; — was I not right when I said of these principles that the time of their simple, calm, unquestioned reign over the lives of men would be fitly described as the time when “A little child shall lead them”?

How like a child a great principle is as it lives here in our world! It walks the earth with feet so soft that they are always being wounded, and yet so strong, with such a virtue in them, that the ground they tread on changes and grows rich with blossoms under them. Like a child, a great simple principle always impresses us as being just fresh from God, and as having yet but imperfectly put on our human flesh. It has a child’s weakness and a child’s strength. It commands an influence in which there is always a mixture of pity. It is in constant danger of corruption, and yet we think of it as gifted with an almost divine power of taking care of itself, and keeping itself pure. It makes men obey it as if they were its slaves; and yet they who obey it patronize it as if it were under their protection, and could not live except for them. It demands what seem the most unreasonable things, and it appears to gain the things it asks by very virtue of their unreasonableness, or, at any rate, by an authority which is above reason. A great principle, like a child, is frank and unskilful, yet does with its blunt weapons what no sharpest and best tempered skill could do. It is abused, imposed upon, misunderstood, yet buoy antly rises in a self-confidence which is all the more complete because it is unconscious, and has its way at last. Appealing to men by its very lack of power to enforce its appeal by arms, creeping into their love, finding their noblest spots and their most pliant moods with an unerring instinct, harboring no grudges, growing angry at no slights, knowing intuitively where it will be welcome, sacrificing nothing to its dignity, yet keeping a sacredness before which rude men uncover their heads, perfectly clear and palpable, yet always wrapped in its mystery; so, with its wise, kind, true, unfearing eyes, and its hands grasping the threads of silk that hold them fast, one of the great, simple, everlasting principles goes before a host of men, and leads them like a little child.

We need to realize and to believe that it is by the enthronement of those first great, simple, childlike principles that the world is to be saved. Men will learn more and more deep and subtle and complicated things, as years go on, about the true relations between man and man; but the great first thing that they must learn is, that man is by his very nature worthy of men’s confidence and honor, that sin and untrustworthiness are intruders and exceptions to the fundamental principle of life. Men will learn to hear all the world keeping tune to the central harmony of righteousness; but the Gospel that they need must be in that central harmony itself, in the profounder and profounder sense that the right is to be done because it is the right, growing ever into beauty and power in their hearts. And it is not the nicety of religious speculation, it is not the refinement of religious thought, that is to be the great blessing of the spiritual days to come. It is the simple ripening into richer and richer power of the great, strong, tender conviction of the Love of God, with all the majestic authority which that conviction brings. In these great, broad, everlasting principles lies the world’s hope and the hope of every man. These are the true kings of the human soul. By the growth of their power over you — by that, and that only — have you any right to judge the progress of your life.

Yet it is just these kings of human life that men disown. They will not mention them. They will give almost any other reason for an act of theirs, except the simple and generous one that they owe it to their fellow-men, or that it is right, or that God calls on them to do it. What is the reason of such a strange reluctance? — a reluctance, remember, that often goes along with a real inward loyalty to the Master whom the lips refuse to name.

Two or three reasons may be given. The first, I think, is the liability of these first principles of life to be counterfeited and pretended, and the difficulty of detecting the pretence from the reality. One great reason why men conceal, both from themselves and from each other, the high sentiments which often are the real ground of their action, is that dread to be or to be thought sentimental. Sentiment is childlike; sentimentality is childish. The childlike is always in danger of the childish. Sentimentality lurks behind sentiment, and men will rather be thought to live their lives on low and selfish grounds than to incur the shame that comes when, claiming the high motive by which they do really try to live, they are met with cool, contemptuous distrust and lack of sympathy. Say, “I did this thing because I thought it would be profitable”; and men will believe you and exclaim, “How frank and honest!” Say, “I did it because I thought it was God’s will,” and men will shrug their shoulders. In the first answer they suspect no hypocrisy, for who would counterfeit a pebble? In the second answer they feel almost sure of it, for how rare perfectly pure diamonds are! Therefore it is that there is no proof in this world of a man’s simple, absolute, manifest greatness so strong as his ability to claim for himself frankly the highest motives, and to be believed. Now and then in our lives we have met men who could say the most generous and lofty words, claim for themselves their servantship to principle and religion, and do it so truly, so simply, so plainly as the accepted fact of all their lives, that all men believed them as they spoke, and were impressed. No man dreamed of calling it hypocrisy, or sentimentality, or cant. To that degree of simple greatness, all men must come before it shall be true that a little child leads them.

Another reason why men will not allow that they are ruled by first principles, by the primary obligations of brotherhood, morality, and religion, seems to be that these reasons are too democratic. They run down too low. They may be the motives of all kinds of men. They may be the powers that move the sluggish wheels of the boor’s life. The sage’s finer machinery must answer to a subtler touch. And so we hear men either going below these motives, and talking about selfishness; or trying to go above them, and spinning aesthetic theories of life, talking about living by the laws and impulses of “beauty.” But the real glory of these great fundamental principles is just here, in their universal range. The boor and the sage may both be religious, and that is the real glory of religion. The great fundamental principles are like life itself, which is the same for all men and yet different for every man. That which was hardly more (though really something more) than an instinct in the lowest man, becomes full of consciousness, purpose, discrimination in the highest man, and yet it is the same thing still.

The true wish of the growing man ought to be that he may keep his share in the impulses that impel the simplest man, so far as they are healthy and genuinely human; and that, within these impulses, he may advance to ever new perception of their richness and ever deeper experience of their strength. It is what Schiller sings of man and the lower creatures:

“Seekest thou the highest, the greatest? Goto the lily to teach thee what it, willingless, is, that thou by willing must be.”

