prominence given to the preservation of the family succession, and to
the birth of male children. That laugh of Sarah—at first of scorn, then
of triumph—sounds out from the early records with a strange, prophetic
voice; and one reads the thirtieth chapter of the book of Genesis with
a sense of the wild, passionate rivalry of the two wives of Jacob, as
they bring forth, one after another, the twelve sons of the patriarch.
The burst of praise also from Hannah, when she was freed from her bitter
shame and had brought forth her son Samuel, has its echo through history
and psalm and prophecy until it issues in the clear, bell-like tones of
the Magnificat, thenceforward to be the hymn of triumph of the Christian
church. The voice of God, as it uttered itself in commandment and
prophetic warning, was for children and children’s children to the latest
generation. It is not the person so much as the family that is addressed,
and the strongest warnings, the brightest promises to the fathers, are
through the children. The prophet Hosea could use no more terrible word
to the people than when, speaking as the mouthpiece of God, he says:
“Seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy
children;”[21] and Zechariah, inspiriting the people, declares: “They
shall remember me in far countries; and they shall live with their
children.”[22] The promise of the golden age of peace and prosperity
has its climax in the innocence of childhood. “There shall yet old men
and old women dwell in the streets of Jerusalem, and every man with his
staff in his hand for very age. And the streets of the city shall be full
of boys and girls playing in the streets thereof;”[23] while the lofty
anticipation of Isaiah, in words which still serve as symbols of hopeful
humanity, reaches its height in the prediction of a profound peace among
the very brutes, when the wolf and the lamb, the leopard and the kid,
the calf, the young lion, and the fatling shall not only lay aside their
mutual hate and fear, but shall be obedient to the tender voice and
gentle hand of a little child, and even the noxious reptiles shall be
playmates for the infant.[24] In the Greek fable, Hercules in his cradle
strangled the snakes by his might; in the Jewish picture, the child
enters fearlessly the very dens of the asp and the adder, secure under
the reign of a perfect righteousness.
Milton, in his Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, has pointed out
this parallel:—
“He feels from Judah’s land
The dreaded infant’s hand,
The rays of Bethlehem blind his dusky eyne;
Nor all the gods beside
Longer dare abide,
Not Typhon huge ending in snaky twine;
Our babe, to show his Godhead true,
Can in his swaddling bands control the damnëd crew.”
To the Jew, childhood was the sign of fulfillment of glorious promises.
The burden of psalm and prophecy was of a golden age to come, not of one
that was in the dim past. A nation is kept alive, not by memory, but
by hope. The God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob was the God of a
procession of generations, a God of sons and of sons’ sons; and when we
read, in the last words of the last canonical book of the Old Testament,
that “he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the
heart of the children to their fathers,”[25] we are prepared for the
opening, four centuries later, of the last chapter in the ancient history
of this people. In the adoration there of the child we seem to see the
concentration of Jewish hope which had for centuries found expression in
numberless ways. The Magnificat of Mary is the song of Hannah, purified
and ennobled by generations of deferred hope, and in all the joy and
prophecy of the shepherds, of Simeon and of Anna, we listen to strains
which have a familiar sound. It is indeed the expectation of what this
child will be and do which moves the pious souls about it, but there is
a direct veneration of the babe as containing the hope of the people.
In this supreme moment of the Jewish nation, age bows itself reverently
before childhood, and we are able by the light which the event throws
backward to perceive more clearly how great was the power of childhood,
through all the earlier periods, in its influence upon the imagination
and reason. We may fairly contend that the apprehension of the sanctity
of childhood was more positive with the Jew than with either the Greek or
the Roman.
It remains, however, that this third great stream of humanity passes out,
in the New Testament, from its Hebraic limitations, and we are unable,
except by a special effort, to think of it as Jewish at all. The Gospels
transcend national and local and temporal limits, and we find ourselves,
when considering them, reading the beginnings of modern, not the close
of Jewish history. The incidents lying along the margin of the Gospels
and relating to the birth of the Christ do, as we have seen, connect
themselves with the earlier national development, but the strong light
which comes at the dawn of Christianity inevitably draws the mind forward
to the new day.
