I have said that every great renaissance has left its record in the recognition which childhood receives in literature and art. I add that the scope and profundity of that renaissance may be measured by the form which this recognition takes. At the birth of Christianity the pregnant sentences, “Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven,” “For of such is the kingdom of heaven,” “Verily I say unto you, their angels do always behold the face of my Father in heaven,” sound a depth unreached before. They were, like other words from the same source, veritable prophecies, the perfect fulfillment of which waits the perfect manifestation of the Son of Man. At the Renaissance, when mediævalism gave way before modern life, art reflected the hopes of mankind in the face of a divine child. At the great Revolution, when, amidst fire and blood, the new life of humanity stood revealed, an unseen hand again took a little child and placed him in the midst of men. It was reserved for an English poet to be the one who most clearly discerned the face of the child. Himself one of the great order of angels, he beheld in the child the face of God. I may be pardoned, I trust, for thus reading in Western fashion the meaning of that Oriental phrase which I find has perplexed theologians and Biblical critics. Was it any new disclosure which the Christ made if he merely said that the attendant ministers of children always beheld the face of the Father in heaven? Was it not the very property of such angelic nature that it should see God? But was it not rather a revelation to the crass minds of those who thrust children aside, that the angels who moved between the Father of spirits and these new-comers into the world saw in their faces a witness to their divine origin? They saw the Father repeated in the child.