The Beautiful Gate of the Temple

“The Beautiful gate of the temple.” — ACTS iii. 10.

PETER and John went up to the temple together, and as they went they passed through “the gate of the temple which is called Beautiful.” This gate must have been very beautiful indeed. It was the outer gate of the temple, that which opened upon the temple area from the broad and splendid street which led from the city to the sacred place. As the entering worshipper passed through this gate, the glory of the splendid structure displayed itself before him. He saw the open courts, the vistas of the galleries, the sweep of stairs, the brilliant walls of the temple of Herod. Entering by the Beautiful gate, he saw the whole in all its beauty. And the gate itself was worthy of the view on which it opened. It was made entirely of the precious Corinthian brass, and its workmanship surpassed that of every other gate in all the temple. There was a certain satisfied sense of fitness here. The gate which opened on the sublime and beautiful prospect was

beautiful and sublime itself. The worshipper entered on the glory of the temple through a portal that foretold the coming glory by its own.

The architecture of the old Jewish Temple serve us for a parable to-day. The truth that it gests will be the harmony between a noble undertaking and a beautiful beginning — that every true temple ought to have a beautiful gate. The impor tance of beginnings is the veriest common-place of practical virtue. That first step which costs, we know, cannot be too costly, if it starts the enterprise aright. And when we look at the fairest things that have been, or that have been done ever in the world, we are much struck by seeing how often the entrance has been at least worthy of, and, alas, how often it has surpassed with its beauty, the court to which it gave admission. The whole world had its beautiful gate in those days of innocence and perfect happiness which passed in Eden before man’s sin and the sorrow that it brings began. Christianity commenced its career with the perfect Life of Jesus, and then the simple beauty of the Apostolic Church, to which our later eyes are ever looking back. So every human life starts in the beautiful mystery of childhood. So every nation begins its career in the romance of some mythology, or the idealized memory of some heroic man to whom it owes its being. So every man’s labor in his profession opens with the days of study and theory, when the idea of his profession is beautiful and clear before him. So ei best ‘friendship and life-long love starts in a glamor of admiration that almost worships the image of the coveted friend.

We might dwell upon several of these, but let us think only of the wisdom and love of God who has put the beauty of youth at the entrance of every human life. Through that Beautiful gate every man comes into the temple. The temple is beautiful it self. Life is filled with joy and sacredness. But how few lives are more beautiful than the youth that leads to them! And how the noblest lives are promised in their youth by fair anticipations of their coming beauty! And then think again that the highest life always is religious. The best glory of the most full existence is in the overfilling of its fulness with the love and fear of God. And that sets us to asking whether to the beautiful temple of a mature religious life there is also a beautiful gate. Is there such a thing as a child’s religion worthy of, and admitting to, the broad thoughtfulness and happy devotion of the mature religion of the grown man and woman, as there is a child’s body and a child’s mind, with their own beauty, worthy of and introducing to the physical and mental life of later years?

