his words over the little children who were forbidden by the disciples to come to him, he has lifted childhood into a type of character, and has given children their share in the kingdom of God.[1] In fact with Jesus the vocabulary of the family becomes one of choicest affection. His disciples are his "little children," doubly dear when he is about to leave them.[2] All earnest members of his divine brotherhood are his family.[3]
In the comparisons of Jesus we again see clearly the underlying Christian ideal of the family. Here, as in the case of women, among his words there is no exhortation to either paternal or filial love. The apostle, less filled with a profound confidence in the inmost nature of man and more concerned with halting converts, bids sons obey their parents and fathers not to provoke their children to wrath.[4] But such commands were impossible for Jesus. With him paternal love is as human and natural as life. To command it would have been to make the holiest of instincts the product of effort. From the very method of his teaching Jesus must needs have started with some absolute ideal to which he might compare spiritual relations, and which, already understood, would make intelligible that which was difficult to understand. Other teachers have felt the same need, and this highest type of holiest relations has been found in many things—numerical harmonies, nature, the state. Jesus found it in the family. Even among evil men the paternal instinct gives good gifts and the deception of a child is unthinkable.[5] Love and kindliness between brothers are spontaneous[6] and their absence is a type of all that is selfish and ungodlike.[7] To give up family relations is the supreme test of loyalty.[8] Thus it is that, as has already appeared is his habit, Jesus here using the noblest forms and words for his noblest teaching, makes the members of the divine society brothers; while paternal love is his representation of the love of God,[9] and the family as a unit, his
