Christian Innocence.
When our Lord took a child, and set it in the midst of the disciples, and made its face the answer to their question, "Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?" nay, even told them they could not enter into the kingdom of heaven unless they were converted and became as that child, he certainly laid them and us under a very serious obligation to inquire what it is in this image which He loved, and after which He would mould us.
I. The purity and innocence of any human creature are not and cannot be his own; we are only innocent so far as we claim nothing of our own, so far as we look out of ourselves, so far as we forget ourselves in another. The reverence for unconsciousness, the almost worship of childhood, are nothing else than a silent homage to this doctrine. And the protest against mere unconsciousness, the desire we feel that a child should grow into a distinct living person, the conviction we have that the command, "Know thyself," does descend from heaven, even when obedience to it seems sometimes to bring us to the very brink of hell, this also is a witness in behalf of the same doctrine. For how can there be any giving up of self if there is not a self to give up? How can a man cease from his own works and his own strivings if there is nothing working and striving within him which he has to cease from?
II. All attempts to make ourselves innocent by putting ourselves into a regulated atmosphere, and trying to bar out the intrusion of evil; all attempts to cut ourselves off from sinners, lest they should defile us; all treatment of other men's evils as if they were not our own, must be fatal to the acquisition of Christ's innocence, the only innocence which God knows anything of. On the other hand, it is contradicting Scripture, and reason, and experience to say that those who have been most stained with outward and inward defilements may not receive the gift of innocency in its fullest measure. "Thou shalt purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean," was the confident and well-grounded assurance of a man upon whose conscience lay the burden of adultery and murder. Let men frame what notions they may about baptismal purity, the sacrament of the Lord's Supper witnesses that the sin-stricken man, who has discerned that he never had and never can have anything righteous in himself, may become altogether childlike and spotless when he turns from himself and seeks for fellowship with Him in whom is no sin.
F. D. Maurice, Sermons,vol. i., p. 82.
Reference: Matthew 18:2; Matthew 18:3. J. W. Burgon, Ninety-one Short Sermons,No. 10.