He seems to have been also especially attractive to little children; he loved them and noticed them; and it would seem from some parts of the Gospel narrative as if the little ones watched for his coming and ran to his arms instinctively. Their artless, loving smiles, their clear, candid eyes, reminded him of that world of love where he had dwelt before he came to our earth, and he said, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." It was the sense that he loved little ones that led mothers to force their way with their infants through reproving and unsympathetic disciples; there was that about Jesus which made every mother sure that he would love her child, and that the very touch of his hands would bring a blessing upon it; and when his disciples treated the effort as an intrusion it is said "Jesus was much displeased." He did not merely accept or tolerate the movement, but entered into it with warmth and enthusiasm; he did not coldly lay the tips of his sacred fingers on them, but took them up in his arms and laid his hands on them and blessed them; he embraced them and held them to his heart as something that he would make peculiarly his own. It is no wonder, therefore, that Jesus was the children's favorite, and that on his last triumphal entrance into Jerusalem the hosannas of the children in the temple should have been so loud and so persistent as to excite the anger of the priests and Scribes. They called on him to silence the little voices, as if they felt sure that he could control them by a word; but that word Jesus refused to speak. The voices of these young birds of paradise were dear to him, and he said indignantly, "If these were forbidden to speak the very stones would cry out." But still more remarkable is the fact that Jesus was attractive to a class who as a general thing hate and flee from religious teachers. The publicans and sinners, the disreputable and godless classes, felt themselves strangely drawn to him. If we remember how intensely bitter was the Jewish sense of degradation in being under Roman taxation, and how hardly and cruelly the office of collecting that tribute was often exercised, we may well think that only Jews who cared little for the opinions of their countrymen, and had little character to lose, would undertake it. We know there are in all our cities desperate and perishing classes inhabiting regions where it would be hardly safe for a reputable person to walk. Yet in regions like these the pure apparition of Jesus of Nazareth walked serene, and all hearts were drawn to him.