This brings us to our subject. I shall not ride the parable to death. I shall not weary you with Gates and Temples. I only wanted by the old passage in the Book of Acts to suggest our theme. I want to speak of the child’s religion. The child’s religion, as introductory to the religion of maturity, but yet as a distinct reality which has a substantial existence of its own. It surely is a subject which has its interest for everybody. The parents who care for their own children, the teachers to whose care the children are immediately intrusted, the Church which has its emumission to all the world, and evidently must not leave the children out, the lover of hi8 kind who looks for its religious progress — where is the man who can say or think that he need have no interest in the possibility and character and means of children’s religion? Here are the children all among us, and yet we often talk to one another, as if nobody under twenty had anything to do with the great things which are of such unspeakable importance after we have come of age. Here are the children all among us, and many a time a minister stops in his sermon and feels disheartened — almost dismayed — when he thinks how he is going on year after year, saying almost never a word in church, to tell the children that the Christ he talks of is not a gray lecturer, giving grown men lectures on hard dry truths, but a kind friend, young with the divine youth of eternity, and wanting them to come to him. Here are the children among us, and we open our Sunday-school and make it bright for them, and do get very close to them there with the love of God, but all the while we feel (and the chil dren are quick and sensitive enough to feel it too), that the Church does not more than half know what to do with them; its theories and machineries are made for grown up people. It wishes the children would hurry and grow up, so that it might know how to talk to, what to do with, what to make of them. They belong to the Church, and yet do not belong to it. Here are the children all around us, and yet we have to begin to speak of a child’s religion by saying something about the very possibility of such a thing. And the first thing that we must say, when we are asked whether it is possible for a child to be religious, must be this, I think; that the religion of childhood is not only possible, but is the normal type of religion; is that which Christianity most contemplates, and that which, when Christianity shall have really entered into her power, all men shall accept as the very image and pattern of religion. We might as well ask whether a child’s life is possible. The child is the embodiment of life, life in its freshness and first glory. As unnatural and exceptional as is the birth of a man full-grown — an Adam or an Eve without a childhood — to the true idea of living, so unnatural and exceptional to the true notion of religion is the thought of a grown up man being converted, beginning his religious life with the stiff’ movements and faded affections of mature years. The New Testament is our book of authority; but the New Testament is always leading men astray, be cause they deal with it unreasonably, because they do not take into account the times in which it was first written. And so the current idea of the churches, which has only just begun to be dislodged, that adult conversion is the type and intended rule of Christianity, comes largely from the fact that the first preachers of Christianity had of necessity to be largely occupied with men who had known nothing of Christianity in their youth. Peter and Paul had

132 The pea utijnl Gate of the Temple.

to go to grown Tip men, an<l ask them to begin the Christian Jife. But surely that was not to be the perpetual picture of Christian culture. Christ was too human for that. God had written through all his creation, in the interweaving of young life with old, his intention that one continuous culture should run through the whole scale of the human creature’s development. Christ had been too evidently a child; the incarnation had too evidently taken all of life into its benediction, for the children ever to be wholly counted out. The great Erasmus once wrote a piece in Latin for a boy to speak which had this last thought beautifully put: “We commemorate,” so he -taught the young declaimer with his bright eye and his glowing face to say, “we boys commemorate the boy — pueripuerum — we commemorate our Master Jesus, the chief ideal of all, but yet peculiarly the chief of us — that is, of boys.” The evident design of God’s creation, the comprehensive form of the incarnation, the clear presence in children of the power of and the need of religion, tin •*»•. fire the forces which, in spite of every tendency of the grown people to make children wait till tin -y grow up, has always kept alive a hope, a trust, how ever blind, that a child’s religion was a possible reality; that a child might serve and love and live for God.

But even where this has been granted, the old feeling that religion belongs to adult people, still has power, and defeats the best results of that faith in the religious possibilities of children which has been persistently uttered in the Church’s sacrament of baptism, and which has in modern times founded the Sunday-school, and created the vast religious literature of childhood. The old feeling still is strong enough, while it allows the possibility of children’s being religious, to insist that their religion must be of the sort that Has taken shape for adults alone. Read many of the children’s religious books, listen to many of the children’s sermons, and you will understand in a moment why they have not wrought their fruit and filled our churches with young Samuels and Timothys and Marys. They attempt to impose upon the child the religion that belongs to the man. They take the elaborate self-conscious experience to which men have been forced by the stresses of their life, and they bid the children look at those experiences and imitate them, and so be religious. The result is that nine-tenths of the children do not get hold of religion at all, and accept the easy heathenism to which they seem consigned; while the other tenth get hold of it only too much, and are the self-conscious little saints, the priggish and pedantic Christians whom it is so sad to see and so easy to caricature. So it comes about that, though it is the type of truest Christianity, a really healthy Christian life in a child is a rare sight. There have been some men, of whom one can hardly express himself too strongly, who have gone through the country preaching what they call children’s revivals, taking that type of the beginning of a new life which belongs to thieves and murderers, and gray old reprobates, who by the grace of God are casting off the vices of a horrible lifetime, and repenting of the most brutal sins — an experience full of convulsion and agony, who try only too successfully to create a counterfeit of that experience in the children whom they want to convert. It is a real disbelief in the reality of a child’s religion, and so an attempt to make the child assume the man’s. It is the modern echo of that medieval marvel which was called the children’s crusade, when their leaders took the children of Europe and led them as their fathers were going to the conquest of Jerusalem, and wasted their little lives by hundreds all along the weary and disastrous way.

