Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 2.djvu/413

Rh the capacities of very little children, and power and will to sanctify them, we have not kept them from  "green pastures," and His "waters of comfort:" whether we have not left them to the wilfulness of their old nature, as if it were this which were "natural" to them, and have neglected to cultivate the new man in them, "which, after, is created in righteousness and true holiness;" whether we have not left them to stray from  fold, as if this were inevitable, and then complained of their unwillingness to be confined within it. The whole education, indeed, of children, is an act of faith and humility: faith, to believe that the seed we see not is already sown by ; that amid all their very childishness, the principle of immortal life is implanted in them; that, before they can express themselves in words, or can understand ours, or we can tell them of, every little act of submission, and so every little conquest of self, is a fruit of , who sealed them in Baptism; that the seed so sown requires but our diligent watering, and will even now give the increase and the promise of the future harvest; that they are already, in deed as well as in name, Christians:—it requires humility as well as faith to believe that the doctrines which we receive, but of which we understand so little, can be, and are received as readily, and in its measure as efficaciously, in the heart of a child; that their evil tempers yield as, yea, or more readily, through prayer, and they become as or more easily victorious in their little trials than we; that there is not the wide difference between us, which our pride of intellect would imagine; that we are in different stages only of the same course—that they are already carrying on the same warfare with the same enemies, and (not having been so often foiled, not having as yet slighted the voice of , and their Baptismal grace still fresh,) in their degree, more successfully than we: that they have need of, and can use, all the same means of Grace (save ), and look with a simpler, more vivid faith, to the same hope of Glory. This, and much more, which those who have tried to educate children Christianly, now know by sight, was at first to them an act of faith: it remains after a time, still, in a degree, an act of