It is the ever richer entrance of intelligent Will, the ever greater deepening of obedience to a principle by sympathetic understanding of the principle, that makes the true growth of the man within the principle. A true principle is large enough for the man to grow within it eternally. Within it our eternal life is to be lived. Not by abandoning the social life, the moral life, the religious life, are we to grow in heaven. But yet we are to grow there. The relations which we hold to our fellow-men, the naturalness of duty, the dearness of God, — these are to be the subjects of our endless learning. And as we learn them forever, we shall feel that we are not outgrowing and losing, but only unfolding and unfolding the great and inexhaustible authority to which we gave ourselves in the true but half-blind consecration of this imperfect world.

But, most of all, the reason why the great primary principles do not command men easily, and show themselves men’s kings, lies in their impersonality. Men obey men. The power of an abstraction, how ever true, however lofty, is weak compared with the power of a personal master who comes with a manifest right to be obeyed. And even where obedience is given to an abstract principle, it is not so healthy and complete an act as if it were bestowed upon a personal master in whom that principle had found embodiment. It is almost always haunted by self-consciousness. This is why, as we see so often, a bad man is stronger than a good creed, and turns the soul that thought itself most settled in its principles, away from its belief to follow him.

This is also why, as we should see more often if we expected it more constantly, a good man is stronger than a bad creed, and a true life will reclaim and will hold the soul that false arguments have turned astray. Is it not true that each of our characters to-day is the result, not to any considerable degree of the abstractions we have believed, of the ideas that we have held, but of the human embodiments of principles, the personal presences of ideas in men which have been pressed upon our lives?

Wonderful and beautiful is this process of the gathering-in of the light and power of a principle into the effective nature of a person. Mysteriously, like the gathering of light into a star, truth gathers itself into a man. What a whole community has believed, some day, lo! it has taken shape and walks the streets. Men have said to one another, “Honesty is sacred; we all ought to be honest”; and some day, lo! there is honesty walking in the guise of a man among them, and shaming every fraud, and cheering every struggle with temptation, as it looks at them out of human eyes. Men have said, “Purity is beautiful; we all ought to be pure”; and some day that light, too, gathers itself into a star. A pure man shines before us, and lust is shamed, and purity is inspired wherever his feet go!

Do you not see to what all this is pointing? Do you not recognize where it was that all this struggle of the abstract and vague to set itself forth, in the clearness and power of personality, attained its consummation? Remember the Gospel of St. John: “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us... full of grace and truth; and we beheld his glory.” Grace and Truth were abroad in the world, appealing to the hearts of men, claiming the hearts of men for the unseen God of whom they were the utterance. At last, in the mystery of the Incarnation, behold! “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” And what then? — “To as many as received him to them gave he power to become the sons of God.”

O my dear friends, if only, instead of reading these words as if they were a riddle to hide some bewildering doctrine, or as if they were the history of some great, dead, past event, — if we could read them as the story of our own present life, as the promise of the way in which the principles which we reverence and love and try to obey might indeed become our masters! The principle of Human Brotherhood, the principle of Duty, the principle of God — those first truths, those fundamental impulses of men, how shall they become our lords? Only by their entering into a Lordship which shall seize us and hold us with that strong warm grasp in which personal Love lays hold of personal gratitude, and the splendor of personal Holiness lays hold upon an answering personal admiration and invitation.

Think how all that was in the days which are a perpetual picture of all the days of Christ. Christ walked by the sea of Tiberias, and saw the fishermen mending their nets, — and He called to them across the blue water, “Follow me”; and they started and followed Him. James and John, leaving Zebedee their father in the boat, followed Him. But by and by they must have known that, in Him, they were following the shadowy and splendid masters whose mastery had tempted but eluded all their youth. They were learning faith in man, and love for righteousness, and loyalty to God, as they learned Him. They were attaining these, as they attained Him. They did not talk of these. They talked of Him. Their eyes were fixed on Him. But that dominion of the primary and essential masters of the human soul which they had longed for, which they had struggled for, became a true reality to them as, full of ever deepening love, they followed Jesus.

Little by little His love tightened around them. And at last there came the Cross. He died for them. For their help, for their hope, He went patiently on and on, and at last the Cross completed everything. Then gratitude and admiration overwhelmed and gathered them into the depths of love past all escape. As a shell that has floated on the sea at last fills itself with the sea, and sinks into the sea; so these disciples’ lives, which had floated on the bosom of Christ’s Love, when at last the Crucifixion came, filled themselves with Christ’s Love and sank into its depths. Thenceforward they must follow Him.

They followed Him until He brought them to their crosses. They followed Him across the dark river. They are following Him to-day in some bright fields of the unknown eternity. But wherever they are following Him, they are following in Him these eternal principles, — the Love of Brethren, the Love of Right, the Love of God. We lift up the eyes of our faith, and far away, yet very near to us — far beyond us, yet under the same guidance and on the same road where we may walk if we are humbly Christ’s — we can see those saints of old, those fishermen of Galilee, walking still in the footsteps of the same Master that they followed over their native hills so long ago. To them the promises have been fulfilled: A little child is leading them. “They follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.”

Is that the Gospel? Indeed it is! All that the Saviour does for us, — the priceless forgiveness of our sins, the opened prospect of eternal life, — it all has its great, one, only purpose, that by the power of gratitude we may be bound into His service and made to follow Him with an unquestioning faith.

You say proudly, “I mean to live up to my principles,” That is well; but oh, it is better if you can say humbly, “I pray that I may follow Christ.” In Him your principles walk transfigured, glorified before you, and draw you “with the cords of a man.’*

Men, women, little children, all may follow Him. Through our separate ways of light or darkness He will lead us all until He brings us to God, in whom we shall surely find ourselves.