The Instructor 1.5.13

(… when translated into Greek.) And it seems to me that Scripture, alluding to the prophecy just mentioned, rebukes the careless: “Have you never read, Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babes you have prepared praise?” So too in the Gospel the Lord spurs on his disciples, urging them to attend to him as one already hastening to the Father, making his hearers more eager by telling them in advance that he will soon be gone, and showing them that they must gather the fruit of the truth all the more generously, since the Word was about to depart for heaven. So again he calls them children: “Little children, yet a little while I am with you.” And again he likens the kingdom of heaven to children “sitting in the marketplaces and saying, We played the flute for you and you did not dance; we mourned and you did not lament,” and the other things he added in keeping with these. And not only the Gospel thinks so; prophecy agrees with it. David says, “Praise the Lord, you children; praise the name of the Lord.” And he says through Isaiah, “Behold, I and the children whom God has given me.”