There is no mere mischievous intent in using for title part of the New Testament words about children, as amusingly translated; but a wish to deal helpfully, let's hope amusingly, and insist un-mischievously, with the problem of bringing children to their religion.

We must be aware of prickling, hindering difficulties at once. A priest without any of the responsibilities and therefore any idea of the responsibilities of day-to-day handling of children isn't on first view the one qualified to write about it. Any excursions of his among them in family or school are, he must remember, always special occasions, often prepared-for events, with an excitement and a response at least different from normal. He will, however, be aware, if only dimly, of what underlies the orderliness and respectful attention he meets; the discipline (or threat of force, to you) that may keep family or school from bedlam, but certainly can make nonsense of what might be said, in mere sentiment and simplicity, about religion, as anything else.

Legalism is for many people one of the more difficult aspects of religion. We cannot help feeling, with some unease, how close it comes to the spirit of the scribes and Pharisees, the very antithesis of New Testament religion, the service of the heart, the freedom of the sons of God. As a subject of prayer, then, it will be even more difficult to assimilate. An ‘Ode to the Codex Juris Canonici’ would surely be limited in its appeal, and as a hymn would not be an obvious success. Yet it is precisely this sort of prayer which the psalter presents to us in psalm I, for example, or 118, or the second half of psalm 18.

The acrostic form used by many of these psalms does not lessen our difficulty. Psalm 118 is in fact a tour de force in this style: it is composed of twenty-two stanzas of eight lines each, in which each line begins with the same letter of the alphabet so that the twenty-two stanzas go through the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Such a form, one might well think, does not make for great poetry; it is a rigid straight-jacket strangling any lyrical impulse or indeed any proper development of thought. And we may be tempted to think that this form is the reflection of the subject matter—uninspired, formalised, the apotheosis of the legal spirit.

To say that the being of God is the basis of human society may seem to anyone who believes in the procession of creatures from the divine, mind, conceived by his thought, made actual by his will, a statement of the obvious; indeed any theist would be likely to agree that since nature of ultimate truth must be the source of all truth and being, whatever theory of creation is held, it is from God that the shape of what concerns human destiny must descend. Any real belief in God affects our ideas about man and human society, but the Christian belief in the Trinity most profoundly tempers the structure of our thought.

The idea of society (as an unspecified notion, not tied down to this society or that, in one age or another), and of man's life in common is closely related to the mystery of divine society. It could hardly be otherwise since the fundamental doctrine of Christianity shows God knowing and loving, having within his essential unity true interchange and the mutual give-and-take indispensable to the concept of community or society.