Not to embarrass ourselves with too many points, we may be content with these four characteristics of childhood, teachableness, ignorance, selfishness, and living only for the present.  In the last three of these, the perfect man should put away childish things; in the first point, or teachableness, while he retained it in principle, he should modify it in its application.  For while modesty, humility, and a readiness to learn, are becoming to men no less than to children; yet it should be not a simple readiness to follow others, but only to follow the wise and good; not a sense of utter helplessness which catches at the first stay, whether sound or brittle; but such a consciousness of weakness and imperfection, as makes us long to be strengthened by Him who is almighty, to be purified by Him who is all pure.

I said, and it is an obvious truth, that the change from childhood to manhood is gradual; there is a period in our lives, of several years, in which we are, or should be, slowly exchanging the qualities of one state for those of the other.  During this intermediate state, then, we should expect to find persons become less teachable, less ignorant, less selfish, less thoughtless.  “Less teachable,” I would wish to mean, in the sense of being “less indiscriminately teachable;” but as the evil and the good are, in human things, ever mixed up together, we may be obliged to mean “less teachable” simply.  And, to say the very truth, if I saw in a young man the changes from childhood in the three other points, if I found him becoming wiser, and less selfish, and more thoughtful, I should not be very much disturbed if I found him for a time less teachable also.  For whilst he was really becoming wiser and better, I should not much wonder if the sense of improvement rather than of imperfection possessed him too strongly; if his confidence in himself was a little too over-weening.  Let him go on a little farther in life, and if he really does go on improving in wisdom and goodness, this over-confidence will find its proper level.  He will perceive not only how much he is doing, or can do, but how much there is which he does not do, and cannot.  To a thoughtful mind added years can scarcely fail to teach, humility.  And in this the highest wisdom of manhood may be resembling more and more the state of what would be perfect childhood, that is, not simply teachableness, but tractableness with respect to what was good and true, and to that only.

But the danger of the intermediate state between childhood and manhood is too often this, that whilst in the one point of teachableness, the change runs on too fast, in the other three, of wisdom, of unselfishness, and of thoughtfulness, it proceeds much too slowly:  that the faults of childhood thus remain in the character, whilst that quality by means of which these faults are meant to be corrected,—­namely, teachableness,—­is at the same time diminishing.  Now, teachableness as an instinct, if I may call it so, diminishes naturally