The evangelists record no incidents of the childhood of Jesus which
separate it from the childhood of other of the children of men. The
flight into Egypt is the flight of parents with a child; the presence
of the boy in the temple is marked by no abnormal sign, for it is a
distorted imagination which has given the unbiblical title to the
scene,—Christ disputing with the Doctors, or Christ teaching in the
Temple. But as the narrative of the Saviour’s ministry proceeds, we are
reminded again and again of the presence of children in the multitudes
that flocked about him. The signs and wonders which he wrought were more
than once through the lives of the young, and the suffering and disease
of humanity which form the background in the Gospels upon which we see
sketched in lines of light the outline of the redeeming Son of Man are
shown in the persons of children, while the deeper life of humanity is
disclosed in the tenderness of parents. It is in the Gospels that we have
those vignettes of human life,—the healing of the daughter of Jairus, the
delivery of the boy possessed with devils, that striking antithesis to
the transfiguration which Raphael’s genius has served to fix in the mind,
the healing of the nobleman’s son, and the blessing of children brought
to the Master by their fond mothers. Most notable, too, is the scene of
the final entry into Jerusalem, when the Saviour appeared to accept from
children the tribute which he shunned when it came from their elders.
Here, as in other cases, we ask what was the attitude of the Saviour
toward children, since the literature of the New Testament is so
confessedly a revelation of life and character that we instinctively
refuse to treat it otherwise. In vain do we listen to those who point out
the ethical beauty of the Sermon on the Mount, or the pathos of this or
that incident; our minds break through all considerations of style and
form, to seize upon the facts and truths in their relation to life. We
do not ask, what is the representation of childhood to be found in the
writings of certain Jews known as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; we ask,
what is there between children and the central figure disclosed in those
writings. We ask purposely, for, when we leave behind this ancient world,
we enter upon the examination of literature and art which are never
beyond the horizon lying under the rays of the Sun of Righteousness. The
attitude which Christ took toward children must contain the explanation
of the attitude which Christianity takes toward the same, for the
literature and art of Christendom become the exponents of the conception
had of the Christ.
There are two or three significant words and acts which leave us in no
doubt as to the general aspect which childhood wore to Jesus Christ.
In the conversation which he held with the intellectual Nicodemus,
he asserted the necessity of a new birth for mankind; in the rite of
baptism he symbolized the same truth; he expanded this word again,
accompanying it by a symbolic act, when he placed a child in the midst
of his disciples and bade them begin life over again; he illustrated the
truth by an acted parable, when he called little children to him with
the words, “Of such is the kingdom of heaven;” he turned from the hard,
skeptical men of that generation with the words of profound relief: “I
thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these
things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes;” he
symbolized the charity of life in the gift of a cup of cold water to a
child.
The eyes of this Jesus, the Saviour of men, were ever upon the new
heavens and the new earth. The kingdom of heaven was the burden of his
announcement; the new life which was to come to men shone most plainly in
the persons of young children. Not only were the babes whom he saw and
blessed to partake of the first entrance into the kingdom of the spirit,
but childhood possessed in his sight the potency of the new world; it
was under the protection of a father and mother; it was fearless and
trusting; it was unconscious of self; it lived and did not think about
living. The words of prophets and psalmists had again and again found in
the throes of a woman in labor a symbol of the struggle of humanity for a
new generation. By a bold and profound figure it was said of the great
central person of humanity: “He shall see of the travail of his soul and
be satisfied.” A foregleam of that satisfaction is found in his face as
he gazes upon the children who are brought to him. There is sorrow as he
gazes upon the world, and his face is set toward Jerusalem; there is a
calm joy as he places a child before him and sees in his young innocence
the promise of the kingdom of heaven; there is triumph in his voice as he
rebukes the men who would fain shut the mouths of the shouting children
that run before him.
The pregnant words which Jesus Christ used regarding childhood, the new
birth, and the kingdom of heaven become indicative of the great movements
in life and literature and art from that day to this. The successive
gestations of history have their tokens in some specific regard of
childhood. There have been three such periods, so mighty that they mark
each the beginning of a new heaven and a new earth. The first was the
genesis of the Christian church; the second was the Renaissance; the
third had its great sign in the French Revolution.
