Whoever is able to understand Wordsworth, or Henry Vaughan, when either speaks of the glorious insights of his childhood, will be able to imagine a little how Jesus must, in his eternal childhood, regard the world.

Hear what Wordsworth says:—­

    Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
    The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
    Hath had elsewhere its setting,
        And cometh from afar: 
    Not in entire forgetfulness,
    And not in utter nakedness,
      But trailing clouds of glory do we come
    From God, who is our home: 
      Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 
        Shades of the prison-house begin to close
    Upon the growing Boy,
      But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
    He sees it in his joy;
      The Youth, who daily farther from the east
    Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
    And by the vision splendid
    Is on his way attended;
    At length the Man perceives it die away,
    And fade into the light of common day.

Hear what Henry Vaughan says:—­

    Happy those early dayes, when I
    Shin’d in my angell-infancy! 
    Before I understood this place
    Appointed for my second race,
    Or taught my soul to fancy ought
    But a white, celestiall thought;
    When yet I had not walkt above
    A mile or two, from my first love,
    And looking back—­at that short space—­
    Could see a glimpse of His bright-face;
    When on some gilded cloud, or flowre
    My gazing soul would dwell an houre,
    And in those weaker glories spy
    Some shadows of eternity;
    Before I taught my tongue to wound
    My conscience with a sinfull sound,
    Or had the black art to dispence
    A sev’rall sinne to ev’ry sence,
    But felt through all this fleshly dresse
    Bright shootes of everlastingnesse. 
      O how I long to travell back,
    And tread again that ancient track! 
    That I might once more reach that plaine,
    Where first I left my glorious traine;
    From whence th’ inlightned spirit sees
    That shady City of palme trees.

Whoever has thus gazed on flower or cloud; whoever can recall poorest memory of the trail of glory that hung about his childhood, must have some faint idea how his father’s house and the things in it always looked, and must still look to the Lord.  With him there is no fading into the light of common day.  He has never lost his childhood, the very essence of childhood being nearness to the Father and the outgoing of his creative love; whence, with that insight of his eternal childhood of which the insight of the little ones here is a fainter repetition, he must see everything as the Father means it.  The child sees things as the Father means him to see them, as he thought of them when he uttered them.  For God is not only the father of the child, but of the