What is the full meaning of these words? They are not simply the expression of that impulse of gentle benevolence excited in all hearts at the sight of children, and their innocent confidence in all who come near them. {288} Jesus Christ no doubt experienced the influence of this feeling, for He was strange to none of man's noble emotions; but his thoughts passed far beyond the children whose approach he permitted, and they merely furnished Him with the living occasion to address to men themselves his solemn warnings. The child, I have already mentioned in these Meditations,[Footnote 125] is, for us, the image of innocence, the type of the creature fallible, yet who has not yet sinned, who knows not yet either error of understanding, or the seduction of passion, or the blinding influence of pride, or the troubles of doubt, or the extreme folly of sin, or the anguish of repentance; who follows in the first impulses of infancy only the spontaneous instincts of tender confidence in the parent to whom he is indebted for security and for love, for the first joys and the earliest blessings. [Footnote 125: Meditation II., Christian Dogmas, p. 48.] {289} Jesus does not pretend to bring men back to that fair condition, to restore to them their primitive innocence: but He comes to ransom them from sin; He brings them the hope of pardon and salvation. Confidence in God, a confidence sincere, unpretending, and loving, is that disposition which opens the soul of man to the divine blessing. This is also the disposition that the child evinces towards its parents; he calls upon them, and he hopes in them. Hence those words of Jesus: "Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." The way of innocence is a far better way than that of science to lead man up to God. Science is a splendid thing; it is also a noble privilege of man that God, in creating him an intelligent and a free agent, has given him a capacity to desire and to pursue through study the truths of science, and even to attain them in a certain measure, and in a certain sphere. {290} But when science attempts to exceed that measure and to quit that sphere; when it ignores and scorns the instincts,--natural, universal, and permanent instincts, of the human soul; when it essays to set up everywhere its own torch in the place of that primitive light that lights mankind: then, and from that cause alone, science fills itself with error; and this is the very case which called forth those words of Jesus: "I praise thee, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." [Footnote 126] [Footnote 126: Matthew xi. 25. The words [Greek text] are better rendered, "from the learned and the prudent," than "wise and intelligent;" "sages et intelligents," as in the French version by Osterwald.] VII. Jesus Christ Himself.