The literature of Greece and Rome is a possession of the modern world. For the most part it has been taken as an independent creation, studied indeed with reference to language as the vehicle of thought, but after all chiefly as an art. It is within a comparatively recent time that the conception of an historical study of literature has been prominent, and that men have gone to Greek and Roman poetry with an eager passion for the discovery of ancient life. The result of these new methods has been to humanize our conception of the literature under examination.

Singularly enough, while the modern world has been influenced by the classic world chiefly through its language, literature, and institutions, the third great stream of influence which has issued from ancient sources has been one in which literature as such has been almost subordinated to the religious and ethical ideas of which it was the vehicle; even the strong institutional forces inherent in it have had only exceptional attention. There was a time, indeed, when the history of the Jews, as contained in the books of the Old Testament, was isolated from the history of mankind and treated in an artificial manner, at its best made to illustrate conduct, somewhat as Latin literature was made to exemplify syntax. The old distinction of sacred and profane history did much to obscure the human element in what was called sacred history, and to blot out the divine element in what was called profane history. There are many who can remember the impression made upon their minds when they learned for the first time of the contemporaneousness of events in Jewish and Grecian history; and it is not impossible that some can even recall a period in their lives when Bible people and the Bible lands were almost as distinct and separate in their conception as if they belonged to another planet.

Nevertheless, the reality of Old Testament history, while suffering from lack of proportion in relation to other parts of human history, has been impressed upon modern civilization through its close identification with the religious life. The inheritance of these scriptures of the ancient Hebrew has been so complete that the modern Jew is regarded almost as a pretender when he sets up a claim to special possession. We jostle him out of the way, and appropriate his national documents as the old title-deeds of Christianity. There is, indeed, an historic truth involved in this; but, however we may regard it, we are brought back to the significant fact that along with the Greek and the Roman influence upon modern life has been the mighty force of Hebraism. The Greek has impressed himself upon our modes and processes of thought, the Roman upon our organization, the Hebrew upon our religious and social life.[20]

It is certain that the Bible has been a storehouse from which have been drawn illustrations of life and character, and that these have had an authority beyond anything in classic history and literature. It has been the book from which youth with us has drawn its conceptions of life outside of the limited circle of human experience; and the geographical, historical, and archæological apparatus employed to illustrate it has been far more considerable than any like apparatus in classical study. The Bible has been the university to the person of ordinary culture; it has brought into his life a foreign element which Greece and Rome have been powerless to present; and though the images of this remote foreign life often have been distorted, and strangely mingled with familiar notions, there can be no doubt that the mind has been enlarged by this extension of its interests and knowledge.

It is worth while, therefore, to ask what conceptions of childhood are discoverable in the Old Testament literature. The actual appearances of children in the narrative portions are not frequent. We have the incident of the exposure of Moses as a babe in the bulrushes; the sickness and death of Bathsheba’s child, with the pathetic story of the erring father’s fasting and prayer; the expulsion of Ishmael; the childhood of Samuel in the temple; the striking narrative of the restoration of the son of the widow of Zarephath by Elijah; and the still more graphic and picturesque description of the bringing back to life by Elisha of the child who had been born at his intercession to the Shunamite, and had been sunstruck when in the field with his father. Then there is the abrupt and hard to be explained narrative of the jeering boys who followed the prophet Elisha with derisive cries, as they saw how different he was in external appearance from the rugged and awe-inspiring Elijah. Whatever may be the interpretation of the fearful retribution which befell those rude boys, and the indication which was shown of the majesty of the prophetic office, it is clear that the Jew of that day would not have felt any disproportion between the guilt of the boys and their dire and speedy punishment; he would have been impressed by the sanctity of the prophet, and the swiftness of the divine demonstration. Life and death were nothing before the integrity of the divine ideal, and the complete subordination of children to the will of their parents accustomed the mind to an easy assent to the exhibition of what seems to us almost arbitrary will.

No attentive reader of the Old Testament has failed to remark the 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:—

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.