IV
IN EARLY CHRISTIANITY
The parabolic expression, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I
will raise it up,” has been applied with force to the destruction of
Judaism, and the reconstruction upon its ruins of a living Christianity.
It may be applied with equal justice, though in more recondite sense,
to the death of the old literature and art, and the resurrection of the
beautiful creations of the human mind in new form. The three days were
more than a thousand years, and during that long sleep what had become
of those indestructible forces of imagination and reason which combine
in literature and art? Roughly speaking, they were disjoined, and only
when reunited did they again assert themselves in living form. The power
which kept each in abeyance was structural Christianity, and only when
that began to be burst asunder by the vital force inherent in spiritual
Christianity was there opportunity for the free union of the imagination
and reason. As the Jewish temple could no longer inclose divinity, but
was thrust apart by the expansive power of the Christianity which was
fostered within it, so the Christian church, viewed as an institution
which aimed at an inclosure of humanity, was in its turn disrupted by the
silent growth of the human spirit which had fed within its walls upon
the divine life. After the birth of Christianity the parallel continuity
of the old world was broken. The Greek, the Roman, and the Hebrew no
longer carried forward their separate movements. Christianity, professing
to annul these forces, had taken their place in history. Again, at the
Renaissance, it was found that the three great streams of human thought
had been flowing underground; they reissued to the light in a generous
flood, each combining with the others.
It was during this long period of apparent inaction in literature and
art that the imagination, dissevered from reason, was in a state of
abnormal activity. The compression of its field caused the faculty to
find expression through forms which were very closely connected with the
dominant sphere of human life. Before religious art and ecclesiastical
architecture had become the abundant expression of Christian imagination,
there was generated a great mass of legend and fable, which only by
degrees became formally embodied in literature or perpetuated in art
and symbol. The imaginative faculty had given it, for material in which
to work the new life, the soul of man as distinctly related to God.
An ethical principle lay at the foundation of Christianity, and the
imagination, stimulated by faith, built with materials drawn from ethical
life. The germinal truth of Christianity, that God had manifested himself
to men in the person of Jesus Christ, however it might be obscured or
misunderstood, was the efficient cause of the operations of the Christian
imagination. This faculty set before itself the perfect man, and in that
conceived not the physical and intellectual man of the Greek conception,
nor the Cæsar of the Roman ideal, nor even the moral man of the Jewish
light, but a man whose perfection was the counterpart of the perfection
of God and its great exemplar, the man Jesus Christ. In his life the
central idea of service, of victory through suffering and humiliation,
of self-surrender, and of union with God was perceived with greater or
less clearness, and this idea was adumbrated in that vast gallery of
saints constructed by Christianity in its ceaseless endeavor to reproduce
the perfect type. Through all the extravagance and chaotic confusion
of the legendary lore of the mediæval church, one may discover the
perpetually recurring notes of the perfect life. The beatitudes—those
spiritual witnesses of the redeemed human character—are ever floating
before the early imagination, and offering the standards by which it
measures its creations. It was by no fortuitous suggestion, but by a
profound sense of fitness, that the church made the gospel of All Saints’
Day to consist of those sentences which pronounce the blessedness of the
poor in spirit, the meek, and the persecuted for righteousness sake;
while the epistle for the same day is the roll-call of the saints who are
to sit on the thrones of the twelve tribes, and of the multitudes who
have overcome the world.
It is not strange, therefore, that the imagination, busying itself about
the spiritual life of man, should have dwelt with special emphasis upon
those signs of the new life brought to light in the Gospels, which
seemed to contain the promise of perfection. It seized upon baptism as
witnessing to a regeneration; it traced the lives of saints back to a
childhood which began with baptism; it invested the weak things of the
world with a mighty power; and, keeping before it the pattern of the
Head of the church, it traced in the early life of the Saviour powers
which confounded the common wisdom of men. It dwelt with fondness upon
the adoration of the Magi, as witnessing to the supremacy of the infant
Redeemer; and, occupied as it was with the idea of a suffering Saviour,
it carried the cross back to the cradle, and found in the Massacre of the
Innocents the type of a substitution and vicarious sacrifice.
