“The Lord said to Cain: ‘What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground’ (Gen 4:10). The voice of the blood shed by men continues to cry out, from generation to generation, in ever new and different ways. The Lord’s question: ‘What have you done?’, which Cain cannot escape, is addressed also to the people of today, to make them realize the extent and gravity of the attacks against life which continue to mark human history; to make them discover what causes these attacks and feeds them; and to make them ponder seriously the consequences which derive from these attacks…”

—St. John Paul the Great, Evangelium Vitae (1995)

Before settling on writing this brief essay on the blessings of children, I had been thinking I would write of child sacrifice. Why? Like so many others, I read almost daily of the mutilation of children in the United States as a result of the diabolical exactions of the soi-disant “trans” movement and recoil in horror. This is a new turn of the screw for those who hunger for the destruction of children—aborting them in the womb obviously not sufficing to sate that hunger—and I thought it would be salutary to share with my readers how our own sacrifice of children fits into the history of child sacrifice as a whole. I had thought to quote those appalling passages from William H. Prescott (1796-1859) on the Aztec delight in child sacrifice, in which, as the Harvard-educated author of The History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) recounted:

On some occasions, particularly in seasons of drought, at the festival of the insatiable Tlaloc, the god of rain, children, for the most part infants, were offered up. As they were borne along in open litters, dressed in their festal robes, and decked with the fresh blossoms of spring, they moved the hardest heart to pity, though their cries were drowned in the wild chant of the priests, who read in their tears a favorable augury for their petition. These innocent victims were generally bought by the priests of parents who were poor, but who stifled the voice of nature, probably less at the suggestions of poverty than of a wretched superstition.

To hammer home my macabre theme, I also thought I might include this additional piece of information, which Prescott’s nineteenth-century Bostonians could not have found easy reading.

The most loathsome part of the story—the manner in which the body of the sacrificed captive was disposed of—remains yet to be told. It was delivered to the warrior who had taken him in battle, and by him, after being dressed, was served up in an entertainment to his friends. This was not the coarse repast of famished cannibals, but a banquet teeming with delicious beverages and delicate viands, prepared with art, and attended by both sexes, who, as we shall see hereafter, conducted themselves with all the decorum of civilized life. Surely, never were refinement and the extreme of barbarism brought so closely in contact with each other.

The conclusion to which Prescott came on the peculiar blood lust of his subjects would have provided an additional parallel to our own sacrifice of children, especially the passage where he says:

Human sacrifices have been practised by many nations, not excepting the most polished nations of antiquity; but never by any, on a scale to be compared with those in Anahuac. The amount of victims immolated on its accursed altars would stagger the faith of the least scrupulous believer. Scarcely any author pretends to estimate the yearly sacrifices throughout the empire at less than twenty thousand, and some carry the number as high as fifty thousand!

Of course, these are insignificant numbers compared to our own, but, again, the parallel is fairly damning, though, to be fair to the Aztecs, they sacrificed their victims as a result of a defective understanding of what would be pleasing to the Godhead, whereas our woke brigade sacrifice theirs out of a mania for power.

Finally, since five prolifers were recently indicted and jailed in the nation’s capital for attempting to call attention to the rank infanticide taking place in an abortion clinic that disposes of the babies it murders in public trash cans, I even thought to include this last passage from Prescott, in which he describes how the Aztecs disposed of their victims.

It was customary to preserve the skulls of the sacrificed, in buildings appropriated to the purpose. The companions of Cortés counted one hundred and thirty-six thousand in one of these edifices! Without attempting a precise calculation, therefore, it is safe to conclude that thousands were yearly offered up, in the different cities of Anahuac, on the bloody altars of the Mexican divinities.

Yet, as I say, after considering the understandably squeamish sensibilities of my gentle readers when it comes to such gruesome barbarities, I thought I would take a different tack and speak of the blessings of children—blessings we need to recapture and celebrate in an age in which the detestation of innocence has become so ubiquitous an evil.

Consequently, here I will begin with a poem by the Jesuit martyr, St. Robert Southwell (1561-1595), which reaffirms how the Child will always be at the heart of our Christian faith.

