The soul of a child is "naturaliter Christiana"; that is, there is in such a soul an instinctive hunger for God. The soul is in a condition of receptivity. Little children believe unquestioningly, and when divine truth is proposed to them they know, as by a sort of sixth sense, that it is just exactly what their minds and hearts are craving for. Happy the child whose parents and teachers make haste to fill that receptive mind with knowledge and that receptive heart with love of divine things before the world and its baubles begin to fascinate the child!
Our Lord thanked His Father for revealing divine truth "to little ones" and told His followers that His doctrine was to be received in the spirit with which little children accept it.
"Amen I say to you: Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a child shall not enter into it." This is why He would have even those of us who are old or ageing "become as little children." He would have us be, not childish, but childlike. Childishness fastens on the defects of the child and makes them its own. Childishness is touchy, childishness is full of inquisitiveness, childishness easily takes offense and will sulk until it be cajoled back to good humor.
But childlikeness has none of these unpleasant traits. Childlikeness draws near to Jesus Christ, is won by the sheer perfection of His teaching and the attractiveness of His personality. The wonderful world He opens out for it to gaze upon becomes its real world and the world surrounding it recedes in importance proportionately. The people described by Jesus Christ as worthy of imitation and emulation are the real people, and those who live for this world and its ideals seem to take on the appearance of ghosts, not to say of persons who have lost their reason. In Jesus Christ and His ideals the soul finds at once truth and beauty and reality; its house is securely built on the solid rock; it knows, because it has subjected them to the test of personal experience, that the words of Christ and the Person of Christ, and the goal He puts before it and the means of reaching that goal, all give it a satisfying assurance that makes all doubt impossible.
Such a childlike person may be a brilliant student; he may know theology and drink abundantly from its purest sources. But it is not this learning that makes him childlike. If he lost all his learning in the morning, he would still walk in the spirit of a little child because he is "taught of God." He knows, from his own personal contact with Christ and His doctrine, the lovableness, the truth, the beauty of what he believes. A childlike person, then, evaluates everything by the standards of the supernatural; he weighs everything in the scales of God.
Make me, dear Lord, to be truly wise, with the wisdom that is foolish to men whose horizon is bounded by the narrow limits of this world. I would see another world, or at least get a glimpse of it, even while I endure this period of pilgrimage and exile. If what You tell about that world were to me a living reality, then would I be childlike indeed.