I. One sense in which this text is true is, that the great company of those who are indeed the Saviour's people is made up of those who resemble little children in certain distinctive features of their character. The Church Militant, and far more the Church Triumphant, consists of such as these unsophisticated ones, fresh from God who is our home their birth, perhaps, for what we know, a sleep and a forgetting; and the heaven they came from still around them in their infancy, as a poet of the purest inspiration has sung such in temper, in disposition, in character. Of all things you could point to in this world, the thing that could give you the best idea of the essential spirit that is most childlike, is the spirit of an innocent and happy little child. Like teachable, like humble, like gentle, like affectionate, like confiding should all true Christians be. Even worldly genius has told how beautiful it is to see something yet of the child's warm heart in the man with hoary hairs; something of the unspoiled freshness of infancy and its home-bred simplicity, abiding still with one who has seen the great world, and borne an honoured part in its conflicts and toils; one of those who, as St. Paul would have it, in malice are children, but in understanding are men.
II. There is another sense in which these words may be taken, which may well be cherished by most of our firesides. I believe that we may take these words of our Saviour in their literal meaning, as implying that the kingdom of God, the assembly of redeemed souls in heaven, is in great measure made up of little children. All that die in infancy are saved, and half the human beings born into this world die in infancy. If the entire human race should be gathered, sanctified, and forgiven, before the throne above, still each second one there would never have known more of this sinful and sorrowful world than comes within the brief experience of early childhood.
"God took them in His mercy, as lambs untasked, untried;
He fought the fight for them; He won the victory, and they are sanctified."
A. K. H. B., Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson,3rd series, p. 141.
References: Luke 18:16. Sermons for Boys and Girls,p. 102; Outline Sermons to Children,p. 171; S. A. Brooke, Christ in Modern Life,p. 275.Luke 18:17. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxiv., No. 1439; E. W. Shalders, Christian World Pulpit,vol. viii., p. 3.Luke 18:22. E. R. Conder, Drops and Rocks,p. 249. Luke 18:25. Expositor,1st series, vol. iii., p. 369. Luke 18:27. Homiletic Magazine,vol. xvi., p. 233.Luke 18:28-30. H. B. Bruce, The Training of Twelve,p. 262.Luke 18:29. H. P. Liddon, Christian World Pulpit,vol. viii., p. 153.Luke 18:30. Phillips Brooks, Twenty Sermons,p. 316.