But even where the sad extravagance and blunder of the children’s revival is not attempted, and could not be tolerated, still I am sure that we are making a corresponding error when we try to force truth in the hard scholastic shapes into which men have cast it on the minds of the young. Every theologian must own that his theology is harder than the New Testament. It is the New Testament and not his theology that he ougLt to teach the child. The child’s mind is natural and not artificial. Our theological systems are artificial and arbitrary, not natural. And the child, while he can make nothing of the balancing of persons in the scholastic doctrines of the Trinity, will know quicker than you or I the rn« aiiing of the equal divine love of Father, Saviour and Spirit. Though his mind will make nothing of the notion of a scheme of an atonement, he will understand wonderfully that Jesus lived and died for him. Though he will cast off the notion of an angry God, wreaking vengeance on his creatures forever and forever, he will understand that sin is dreadful, and must bring, of its own essential nature, dreadful consequences; and that of those consequences none but he who knows the measure of the sin can see the end. Who can say what a power children may some day have over religious thought, in bringing back Christianity, as we long to see it brought, from a scheme of complicated and artificial arrangements to be the free utterance of the heart of God to man?

And so we come to this; that while men believe in the possibilities of children’s being religious, they are largely failing to make them so because they are offering them not a child’s, but a man’s religion, men’s forms of truth and men’s forms of experience. The child makes nothing out of either. The one power that he has and longs to use is the power of personal loyalty and love. He wants Christ. When through the systems here and there the personal Christ stepa forth, the true character of the child’s religion always suggests itself, as the child runs to him.

I have already said that there was something in the Epistles that had worked to the discouragement of children’s piety; but there is nothing of that in the Gospels. The Gospels come after the Old Testament, like spring after winter. There is child-life in the Old Testament, but it is crushed and buried. When Jesus appears, the children come singing Hosannas, and asking him to bless th»-m. as tin’ laughs with its flowers when the sun gets high.

And then our next question comes. If there is such a thing as a childfs religion, and if men have made great mistakes because they did not understand it, then, what is it? What is the true character of the religion of a child? Certainly, to be sweet and real, it must be the possession by God of the faculties and qualities that belong especially to childhood. And it is not hard to enumerate some of those qualities at least. The first and most prominent of them all is the faculty of genuine, unqualified, unhesitating admiration. The grown man has to find out his ideals with difficulty. The world is tarnished to him. He has to abstract himself, and it is by a labored effort that he culls out from under its stained and battered surface the unseen and beautiful idea and promise which is at the heart of everything. But a child has no such effort. To him the world is beautiful, and he sees everything easily in its perfection. While the grown man is ready first to criticise, and only afterwards to discover what there is good and beautiful in the faulty thing, the child is struck first with admiration, and only reluctantly discovers that what he admires is not wholly good. Now this difference surely must tell upon the kind of religion that we are to look for in the earlier and the later life. There is a religion which finds the world unsatisfying, and so turns longingly, wistfully, pathetically, wearily to God. There is another n-liion which finds the world wondrously beautiful and good, yet always suggesting something more beautiful and better than itself, and this religion too turns to God, but glowingly, springingly, hopefully. The first religion starts from a sense of sin and comes to God for forgiveness. The second religion starts in a thankful joy, a sense of promise, and comes to God for fulfilment. The first starts with disgust at self, and so comes to love for God. The second starts in admiration of God, and so comes to forgetfulness of self.