A Child of My Choice

Let folly praise that fancy loves, I praise and love that Child

Whose heart no thought, whose tongue no word, whose hand no deed defiled.

I praise Him most, I love Him best, all praise and love is His; While Him I love, in Him I live, and cannot live amiss.

Love’s sweetest mark, laud’s highest theme, man’s most desired light, To love Him life, to leave Him death, to live in Him delight.

He mine by gift, I His by debt, thus each to other due;

First friend He was, best friend He is, all times will try Him true.

Though young, yet wise; though small, yet strong; though man, yet God He is: As wise, He knows; as strong, He can; as God, He loves to bless.

His knowledge rules, His strength defends, His love doth cherish all; His birth our joy, His life our light, His death our end of thrall.

Alas! He weeps, He sighs, He pants, yet do His angels sing; Out of His tears, His sighs and throbs, doth bud a joyful spring.

Almighty Babe, whose tender arms can force all foes to fly,

Correct my faults, protect my life, direct me when I die!

This is but one of hundreds of poems that one could cite to show how the Christ Child animates what is most noble and beautiful in our beleaguered but still irreplaceable Christian culture. If we leave poetry and look at the history of painting in both the East and the West, we encounter a like paramountcy in the homage paid to the “Almighty Babe.” What, after all, would the history of art be if we did not have the Christ Child celebrated by Byzantium in its icons or by Cimabue, Duccio, Raphael, and Bellini in their masterly paintings?

Then, again, we see the blessings of children praised by our saints. St. John Henry Newman is as eloquent on these blessings as he is on so many other matters. “This we know full well,” he says in his sermon “The Mind of Little Children” (1833), “—we know it from our own recollections of ourselves and our experience of children—that there is in the infant soul, in the fresh years of its regenerate state, a discernment of the unseen world in the things that are seen, a realization of what is sovereign and adorable, and an incredulity and ignorance about what is transient and changeable, which mark it as the first outline of the matured Christian, when weaned from things temporal, and living in the intimate conviction of the Divine presence.”

Lest anyone read this and imagine that Newman, in his good-heartedness, had somehow an unduly indulgent view of children and their blessings, I should quote more fully from the sermon, especially the qualification he adds to his paean above, where he writes:

I do not mean of course that a child has any formed principle in his heart, any habits of obedience, any true discrimination between the visible and the unseen, such as God promises to reward for Christ’s sake, in those who come to years of discretion. Never must we forget that, in spite of his new birth, evil is within him, though in its seed only; but he has this one great gift, that he seems to have lately come from God’s presence, and not to understand the language of this visible scene, or how it is a temptation, how it is a veil interposing itself between the soul and God. The simplicity of a child’s ways and notions, his ready belief of everything he is told, his artless love, his frank confidence, his confession of helplessness, his ignorance of evil, his inability to conceal his thoughts, his contentment, his prompt forgetfulness of trouble, his admiring without coveting; and, above all, his reverential spirit, looking at all things about him as wonderful, as tokens and types of the One Invisible, are all evidence of his being lately (as it were) a visitant in a higher state of things. I would only have a person reflect on the earnestness and awe with which a child listens to any description or tale; or again, his freedom from that spirit of proud independence, which discovers itself in the soul as time goes on. And though, doubtless, children are generally of a weak and irritable nature, and all are not equally amiable, yet their passions go and are over like a shower; not interfering with the lesson we may gain to our own profit from their ready faith and guilelessness.

These are some of the great blessings of children; and while we continue to wage the good fight for life in what Saint Mother Teresa rightly called “the war against the child”—the good fight that has been so staunchly advanced over the years by the editors, writers, and donors of the Human Life Review and so many others—we should always stop and be thankful for these inestimable blessings.

To conclude, I shall relate something Prescott’s private secretary Robert Carter (1819-79) once wrote of the historian, who had lost his beloved daughter Catherine, his firstborn, at the age of four to a childhood illness. Carter, who would go on to become Washington correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, was walking about Boston at lunchtime before returning to Prescott’s house to help him with his work and encountered a poor fellow Irishman, Michael Sullivan, who was in bad straits.