The simple annals of the Gospels shine with great beauty when confronted
by the ingenuity and curious adornment of the legends included in the
so-called Apocryphal Gospels. Yet these legends illustrate the eagerness
of the early Christian world to invest the person of Jesus with every
possible charm and power; and since the weakness of infancy and childhood
offers the strongest contrast to works of thaumaturgy, this period is
very fully elaborated. A reason may also be found in the silence of the
evangelists, which needed to be broken by the curious. Thus, when, in
the flight into Egypt, the Holy Family was made to seek rest in a cave,
there suddenly came out many dragons; and the children who were with the
family, when they saw the dragons, cried out in great terror.
“Then Jesus,” says the narrative, “went down from the bosom of his
mother, and stood on his feet before the dragons; and they adored Jesus,
and thereafter retired.... And the young child Jesus, walking before
them, commanded them to hurt no man. But Mary and Joseph were very much
afraid lest the child should be hurt by the dragons. And Jesus said to
them; ‘Do not be afraid, and do not consider me to be a little child;
for I am and always have been perfect, and all the beasts of the field
must needs be tame before me.’ Lions and panthers adored him likewise,
and accompanied them in the desert. Wherever Joseph and the blessed Mary
went, these went before them, showing them the way and bowing their
heads, and showing their submission by wagging their tails; they adored
him with great reverence. Now at first, when Mary saw the lions and the
panthers, and various kinds of wild beasts coming about them, she was
very much afraid. But the infant Jesus looked into her face with a joyful
countenance, and said: ‘Be not afraid, mother; for they come not to do
thee harm, but they make haste to serve both thee and me.’ With these
words he drove all fear from her heart. And the lions kept walking with
them, and with the oxen and the asses and the beasts of burden which
carried their baggage, and did not hurt a single one of them; but they
were tame among the sheep and the rams which they had brought with them
from Judæa, and which they had with them. They walked among wolves and
feared nothing, and no one of them was hurt by another.”[26]
So, too, when Mary looked helplessly up at the fruit of a palm-tree
hanging far out of her reach, the child Jesus, “with a joyful
countenance, reposing in the bosom of his mother, said to the palm, ‘O
tree, bend thy branches, and refresh my mother with thy fruit.’ And
immediately at these words the palm bent its top down to the very
feet of the blessed Mary; and they gathered from its fruit, with which
they were all refreshed. And after they had gathered all its fruit, it
remained bent down, waiting the order to rise from him who had commanded
it to stoop. Then Jesus said to it, ‘Raise thyself, O palm-tree, and be
strong, and be the companion of my trees which are in the paradise of my
Father; and open from thy roots a vein of water which has been hid in the
earth, and let the waters flow, so that we may be satisfied from thee.’
And it rose up immediately, and at its root there began to come forth a
spring of water, exceedingly clear and cool and sparkling. And when they
saw the spring of water they rejoiced with great joy, and were satisfied,
themselves and all their cattle and their beasts. Wherefore they gave
thanks to God.”
The legends which relate to the boyhood of Jesus carry back with
a violent or confused sense the acts of his manhood. Thus he is
represented more than once as willing the death of a playmate, and then
contemptuously bringing him to life again. A favorite story grossly
misconceives the incident of Christ with the Doctors in the temple, and
makes him turn his schoolmaster into ridicule. There are other stories,
the incidents of which are not reflections of anything in the Gospels,
but are used to illustrate in a childish way the wonder-working power of
the boy. Here is one which curiously mingles the miraculous power with
the Saviour’s doctrine of the Sabbath:—
“And it came to pass, after these things, that in the sight of all
Jesus took clay from the pools which he had made, and of it made twelve
sparrows. And it was the Sabbath when Jesus did this, and there were
very many children with him. When, therefore, one of the Jews had seen
him doing this, he said to Joseph, ‘Joseph, dost thou not see the child
Jesus working on the Sabbath at what it is not lawful for him to do? For
he has made twelve sparrows of clay.’ And when Joseph heard this, he
reproved him, saying, ‘Wherefore doest thou on the Sabbath such things as
are not lawful for us to do?’ And when Jesus heard Joseph he struck his
hands together, and said to his sparrows, ‘Fly!’ and at the voice of his
command they began to fly. And in the sight and hearing of all that stood
by he said to the birds, ‘Go and fly through the earth, and through all
the world, and live.’ And when those that were there saw such miracles
they were filled with great astonishment.”