It is needless to say that both these religions meet in the fullest religious experiences; but it is evident which of them most naturally belongs to the experience of a child. You cannot teach a child that hatred of himself, you cannot fill him with that sense of sin that sends the worn and weary sinner with his load of sins staggering up to cast them down before the cross. The attempt to create such experiences in children either kills them with morbid misery or makes them dreadful little hypocrites. But this power of admiration in the child promises its own religion, of its own natural kind. His are the years in which one can really believe in ideals. God can stand out before him, awful, yet dear; for to the child to whom all is mysterious, nearness and awfulness do not destroy one another as they do to us older folk. No doubt of God’s faithfulness, no questioning of His ways comes in to cloud the perfectly unspotted adoration. How good it is that there are years at the beginning of every life when it is the most easy thing to believe in an absolute right and goodness. How strange it is that we should not use those precious years for tin- attainment of their own appropriate and beautiful religion. We grudge children their ideals. There are the much abused Sunday-school books which many good people unite to condemn. They are bad enough, many of them; but that which is made the special object of abuse in them, that they describe unnaturally perfect boys and girls, is not necessarily a fault. If the perfect children they describe are only healthy and not sickly in their virtue, they just meet and cultivate that belief in the possibility of perfection which is instinctive in a child’s heart, and which in a man’s is so often, so soon, buried deep under the accumulated conviction of the reality of sin. The present tendency of those who write children’s books is to describe not the perfect child, but children as they are. The old-fashioned way was truer to the child’s idealizing nature. For the first feature of a child’s religion will be this, which we cannot ignore, that a child will come to God far oftener and far closer from love of the good than from hatred of the eviL

And then another thing in a child’s religion is the perfect healthiness of his traditionalism, of his be longing to a certain sect and holding to certain opinions. So many grown people seem to have mixed up as much of evil as of good in their adherence to the faith of their fathers. They cling to it controversially. Their love for it is mixed up with jealousy and spite and pride. A child knows nothing of all that. His denomination, his creed, is like his nation, or his home. It is his because he was born there. It is dear to him with the unquestioning sense that he belongs to it and it to him. Alas, that our bectarian lines are drawn so narrow that very often a child cannot keep this simple home feeling as he grows up; alas, that so often as the child goes on to develope his own appropriate type of Christian faith and feeling, he finds that the sect in which he was born will not hold his special aspect of the truth, and so has to go abroad and break the ties of earliest sympathy in order to be the Christian that the Lord meant him to be. Alas, that we are all such secta rians, whatever we may call ourselves, and that the great idea of a whole Christian Church is as yet so little realized. But these are troubles which the man grows into. The child may freely glory in his own Church, and yet be no sectarian; may accept his creed from the lips of others, and yet be no dogmatist. And so a second feature in the child’s religion will be this — a healthy traditionalism, a warm, true love for the Church he is brought up in; not an abstract and general, but a clear, localized religion. The true parent, the true teacher, will try not merely to make the child love God, but to make him love his own church, as the place where he knows God, and where he finds God always.

And then again, as a child is able to love his own church without any of the evil effects of sectarianism, so he is able to love the organizations and habits of the Church, without the evil effects of formalism. The child’s nature is poetic. This is seen in the ease with which it feels the symbolic character of symbolic things. Its symbols are real symbols; tin -y really stand for something besides themselves, s thing unseen. Now formalism comes lari-ly from the sheer loss of the poetic sense. The stupidity of ritualism is the prosaic way in which its symbols have lost their meaning, and become valuable in and for themselves. This is the way in which many people make a Fetish of the Church. The Church is the most poetic of all things, so long as men see her with poetic eyes, so long as her outward shows stand for spiritual truths; but there never was any thing so wretchedly prosaic as the outward slum’s and ways of the Church, her visible sacraments and tactual successions, when they have ceased to be merely representative of spiritual verities and are valued for themselves. Now, is it saying too much to claim that a child with his nature full of poetry is able to take and use the ceremonies and external things of the Church and keep their meaning, as many men cannot? He needs them. It is all very well for you to say that you can worship without a liturgy, and without the company of a congregation. You think you can. You have faith in your power for abstracted and solitary devotion; but it is not right for you to assume that your child can do it. This is why, as I think, all the children of a parish sn< h as this, even those who are best taught at home, onu lit to be gathered into the parish Sunday School, which for many purposes is their church. Apart from what they learn there, it brings them into a true conscious partnership in the church and its w< a kings, makes itself their church, fills them with its spirit, lets them understand its life, and look on it as their home. This is why I wish all the children of our church were there.

