Jesus had always a peculiar tenderness for children. "Suffer little children to come unto me," is one of his most familiar sayings, though in quoting it we are apt to forget that "come" is in Greek a verb carrying volition with it, and that Mark uses another noticeable word, and tells us that Jesus put his arms round the child.[12] Little children, we may be sure, came to him of their own accord and were at ease with him; {122} and it has been suggested that the saying goes back to the Nazareth days, and that the little children came about their brother in the workshop there. Mr Burkitt has recently remarked[13] that we may read far and wide in Christian Literature before we find any such feeling for children as we know so well in the words of Jesus; and in Classical Literature we may look as far. To Jesus the child is not unimportant--to injure a child was an unspeakable thing. Indeed, if the Kingdom of God meant anything, it was that we must be children again--God's little children, to whom their Father is the background of everything. The Christian phrase about being born again may be Jesus' own, but if so, it has lost for us something of what he intended by it, which survives in more authentic sayings. We have to recover, he said, what we lost when we outgrew the child; we must have the simplicity and frankness of children--their instinctive way of believing all things and hoping all things. All things are new to the child; it is only for grown-up people that God has to "_make_ all things new." Paul has not much to say about children, but he has this thought--"if any man be in Christ, it is a new creation, all things are made new." Probably the child's habit of taking nothing for granted--except the love that is all about it--is what Jesus missed most in grown men. Every idealist and every poet is a child from beginning to end--and something of this sort is the mark of the school of Jesus. [Sidenote: Jesus and nature] The outdoor life of Jesus lies recorded in his parables. Weinel has said that Paul was a man of a city--Paul said so himself. But Jesus is at home in the open air. The sights and sounds of the farm are in his words--the lost sheep, the fallen ox, the worried flock, the hen clucking to her chickens. This last gave a picture in which his thought instinctively clothed itself in one of his hours of deepest emotion. It is perhaps a mark of his race and land that to "feed swine" is with him a symbol of a lost life, and that the dog is an unclean animal--as it very generally is elsewhere. He speaks of ploughing, clearly knowing how it should be done; and like other teachers, he uses the analogies of sowing and harvest. The grain growing secretly, and the harvest, over-ripe and spilling its wheat, were to him pictures of human life. {123}