It is interesting to note how many of these stories connect the child
with animals. The passage in Isaiah which prophesied the great peace in
the figure of a child leading wild beasts had something to do with this;
so had the birth of Jesus in a manger, and the incident of the entry
into Jerusalem: but I suspect that the imagination scarcely needed to
hunt very far or very curiously for suggestions, since the world over
childhood has been associated with brute life, and the writers of the
Apocryphal Gospels had only to make these animals savage when they would
illustrate the potency of the childhood of Jesus.
“There is a road going out of Jericho,” says the Pseudo-gospel of
Matthew, “and leading to the river Jordan, to the place where the
children of Israel crossed; and there the ark of the covenant is said to
have rested. And Jesus was eight years old, and he went out of Jericho
and went towards the Jordan. And there was beside the road, near the
banks of the Jordan, a cave, where a lioness was nursing her cubs; and
no one was safe who walked that way. Jesus, then, coming from Jericho,
and knowing that in that cave the lioness had brought forth her young,
went into it in the sight of all. And when the lions saw Jesus they ran
to meet him, and adored him. And Jesus was sitting in the cavern, and
the lion’s cubs ran hither and thither round his feet, fawning upon him
and sporting. And the older lions, with their heads bowed down, stood at
a distance and adored him, and fawned upon him with their tails. Then
the people, who were standing afar off, not seeing Jesus, said, ‘Unless
he or his parents had committed grievous sins, he would not of his own
accord have offered himself up to the lions.’ And when the people were
thus reflecting within themselves, and were lying under great sorrow,
behold, on a sudden, in the sight of the people, Jesus came out of the
cave, and the lions went before him, and the lion’s cubs played with each
other before his feet. And the parents of Jesus stood afar off, with
their heads bowed down, and watched; likewise, also, the people stood at
a distance, on account of the lions; for they did not dare to come close
to them. Then Jesus began to say to the people, ‘How much better are the
beasts than you, seeing that they recognize their Lord and glorify him;
while you men, who have been made after the image and likeness of God,
do not know him! Beasts know me, and are tame; men see me, and do not
acknowledge me.’”
To the mind of these early Christians the life of Jesus was compounded
of holiness and supernatural power; so far as they distinguished these,
the holiness was the cause of the power, and hence, when the imagination
fashioned saints out of men and women, it followed the same course
which it had taken with the Master. The childhood of the saints was an
anticipation of maturer virtues and powers, rather than a manifestation
of ingenuous innocence. There was a tendency to explain exceptional
qualities in lives by extending them backward into youth, thereby gaining
for them an apparent corroboration. The instances of this in the legends
are frequent. Mothers, like the Virgin Mary, have premonitions that
their children are to be in some special manner children of God, and the
characteristics of later life are foreshadowed at birth. The Virgin
herself was thus dealt with. The strong human feeling which subsequently,
when the tenderness of Christ had been petrified into judgment,
interposed the Virgin as mediator, found gratification in surrounding
Mary’s infancy and childhood with a supernatural grace and power, the
incidents in some cases being faint reflections of incidents in the life
of her son; as when we are told that Joachim and Anna carried Mary, then
three years old, to place her among the virgins in the temple of God.
“And when she was put down before the doors of the temple, she went up
the fifteen steps so swiftly that she did not look back at all; nor did
she, as children are wont to do, seek for her parents. Whereupon her
parents, each of them anxiously seeking for the child, were both alike
astonished until they found her in the temple, and the priests of the
temple themselves wondered.”