 Chesterton shows us how to be childlike without being childish. So to try to explain that, Christ himself says to us that unless we become like little children, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. So we have to be like children. We have to be childlike. And yet St Paul tells us that when he was a child, he behaved as a child. But now that he's a grown-up, he's put away childish things. So St Paul is telling us we have to stop being childish. Now is St Paul a heretic? I would be a heretic if I had to say so. Clearly he isn't. So clearly we're talking about something paradoxical here. Clearly to be childlike as Christ commands us to be is not the same thing as being childish, which St Paul tells us not to be. So let's look at that paradoxical combination of how we have to remain childlike or become childlike by ceasing to be childish. So to give some examples, Oscar Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is a parable of childishness that Dorian Gray does not want to grow up. He does not want the responsibilities and the self-sacrifice inherent in being a grown-up, in accepting responsibility, in laying down one's life for others, which is the Christian understanding of love. On the other hand, the Lord of the Rings is a parable of growing up, but remaining childlike. In fact, it's a parable of growing up by remaining childlike. So the Hobbits can't live in their own comfort zone without embracing the sacrifice that's necessary, the acceptance of suffering that's necessary in order to grow in wisdom, but they have to have that experience whilst retaining their childlike innocence. That's the test in The Lord of the Rings and indeed the Hobbit. And putting those two together, the parable of the prodigal son is a parable of childishness and growing up. The prodigal son is childish. He doesn't want to embrace the hard work of what being a grown-up is. So he goes off with all the money that he can get from his father and squanders it in a life of self-indulgence, which as lives of self-indulgence normally do end up, is miserable. And then having slept with the pigs, he returns home chastened. But he returns home as a repentant, which is as someone who has grown up. So again, that great parable of Christ is how do we grow up, how do we cease being childish whilst remaining childlike? And how does that parable end? Ends with the child accepting the fact that he is the child and returning to the father. So Chesterton in his work, in his life, in just about all the genres in which he wrote shows us how to grow up, how to be grown-ups whilst retaining the wisdom and innocence of a child. And one way we do that is to grow up by spending time with our elders. The past is not backwards. Theology, philosophy, literature, the lessons of history, these are things that show us who we are, show us who we are in relation to our brothers and sisters, and not just the brothers and sisters who happen to be walking around at the same time we're alive, but all of our brothers and sisters throughout that communion we call time, human history. And this was encapsulated perfectly by Chesterton in his book, Orthodoxy, when he said that tradition is the extension of democracy through time. He said it is the proxy of the dead and the enfranchisement of the unborn. In other words, it's the tradition of Western civilization, which we have a duty to pass on to future generations, firstly because it's our inheritance from the great men that lived in the past, they passed it on to us, but we owe it to future generations. But against that, we actually look at the world now and Chesterton said that the modern man is like a contemptible cad who kicks down the ladder by which he's climbed. So we have this supercilious arrogance and therefore ignorance of the modern man towards the past and towards anything that the past has to offer.