| The Ministry of Comfort |
Chapter 22 |
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But childishness is something altogether different. It is something to get as far as possible away from, and not something to cultivate. It is one of the things we are to put off and leave behind as we grow into the strength and beauty of mature manhood. Instead of being a noble quality, the mark of rank and greatness in spiritual life, it is the sign of weakness, of unmanliness, of puerility.
Childishness in a child may be endured. One is expected to be a baby before he becomes a man. Indeed, it is abnormal to miss being a child, to be mature as if full grown when one is still an infant in years. “How old is your friend?” asked one man of another. “Let me see,” was the reply, “he was fifty when he was born, and that was thirty three years ago. He is eighty three now.” There are such people. They are never young. They have no childhood. They miss the gladness of the carefree days and start away on amid the feeling and ways of maturity.
But such a life is not beautiful. Precocity is deformity, monstrosity. The truest childhood is the one that is most childlike. We are forbearing with childishness in a child. We do not grow impatient with it. “He is only a child,” we say in apology for actions and words and ways which are not beautiful. But when these childish things appear in one who has come to manhood in years, we find no excuse for them. They are blemishes, marks of immaturity. We ought to leave them behind us when we pass up into the larger, more mature life of manhood. We have good authority for saying that when we are children, we speak as children, we feel as children, we act as children; but when we become men we put away childish things.
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