“Perhaps,” said I, “this explains why Paul seldom mentions the word ‘little children’.” “‘Seldom’,” said Clemens, “is not the right word. Paul _never_ mentions it, except in the warning I mentioned above. Moreover John, in his epistle, says, ‘I have written unto you little children, _because ye have known the Father_.’ That word ‘_known_’ goes to the root of the matter. The essence of ‘little childhood,’ in Christ’s sense, is _not ignorance, but knowledge_—‘knowing the Father.’ And ‘knowing the Father’ implies loving the Father, or desiring the Father. There are cases where ‘desire’ may perhaps be well substituted for ‘love,’ so as to indicate that kind of love which leads one onwards to the object desired. This gospel seems to me to attempt to express—if I may so speak in accordance with the prophets of Israel—a desire of God for man, producing a desire of man for God. The work of the Son of God is to unite these two desires. This is a great mystery, a mystery past mere logic, that God, the Creator, should ‘desire.’ Yet I accept it—as it has been expressed by a certain holy woman of Athens, whom I verily believe to have been inspired by God, ‘The Son of God chose to be lifted up upon the tree of the Cross that we might receive the food of angels. And what is this food of angels? It is the desire of God, which draws to itself the desire that is in the depths of the soul and they make one thing together’.” This saying was beyond me at the time. But I felt that it contained truth, and that I should grow into some apprehension of it. And what Clemens had said, though very strange at first, had been gradually growing to seem possible and even reasonable, if one may use the word concerning that which accords with the spiritual Logos—namely, that the Son of God, being human, was caused to feel forsaken by God, and to desire God, and to ask why this strange feeling of forsakenness, this unwonted, unsatisfied desire, was brought upon Him by the Father. Then, according to the saying of this holy woman of Athens, the answer of the Father was, “In receiving this forsakenness and this desire for my presence, thou art receiving from me my desire, which draws up to me thy desire, and they two make one together.”