Before the Fall
We all know of the incident when the disciples were grumbling amongst themselves about which of them would be greatest in the kingdom of God, and Jesus took a child and set him in their midst, saying that unless they were converted and became as little children, they would not enter the kingdom at all. It was the same when women brought their children to Jesus to be blessed, and the disciples, playing the officious managers, told the women to go away, no doubt begging them to consider how far the Master had walked and how tired he was. But Jesus rebuked the disciples, telling them to let the little children come to him, for of such was the kingdom of God. Then he embraced the children and blessed them.
Of course, Jesus was urging upon his disciples the virtue that hardly anyone prays for, which is humility, a virtue which seems to shrivel up in us like a spider as soon as we begin to notice it. And yet we play-act at humility, too. Charles Dickens can portray this vice for us with fiery purity, as he did, for example, with the never-young clerk, Uriah Heep. When the boy David Copperfield first meets Uriah and asks him, since he is a lawyer’s clerk, whether he is going to be a great lawyer, too, the clerk rubs his hands and demurs. Oh no, that will never happen, says he:
“I am well aware that I am the umblest person going,” said Uriah Heep, modestly; “let the other be where he may. My mother is likewise a very umble person. We live in a numble abode, Master Copperfield, but have much to be thankful for. My father’s former calling was umble. He was a sexton.”
“What is he now?” I asked.
“He is a partaker of glory at present, Master Copperfield,” said Uriah Heep.
Of that, we may entertain our doubts, supposing that something of the father has borne sour fruit in the sly, conniving, malevolent, and ambitious son.
The Blessed Thing in Children
We are apt, still, to define humility by what it is not: it is not ambitious, it is not proud, it does not gaze in the mirror, it does not blow a trumpet before it as it swaggers down the street. Yet it seems to me that the more we look upon Jesus’ love for children as only an appreciation of their lowliness, the less we find of his outgoing and heartfelt love for them as children. We don’t, after all, think first of humility when we look upon a field where children are racing at play and laughing, not unless we see the play itself as an openness to joy, as it involves full-hearted action without a thought for advantage or utility. The children don’t play so that they may make more money when they are grown up. They don’t play to pad a resume; the sports that parents push them into, thinking of college, are for the children, insofar as they engage in them with that ulterior aim, not play but work.
What is the blessed thing that is present in the children, the thing we miss in ourselves as we grow old, the thing we see and feel as an abiding good, and not as just the absence of the sins and the sadness that cramp the heart of the adult?
“So small a boy, and so great a sinner!” cried Augustine, thinking of his own past. Perhaps it is temerity in me to seem to run counter to the saint, but let me venture to present for you, dear reader, a poem that portrays the goodness of childhood as a still-surviving trace of our innocence before the Fall, and as an opportunity, not for us to seize upon, but for Christ and his innocence-making power. It is a poem fit for the early months of the year: “Spring,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring—
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrushThrough the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rushWith richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginningIn Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
What a boisterous and delight-taking sonnet it is! Hopkins doesn’t need to go for anything stale and merely picturesque about the spring—nothing to grace a dully pretty greeting card. He loves the weeds and their weediness. He loves the eggs the thrush lays in her nest; think of the most common American thrush, the robin, and her little blue-green eggs. But the thrush sings, too; the robins sing, and our finest American singers are the robin’s cousins, the wood thrush, the hermit thrush, and the veery.
In England, you can hear the song-thrush in “the echoing timber,” the woods before the summer leaves have muffled everything, as he rinses and wrings the ear with his pure and ethereal melodies. The pear tree blossoms, and the breeze brushes the flowers against the rich blue sky—a deeper blue than we are accustomed to in America, because England is farther from the equator than we are; and the lambs gambol about on their spindly legs.
“What is all this juice and all this joy?” asks the poet, who then answers his own question. God did not merely obliterate the garden of Eden. He did not turn it into a lifeless asphaltic lake, as he did to the cities of the plain. He cast Adam and Eve out of the garden, but, if we take Hopkins’ cue, he allowed some of the “juice,” some of the “strain of the earth’s sweet being,” to remain. At which point the poet makes a sudden turn, though for the Christian reader it should not be entirely surprising. “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring,” he has said, and where is spring to be found in man, if not in children?
A Prayer & an Invitation
Hopkins is under no illusions about what will happen to that spring garden if Christ does not tend it. Therefore, the last several lines of the poem are a prayer, an urgent and indeed joyful petition. Why, he fairly commands the Lord, in what is itself a kind of childlike boldness. “Have, get!” he cries. “Have it,” that is, “get it before it cloy,” before it should “cloud” over and “sour with sinning.”
What is the Lord to get? What juice to cherish? What inmost and sweetest sap of life? It is the “innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy.” And why should Christ, of all the men who have ever walked the earth, not cherish that juice? For he himself is the child of a maiden, and children and their innocent minds are most his choice, and indeed “worthy the winning.”
And what of the “girl and boy”? They may be gathering May flowers, they may feel the first innocent attractions of love—we are not told; May, for the Catholic Hopkins, is Mary’s month, too, and children may gather flowers in her honor. Man and woman can sin together, but the girl and boy in Hopkins’s poem do not yet know of such things; and God help the man or woman who would offend one of these little ones. In Hopkins’s time, unless the children were growing up in hothouses of wickedness, they might have that spring, and perhaps recall it when they were old, and when the words of Jesus would strike their ears as an invitation to return, and be children, by grace—children not as they once were, but as they might ever be. May it be so also with us! “The growth of flesh is but a blister,” says the poet Herbert. “Childhood is health.”
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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