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:— “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.”