The Child in the Midst

And first, let us consider where and what the little being is who is entrusted to the care of human parents.  A tablet to be written upon?  A twig to be bent?  Wax to be molded?  Very likely; but he is much more – a being belonging to an altogether higher estate than ours; as it were, a prince committed to the fostering care of peasants.  Hear Wordsworth’s estimate of the child’s estate:–

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
•	•	    •
Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height  [1]

and so on, through the whole of that great ode, which, next after the bible, shows the deepest insight into what is peculiar to the children in their nature and estate.  “Of such is the kingdom of heaven.”[2]  “Except ye become as little children ye shall in no case enter the kingdom of heaven.”[3]  “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”[4]   “And He called a little child, and set him in the midst.”[5]   Here is the Divine estimate of the child’s estate.  It is worthwhile for parents to ponder every utterance in the Gospels about the children, divesting themselves of the notion that these sayings belong, in the first place, to the grown-up people who have become as little children.  What these profound sayings are, and how much they may mean, it is beyond us to discuss here; only they appear to cover far more than Wordsworth claims for the children in his sublimest reach –

“trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home”[6]