All men are children of the Son of Man, but no one could call Him father in the flesh. Among the disappointing joys of men perhaps the only joy which does not disappoint is to hold in one’s arms or on one’s knees a child whose face is rosy with blood which is also yours, who laughs at you with the dawning splendor of his eyes, who stammers out your name, who uncovers the springs of the lost tenderness of your childhood; to feel against your adult flesh, hardened by winds and the sun, this fresh smooth young flesh where the blood seems still to have kept some of the sweetness of milk, flesh that seems made of warm, living petals. To feel that this flesh is yours, shaped in the flesh of your mate, nourished with the milk of her breasts; to watch the birth and slow flowering of the soul in this flesh; to be the sole father of this unique creature, of this flower opening in the light of the world; to recognize your own aspect in his childish eyes, to hear your own voice through his fresh lips; to grow young again through this child in order to be worthy of him; to be nearer to him; to make yourself younger, better, purer; to forget all the years which bring us silently nearer to death, to forget the pride of manhood, the vanity of wisdom, the first wrinkles on the face, the expiations, the ignominies of life and to become a virgin again beside this virginity, calm beside this calmness, good with a goodness never known before; to be in short the father of a child of your own, this is certainly the highest human pleasure given to a man who has a soul within his clay. Jesus, whom no one called Father, was drawn to children as to sinners. Lover of the absolute, He loved only extremes. Complete innocence and complete downfall were for Him pledges of salvation. Innocence because it does not need to be cleansed; abject degradation because it feels more keenly the need to be cleansed. The people in danger are those midway; men half depraved and half intact; men who are foul within and wish to seem upright and just; those who have lost with their childhood their native purity and do not yet recognize the filthiness of their inner depravity.