ecause those higher feelings, which are the great
check to selfishness, have not yet arisen within him, the selfish
instinct, connected apparently with all animal life, is exceedingly
predominant in him. If a child then on the one hand be teachable, yet he
is at the same time morally weak and ignorant, and therefore
extremely selfish.

It is also a part of the nature of childhood to be the slave of present
impulses. A child is not apt to look backwards or forwards, to reflect
or to calculate. In this also he differs entirely from the great quality
which befits man as an eternal being, the being able to look before
and after.

Not to embarrass ourselves with too many points, we may be content with
these four characteristics of childhood, teachableness, ignorance,
selfishness, and living only for the present. In the last three of
these, the perfect man should put away childish things; in the first
point, or teachableness, while he retained it in principle, he should
modify it in its application. For while modesty, humility, and a
readiness to learn, are becoming to men no less than to children; yet it
should be not a simple readiness to follow others, but only to follow
the wise and good; not a sense of utter helplessness which catches at
the first stay, whether sound or brittle; but such a consciousness of
weakness and imperfection, as makes us long to be strengthened by Him
who is almighty, to be purified by Him who is all pure.

I said, and it is an obvious truth, that the change from childhood to
manhood is gradual; there is a period in our lives, of several years,
in which we are, or should be, slowly exchanging the qualities of one
state for those of the other. During this intermediate state, then, we
should expect to find persons become less teachable, less ignorant, less
selfish, less thoughtless. "Less teachable," I would wish to mean, in
the sense of being "less indiscriminately teachable;" but as the evil
and the good are, in human things, ever mixed up together, we may be
obliged to mean "less teachable" simply. And, to say the very truth, if
I saw in a young man the changes from childhood in the three other
points, if I found him becoming wiser, and less selfish, and more
thoughtful, I should not be very much disturbed if I found him for a
time less teachable also. For whilst he was really becoming wiser and
better, I should not much wonder if the sense of improvement rather than
of imperfection possessed