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Youth showed itself, however, in a certain childlikeness of demeanour a mixture of timidity, confidence, embarrassment, and, if one looked in her face for any sign of the emotions she had experienced, or the scenes in which she had played no feeble part, one sought in vain. Gaiety covered the melancholy, almost sombre depths in her character.
He had somehow managed to retain a certain quality of childlikeness that made her feel as if she were looking through crystal. She was grateful that no contact had been able to blunt it, that it remained undimmed and serene. Briefly and rather baldly Peter outlined his years of struggle, dismissing their bleak hardships with a tolerant smile.
But when it is preserved into manhood, deepened into reliability and maturity, it is that glorified childlikeness, that high and reverend simplicity, which shames and baffles the most accomplished astuteness, and is chosen by God to fill his purposes when he needs a ruler for his people, of faithful and true heart, such as he had who was our President.
It came in fact of childlikeness, but the lady was not child enough to distinguish the difference as great as that between the back and the front of a head.
An English friend of mine threw down the gauntlet thirty years ago. She had married a German officer. After living at army posts all over the Empire, she declared, "What we foreigners take as simple childlikeness in the Germans is merely lack of civilization." This keen analysis came from a woman trained as an investigator, and equipped with perfect command of the language of her adopted country.
Night after night I saw the same children led out to the slaughter, and as I looked I saw their round, red cheeks grow thin and white, their delicate nerves lose tone and tension, their brains become feeble and flabby, their minds flutter out weakly in muslin and ribbons, their vanity kindled by injudicious admiration, the sweet child-unconsciousness withering away in the glare of indiscriminate gazing, the innocence and simplicity and naturalness and childlikeness swallowed up in a seething whirlpool of artificialness, all the fine, golden butterfly-dust of modesty and delicacy and retiring girlhood ruthlessly rubbed off forever before girlhood had even reddened from the dim dawn of infancy.
Nor do I see here, in his abandonment of the obvious, any proof of the childlikeness and innocence of Emily, however childlike and innocent she may have been. I see only a tremendous artistic uprightness, the rejection, conscious or unconscious, of an unfitting because extraneous element.
Yet there was an uncommon childlikeness about her which not only misled these new friends, but many others who had known her longer. And when these listened to accounts of her devotion to her present studies and her marked proficiency, they shook their wise heads smilingly, as if they knew that the girl was innocent of certain proper and insurmountable obstacles farther on.
But in faith and in the filial spirit, he always continued to be a little child. Mr. J. Hudson Taylor well reminds us that while in nature the normal order of growth is from childhood to manhood and so to maturity, in grace the true development is perpetually backward toward the cradle: we must become and continue as little children, not losing, but rather gaining, childlikeness of spirit.
"Why were you frightened, uncle?" "I was afraid of your being frightened." "I hardly had time to be frightened before the lady came." "Yes; you see I needn't have been so unhappy!" My uncle always treated me as if I could understand him perfectly. This came, I see now, from the essential childlikeness of his nature, and from no educational theory.
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