Sermons at Rugby | Page 5

the face of Christ, and is embraced in the arms of His love.

And these are, or they once were, your gifts. As you love the better life,
and hope for good days, hold them fast and cherish them, or if any of
them be unhappily lost, let it be your endeavour to recover it.
As we contemplate such a scene as this in our Lord's life with the little
child in the midst, and listen to the Saviour's words, all the commands
and injunctions to keep innocency, to keep the spirit of obedience, to
keep a guileless and trusting and loving heart, gain a new force. They
seem to speak to us with new voices; for if the true life, the life that has
in it the hope of union with Christ, must be a life endowed with these
gifts, whether in youth or age, what a blessed thing it will be for you if
you have never lost or squandered them. We cannot too soon learn this
lesson; for if under the influence of any wrong motives, or following
any wrong ideals, or misled by any bad example, you go astray and rob
your young life of these divine gifts, no man knows how, or when, or
where you will recover them, and become again as a little child.
And if we turn our thoughts from our own separate personal life, and
look for a moment at our duty as members of a society, how this
picture of Christ embracing the little child, and blessing those who
receive or help one such, should stir us to new and keener interest in
social duty! Does it not carry in it, this example and teaching of the
Lord, does it not carry in it the condemnation of a great many of our
traditional notions about our duty to the young? We see the Lord's
tenderness and love and care for the little child; we see how He values
the childlike qualities; and how He enjoins the nursing and the
cherishing of these. If, then, we have really learnt the lesson which He
thus presses upon us, we shall feel something like reverence for every
young life, as it begins its perilous and uncertain course on the sea of
man's experiences; and with this feeling we shall be eager to help and
protect such lives whenever we have the chance of doing it, and we
shall be very careful to do them no wrong.
But when we turn from the Gospel and these thoughts which it stirs in
us to our common life of every day, does it not rather seem sometimes
as if this teaching of the Lord were all a dream and had no reality? And
yet there is hardly one of us but would confess that, having once seen

this revelation of the Lord, we are put to shame if, as happens
sometimes, a young soul comes amongst us endowed with these very
gifts of innocence, and high purpose, and trust, and promise of all
goodness, which so won the Saviour's heart, and is met, when he comes,
in school or house, not by care, or sympathy, or guidance, or protection,
as of an elder brother's love, but by experiences of a very different sort.
You would agree that it is a shame to us if such an one comes only to
find the misleading influence of some thoughtless or bad companion, or
to have held up before him some bad tradition as the law which should
rule his life here.
I have known--which of us in the course of years has not known?--such
cases in our school experience. A child has come from a refined and
loving home, but only to meet with roughness or coarseness; and
instead of retaining those gifts and qualities of childhood, which are the
godlike qualities of life and meant to be permanent, he has been led to
grow up utterly unchildlike, depraved, debased, hardened; and there is
no sadder sight to see than a growth of this kind. And if you have ever
seen it; if you have ever noticed the falling away from childlike
innocence to sin, from purity to coarseness, from the open, ingenuous,
trusting spirit to sullen hardness, from happiness to gloom, you know
how terribly in earnest the Saviour must have been when He denounced
that woe on any one who causes such debasement of a young
soul--"Whoso shall offend one of these little ones, it had been better for
him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were drowned
in the depth of the sea."

III. THE BREVITY OF LIFE.
"I must work the works of Him that sent Me, while it is day: the night
cometh."--ST. JOHN ix. 4.
There are few things