The Instructor 1.5.14

Are you surprised to hear that men from among the nations are children before the Lord? You do not seem to me to understand the Attic language, from which one can learn that beautiful, lovely, and freeborn young women are called paidiskai (“girls”), and slave women paidiskaria, though these too are young women, honored with a diminutive on account of the bloom of youth. And when he says, “Let my lambs stand on the right,” he means the simple, children like lambs, not men like sheep by kind; and he has given the lambs a privilege, preferring gentleness and simplicity of mind in human beings, innocence. And again when he says, “like suckling calves,” he speaks allegorically of us again; and “like a dove, innocent and without gall,” us again. And through Moses he commands two young doves or a pair of turtledoves to be offered for sin, saying that the sinlessness, innocence, and forgiving nature of the tender young birds is acceptable to God, and suggesting that like purifies like; and the timidity of turtledoves figures caution toward sins. That he calls us the young birds, Scripture bears witness: “as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings”; so we are the Lord's chicks, the Word most wonderfully and mystically describing the simplicity of the soul in terms of the age of childhood. For sometimes he calls us children, sometimes chicks, sometimes infants, elsewhere sons, often little children, and a young people and a new people: “My servants,” he says, “shall be called by a new name” (by “new” name he means fresh and eternal, pure and simple and childlike and true),