Qnly one thing more let me say about the character of the child’s religion. Is it not true that the simplest and primary form of the presentation of the Gospel is the one which is preserved most truly and necessarily in the teaching of children? The Gos pel came first into the world as good news. It was a simple, glorious story, told in the purest and directest way. It was a message, a revelation, God’s love to man, God’s pity and salvation for man, told by the roadside and the wellside, told in the temple courts, told from the cross. But how that first conception of the Gospel gets blurred and lost. To us grown men, the Gospel is a philosophy of life, a system to be argued about, almost anything but a message coming right down from God to man. But the child’s nature is all receptive of stories, open for messages on every side. The child is a little Athenian, always listening for some new thing. All the world about him is mysterious, ever breaking out into tidings of itself. And so the child is ready, if it can be rightly told him, to hear, above all the other messages that come to him out of this ever opening and surprising world, the best and highest news of all, the Gospel, simply as glad tidings of the love of God and the salvation of the world by Jesus.

I must not mention more; but put together in

142 The Beautiful Gate of the Ton pic.

your own mind theoe characteristics <»t’ ;i child’s n-ligion which we have recounted, and see if you have not a recognizable and beautiful conception as their result. It is no monstrous thing. It is no priggish and unpleasant aping of what is possible only t’nr maturer life. It is a true child who loves God and sees everything beautiful in Him, who loves the Church and finds its ways and forms full of significance and pleasure, and who hears and accepts as part of the story of the world which it is gradually learning to know, the story of how God loved that world, so that He came into it and lived here and died here, to help every man to live in holiness and to save every man when he fell into sin. There is no child for whom that religion is not possible. Brave, true, frank, gentle, joyous, what is there better than this in the labored religion of our later days? It is not only a promise, it is a present reality. The boy is not only a little man, he is a boy, with his own pres ent capacity of character. He is even now “a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.”

We have said something of the possibility and of the character of a child’s religion. And now we want to go on and say a little of the methods of it; how is it to be created in all its beauty in these chil dren whom you know? Ah, first of all, let us feel for our comfort and humility that the power to create it rests far back of our feebleness. They are God’s children. We stand over the little stalk and say, “How shall I make this flower grow?” Think how

God must listen to us as we say that. God who made the growing power of that little flower, and ripened it in the flora of worlds that perished before our history began. No education can be true or fruitful which forgets the perfect education of which it is but a minister. No man can care wisely or well for any one he loves, who dares forget that God is caring for that friend of his, whether he be old man or little boy, with a wisdom and love incomprehensible. I cannot but think how many families and schools it would at once fill with happy earnestness and relieve of nervous anxiousness to be pervaded with this remembrance continually. So often grown people here pass out of childhood and become incapable of dealing with children. But God is always young and always sympathises with the children whom He sends into the world.

Bear this in mind, and then before us opens the work of helping under God in the training of his children. It is not easy. The child’s nature every where shows its imperfectness. It is hard to open it for what it ought to receive, and it is hard to close it against what it ought to reject. It is like the beautiful gate with which we are comparing it, for Josephus tells us about that gate, that it took the strength of twenty men to open it or close it. I am not going to undertake a general treatise on the Christian education of children. There are only two suggestions which I want to make and urge with all the force I can upon those to whom the training of children is intrusted.

