The tenderness and charm of those passages in which he celebrates the importance and sanctity of childhood, its innocence, its capacity for growth, its virginal outlook, its freshness and power of response, place him in the front rank of the poets who have treated this most difficult subject, and constantly remind us of Blake: “Comme leur jeune regard a une promesse, une secrète assurance intérieure, et leur front, et toute leur personne. Leur petite, leur auguste, leur si révérente et révérende personne.... Heureuse enfance. Tout leur petit corps, toute leur petite personne, tous leurs petits gestes, est pleine, ruisselle, regorge d’une espérance. Resplendit, regorge d’une innocence Qui est l’innocence même de l’espérance.” This hope, the childhood of the heart, is to Péguy the most precious of human qualities, and the one in which man draws nearest to an understanding of the Divine Idea. Jesus is “the man who has hoped,” and the Christian assault, which is the assault of hope, can alone make a breach in the defences of eternity. It is “the faith that God loves best”; the beginning of liberty, the growing point of the eager spirit of life. Faith beholds that which is: Charity loves that which is: Hope alone beholds and loves that which shall be. Faith is static; hope dynamic. Faith is a great tree; hope is the rising sap, the little, swelling bud upon the spray. “La petite espérance Est celle qui toujours commence”— the persistent element in all effort and all change. She deceives us twenty times running; yet she is the only one of our leaders who never deceives us in the end. She gives significance to human toil, beauty and meaning to human suffering, reality to human joy. In one of his most beautiful verses, he describes the crowning of humanity with this living, budding diadem of hope. “Comme une mère fait un diadème de ses doigts allongés, des doigts conjoints et affrontés de ses deux mains fraîches Autour du front brûlant de son enfant Pour apaiser ce front brûlant, cette fièvre, Ainsi une couronne éternelle a été tressée pour apaiser le front brûlant. Et c’était une couronne de verdure. Une couronne de feuillage.” Moreover, “cette curieuse enfant Espérance” is the motive-power of the spiritual order too. God Himself hopes for and in man: has placed His eternal hope in man’s hands, and given to him, along with the gift of liberty, the terrible power of frustrating or achieving the purposes of Divine Love. “Le plus infirme des pécheurs peut découronner, peut couronner Une espérance de Dieu.”