The occasion of their utterance is interesting, and brings to view a beautiful feature in the perfect character of Jesus Christ.  The Redeemer was deeply interested in every age and condition of man.  All classes shared in His benevolent affection, and all may equally partake of the rich blessings that flow from it.  But childhood and youth seem to have had a special attraction for Him.  The Evangelist is careful to inform us, that He took little children in His arms, and that beholding an amiable young man He loved him,—­a gush of feeling went out towards him.  It was because Christ was a perfect man, as well as the infinite God, that such a feeling dwelt in His breast.  For, there has never been an uncommonly fair and excellent human character, in which tenderness and affinity for childhood has not been a quality, and a quality, too, that was no small part of the fairness and excellence.  The best definition that has yet been given of genius itself is, that it is the carrying of the feelings of childhood onward into the thoughts and aspirations of manhood.  He who is not attracted by the ingenuousness, and trustfulness, and simplicity, of the first period of human life, is certainly wanting in the finest and most delicate elements of nature, and character.  Those who have been coarse and brutish, those who have been selfish and ambitious, those who have been the pests and scourges of the world, have had no sympathy with youth.  Though once young themselves, they have been those in whom the gentle and generous emotions of the morning of life have died out.  That man may become hardhearted, skeptical and sensual, a hater of his kind, a hater of all that is holy and good, he must divest himself entirely of the fresh and ingenuous feeling of early boyhood, and receive in its place that malign and soured feeling which is the growth, and sign, of a selfish and disingenuous life.  It is related of Voltaire,—­a man in whom evil dwelt in its purest and most defecated essence,—­that he had no sympathy with the child, and that the children uniformly shrank from that sinister eye in which the eagle and the reptile were so strangely blended.

Our Saviour, as a perfect man, then, possessed this trait, and it often showed itself in His intercourse with men.  As an omniscient Being, He indeed looked with profound interest, upon the dawning life of the human spirit as it manifests itself in childhood.  For He knew as no finite being can, the marvellous powers that sleep in the soul of the young child; the great affections which are to be the foundation of eternal bliss, or eternal pain, that exist in embryo within; the mysterious ideas that lie in germ far down in its lowest depths,—­He knew, as no finite creature is able, what is in the child, as well as in the man, and therefore was interested in its being and its well-being.  But besides this, by virtue of His perfect humanity, He was attracted by those peculiar traits which are seen in the earlier years of human life.  He loved the artlessness and gentleness, the sense of dependence, the implicit trust, the absence of ostentation and ambition, the unconscious modesty, in one word, the child-likeness of the child.