The first is this; the absolute need <»f perfect truthfulness in children’s religious tra i 1 1 i n «r. N >1 pody, I think, can look at th — strange state of n li — i«»us thought in this day, without seeing at once tin- importance and the difficulty of making truthfulness first and absolute when we try to teach children re ligious truth or to excite them to religious feeling. Religious truth has passed in many people’s minds into new forms. Men hold other conceptions than they held twenty years ago. I do not argue now whether the newer theology is more or less true; but many an earnest thinker to whom the truth has come with a freshness and a force to his own soul in some new shape, will still, as he undertakes to teach children, tell them not what he believes, give the m not the fresh food oil which he knows that his own soul is nourished, but spread before them traditional statements of orthodoxy wnich are ordinarily reputed safer, but which he himself really does not believe. He has not full faith in his truth. He is willing to rest himself, nay, he is gladly resting himself upon it daily for salvation; but when he comes to teach tin; children, he draws back, and from a curious mixtuiv of timidity and care for them and spiritual fait I ness, he puts before them some dead husks in of the live truth on which he feeds. Are th«-iv nut many parents and teachers whose views of the Bible as God’s Book, of the Lord’s Day as His festival, of the Atonement as the free expression of His love, of the Resurrection of the body and the life in licav* n. are free, rational, scriptural and vital, who will y» t teach their children as they were taught, in hard, mechanical and untrue statements of those great Christian verities? It keeps the religious education of our nurseries and Sunday-schools too often behind the best religious conviction of the time. It is riot right. I do not ask that every crude speculation should be immediately thrust upon the minds of trusting children, who will take it in all its crudeness for a settled conviction; but I do believe that he who is set to teach children about God, should show to them the best and fullest that the Lord has shown to him, and not another something which he does not believe, but which for some reason he has come to think is best for them at present

See what are the evils of such strange conduct. In the first place, it is insincere in the teacher. That is reason enough against it. In the second place, it will be ineffective, for a man cannot teach with his whole heart what he only half-heartedly believes. The bright eyes of the children will see through him. And, in the third place, it is doing fearful wrong to the children’s future, who must find out some day that what they have learned is not true, and so must give it up; and in giving up your feeble and false version of it, will stand in terrible danger of giving up the Christian religion altogether.

No, give the children the best that God has given you. Teach them nothing that you do not believe they can carry on, growing to them with their

growth, through all this life, into the life beyond.

There is a difference between a child’s religion and a man’s religion, but remember always it is not a difference of false and true. The child’s religion must be like the clothes with which the Israelite children started out of Egypt, which, according to the old legend, grew as they grew till the boys and girls were men and women. To have a partial religion grow into a perfect religion, is one of the most natural and healthy processes of human life. To change a false religion for a true one is the most necessary, but most violent struggle of the human soul.

There is a class of books and teachers — the ordinary Sunday School talker, is often of that sort — who, it seems to me, does very much, partly from timidity, partly from laziness, partly from sensationalism, to keep a certain unreality and insincerity in the religious teaching of the young. Everywhere but in religion, in history, in science, each new and truer view, as soon as it is once established, passes instantly into the school books of the land. Am I not right in saying that there are great convictions about scripture and the Christian faith which are heartily accepted by the great mass of thinking Christian people now, which are not being taught to the children of to-day? If that is so, as I fear it is, then this new generation has got to fight over again the battle that our generation has fought, and iilit it, too, less hopefully, !>• .•< •••nisr there will have been less of sincerity in its education. It is always a better and safer process to outgrow a doctrine that we have been sincerely taught, than to abandon one that had no real hold upon our teacher’s mind. In the first case we keep much of the sincerity, even if we let the doctrine go. In the second case, when we let go the doc trine, there is nothing left. Is there not here the secret of much of the ineffective religious teaching of the young, of the way they cast our teaching off when they grow up? No! my dear friends, all of you anywhere who are called to teach, with larger faith in truth, with larger faith in God, with wise love for his children, I beg you to make truthfulness the first law of your teaching. Never tell a child that he must believe what you do not believe, nor teach him that he must go through any experience which you are not sure is necessary to his conversion and his Christian life.