I inquired what ailed him [Carter recalled]. He said he had been sick and out of work, and had no money, and his family was starving with cold. I went with him to the den where he lived, and found his wife and three or four small children in a wretched loft over a warehouse, where they were lying on the floor, huddled in a pile of straw and shavings, with some rags and pieces of old carpet over them. The only furniture in the room was a chair, a broken table, and a small stove in which were the expiring embers of a scanty handful of coal, which they had begged from neighbors equally poor. The mercury was below zero out of doors, and the dilapidated apartment was not much warmer than the street. I had no time to spare, and the detention, slight as it was, prevented me from getting back to Mr. Prescott’s till a quarter-past one. His MSS lay on my desk, and he was walking about the room in a state of impatience, I knew, though he showed none, except by looking at his watch. As I warmed my chilled hands over the fire, I told him, by way of apology, what had detained me. Without speaking, he stepped to a drawer where scraps of writing paper were kept, took out a piece, and laying it on my desk, told me to write an order on Mr. (a coal dealer with whom he kept an account always open for such purposes) for a ton of coal, to be delivered without delay to Michael Sullivan, Broad Street. He then went to his bell-rope and gave it a vehement pull. A servant entered as I finished the order. “Take this,” he said, “as quick as you can, to Mr., and see that the coal is delivered at once. What is the number of the house in Broad street?” I had neglected to notice the number, though I could find the place readily myself. I therefore suggested to Mr. Prescott, that as there were probably twenty Michael Sullivans in Broad Street, the coal might not reach the right man unless I saw to it in person, which I would do when I went to dinner . . . “Thank you, thank you,” he said, “but go at once, there will be time enough lost in getting the coal.” I reminded him of the letters. “Go, go! never mind the letters. Gayangos and Circourt will not freeze if they never get them, and Mrs. O’Sullivan may, if you don’t hurry. Stay—can the man be trusted with money? or will he spend it all in drink?” He pulled out his pocketbook. I told him he could be trusted. He handed me five dollars. “See that they are made comfortable, at least while this cold spell lasts. Take time enough to see to them, I shall not want you till six. Don’t let them know I sent the money, or all Broad street will be here begging within twenty-four hours.” I relieved Mr. O’Sullivan, as Mr. Prescott persisted in calling him, and when I returned at six, I entered in the account-book, charity, $5. [Five dollars in 1848 would have been the equivalent of about $195 today.] “Always tell me, when you know of such cases,” he said, “and I shall be only too happy to do something for them. I cannot go about myself to find them out, but I shall be always ready to contribute.” He did not let the matter rest there, but kept playfully inquiring after my friends, Mr. and Mrs. O’Sullivan, until I satisfied him that he had found employment, and could provide for his family.

The need to protect the blessings of children was not lost on the historian of the conquest of Mexico, though it may be worth pointing out that the death of his firstborn did inspire him to question his agnosticism. “The death of my dearest daughter on the first day of this month having made it impossible for me at present to resume the task of composition,” he wrote in his diary, “I have been naturally led to more serious reflection than usual, and have occupied myself with reviewing the grounds . . . of the evidences of the Christian revelation. I have endeavored and shall endeavor to prosecute this examination with perfect impartiality, and to guard against the present state of my feelings influencing my mind any further than by leading it to give to the subject a more serious attention.” The upshot of his “examination,” however, was not what it might have been. According to his biographer, George Ticknor, while Prescott gave his assent to what he regarded as the “moral truths” of Christianity, “he did not find in the Gospels, or in any part of the New Testament, the doctrines commonly accounted orthodox, and he deliberately recorded his rejection of them.” Nevertheless, the loss of his beloved firstborn did induce one striking change in the Bostonian agnostic. “He declared his purpose to avoid all habits of levity on religious topics. And to this purpose, I believe, he adhered rigorously through life. At least, I am satisfied that I never heard him use light expressions or allusions of any kind when speaking of Christianity, or when referring to the Scriptures.” Since Prescott was a great admirer of the sardonic Hume, this was no trifling resolution, even if he was never prepared to accept the lesson of “ready faith” that children so enviably impart.
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Original Bio:

Edward Short is the author of several acclaimed books on St. John Henry Newman, as well as the most recent What the Bells Sang: Essays and Reviews, which the bestselling historian Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny, called “beautiful,” “brave,” and “wise.”