ded that, while the
Child may be Father of the Man, the Man reserves the privilege of
spanking. Even so I observe that, while able to agree cordially with
Christ on the necessity of becoming as little children as a condition
of entering the Kingdom of Heaven, we are not so injudicious as to
act upon any such belief; nay, we find ourselves obliged to revise
and re-interpret the wisdom of the Gospels when we find it too
impracticably childish. When Christ, for instance, forbids oaths of
all kinds, we feel sure He cannot be serious, or we should have to
upset a settled practice of the courts. And as for resisting no evil
and forgiving our enemies, why, good Heavens! what would become of
our splendid armaments! The suggestion, put so down rightly, is
quite too wild. In short, as a distinguished Bishop put it, society
could not exist for forty-eight hours on the lines laid down in the
Sermon on the Mount. (I forget the Bishop's exact words, but they
amounted to a complete and thoroughly common-sense repudiation of
Gospel Christianity.)

No; it is obvious that, in so far as the Divine teaching touches
on conduct, we must as practical men correct it, and with a
special look-out for its indulgent misunderstanding of children.
Children, as a matter of experience, have no sense of the rights of
property. They steal apples.

And yet--there must be something in this downright wisdom of
childishness since Christ went (as we must believe) out of His way to
lay such stress on it; and since our own hearts respond so readily
when Vaughan or Wordsworth claim divinity for it. We cannot of
course go the length of believing that the great, wise, and eminent
men of our day are engaged one and all in the pursuit of shadows.
'Shadows we are and shadows we pursue' sounded an exquisitely solemn
note in an election speech; but after all, we must take the world as
we find it, and the world as we find it has its own recognised
rewards. No success attended the poet who wrote that--

"Those little new-invented things--
Cups, saddles, crowns, are childish joys,
So ribbands are and rings,
Which all our happiness destroys.
Nor God
In His abode,
Nor saints, nor little boys,
Nor Angels made them; only foolish men,
Grown mad with custom, on those toys
Which more increase their wants to date. . . ."

He found no publisher, and they have been rescued by accident after
two hundred years