And then the other principle that I wanted to remind you of, was the necessity of a larger element of suggestiveness in the best training of a religious nature. A child is not a block of marble, to be hewn out into what you will. A child, and especially a child considered as a religious being, is a plant which you are to set into the right soil of truth, and then watch as it developes its own special nature. And every child is a separate and peculiar plant, different from every other. What shall the teacher do then? Not say, “I will make of this child before me, this or that,” but “I will quicken every activity with its own spiritual stimulus. I will break off the chains and get every obstruction of sin and slothfulness out of the way, and help this child to be what God made him to be, whatever it is.” A teacher who says that, brings truth always so fresh to each young life that it can be eaten and turned into that life’s own forms of action; not hard and fossilized, so that it must always be kept in just the shape in which it is first given. He will not be surprised or disappointed when he sees his pupil developing a type of Christian life different from his own. If it is only real, and pure from all conceit, and truly full of Christ, he will be delighted to watch it, and rejoice more to have given an impulse to a movement which shall far outrun him self, than he ever could have rejoiced to train a hundred scholars into mere echoes and repetitions of his imperfect individuality.

This power of suggestiveness runs everywhere. More is accomplished in this world always by the suggestions of motive and force than by the impositions of form and rule. He who believes in suggestion has trust in the vital powers of things. The whole world is waiting to start into far higher action than anything yet, if one could only touch its springs. This is the beauty, this must be the quiet satisfaction of the lives of those obscure and patient workers who build nothing themselves, but who suggest the need and wish of building to other minds greater than theirs. Think of being the schoolteacher of Shakespeare, or Milton, or Pascal; and yet only a few antiquarians know the name of either. Surely there are last that shall be first. Surely this power of suggestiveness must always be the teacher’s wisest and best.

Let me rest with these two ideas. You see at once how both of them, truthfulness and suggestiveness, are words of personal character. In all teaching, but most of all in religious teaching, the personal nature of the teacher is supreme.

“I am thy God that teacheth thee,” Jehovah said. Only in deity are met perfectly those qualities that make the perfect Being, “apt to teach.” We are under teachers in God’s school here. But what a light all this throws upon that which seems so terrible to us on earth, the sad and awful mystery of a child’s death. What is it when a child dies? It is the great head-master calling that child up into his own room, away from all the under-teachers, to finish his education under his own eye, close at his feet. The whole thought of a child’s growth and development in heaven instead of here on earth, is one of the most exalting and bewildering on which the mind can rest. Always the child must be there. Always there must be something in those who died as children to make them different to all eternity from those who grew up to be men here among all the temptations and hindrances of earth. There must forever be something in their perfect trust in the Father, some thing in the peculiar nearness and innocent familiarity of their life with Jesus, something in the simplicity and instinctiveness of their relation to the truth, something pure even among all the perfect purity which we shall all have reached, something wiser than the wisest, showing that even there there is a revelation that can be given only to the babes.

Something more perfectly triumphant and serene to mark forever the perfected life of those who never sinned, and whose whole education has been in the full sunlight of their Father’s presence. There will be seen forever what we have tried so dimly to depict to-day, the possibility and beauty of a child’s religion. We hear much in these days of the precocity of children. Never were they so forward. Never were children treated so like men and women. Never did they get ideas so freely from the freest contact with the life about them. It may be bad or good; which ever it be, it marks a critical time and multiplies the responsibility of those who in any capacity are teachers now. Josephus tells us that once in the seige of Jerusalem this golden gate which we have made the image of childhood, vastly heavy and hard to move, “was seen to be opened of its own accord about the sixth hour of the night.” And he says that some thought it was a good omen, “as if God did open then the gate of happiness.” But others thought it very bad, “as if the gate was open to the advantage of their enemies.” So in this critical time of ours, not the least critical sign is this: that the golden gate stands open wide; that childhood is exposed and sensitive to new impressions and ideas. Is it for good or evil? Certainly, n«t necessarily for evil, if with a deep trust in God sun I a true love for His children, those to whom the care of the gate is given can only do their duty. The wider open the gate the better, if only the truth can be poured in. The more receptive the child mi’s life the better, if’ only they who train the children can thoroughly believe that there is a manly and beautiful religion of which the child is capable, and work with God to bring their children to it. When that conviction takes possession of the Church, then the Church shall indeed have her children in her arms. Then Isaiah’s vision of the complete New Jerusalem shall be fulfilled. “Thou shalt call thy walls salvation, and thy gates praise.”