“Suffer little children to come unto me”

“Suffer little children to come unto me” is the scriptural appeal Blackie uses to reassure Emma that her baby can be christened in their home. The words turn a dispute about religious observance into a question of welcome: he argues that the child’s baptism and the love behind it matter more than the officiant or setting.

The expression in the private baptism

Emma, who has repeatedly said she is an atheist, nevertheless worries that her daughter might grow up believing in God and resent not having been baptized. She fears that a vicar would demand the birth certificate, learn that the child was born outside marriage, and expose a private matter she wants kept secret. Blackie offers to perform the christening himself. Though he no longer attends the Catholic Church, he tells Emma that he has not lost his faith and believes God lives within people; neither a church nor a font, he insists, is necessary. To support that assurance, he cites Jesus’s words: “Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for of such is the kingdom of God.” The quotation gives his action a scriptural basis and frames the home ceremony as an act of care rather than an improper substitute for church ritual. Reassured by his conviction, Emma agrees to let him christen the baby.

The phrase within Emma’s changing relation to faith

The appeal to welcome children acquires a wider resonance against Emma’s own movement between rejection of religious authority and recognition of faith as a lived practice. After Elizabeth Harte dies, Jack Harte calls her death God’s will; Emma answers that there is no God who could have allowed her mother to suffer and die, then runs from the house toward the moors. Her rejection is rooted in the suffering she has witnessed, not in an abstract argument. The child-centered promise Blackie later invokes therefore meets a wound in Emma’s understanding of religion: she can distrust God and still fear denying her daughter a choice about belief.

Emma has also seen religious observance sustain a family rather than condemn or exclude it. At the Kallinskis’ table, she watches Janessa light candles and Abraham bless wine and bread; the prayers are unfamiliar to her, but the warmth of the meal makes her feel welcome. That experience gives particular force to Blackie’s insistence that a child’s welcome into faith need not depend on a church building or its officiant. Later, as Laura O’Neill is dying, Laura asks Emma to ensure that Bryan is brought up as a good Roman Catholic. When a priest arrives to administer Extreme Unction, Emma silently rails against his presence as a harbinger of death, while Laura confesses and receives absolution. Across these scenes, the expression’s promise of welcome sits beside Emma’s grief-driven resistance to religious explanations and her willingness to respect the religious care others seek for their children.

The expression’s ethical force

The quotation’s decisive word is not a rule about who may perform a rite, but an instruction not to bar children from receiving it: “Suffer little children to come unto me.” Blackie applies that welcome to a baby whose circumstances Emma fears would invite judgment, making the verse an argument against allowing formal requirements to eclipse care. Its force depends on his conviction that the spirit of love matters more than the place or person conducting the baptism. The appeal does not reconcile Emma to belief; it lets her act for her daughter without surrendering her own disbelief.

Welcome beyond formal eligibility

The expression also answers the bureaucratic barrier surrounding the baptism: Emma expects the vicar to require a birth certificate, a document that would expose her daughter’s illegitimacy, while Blackie’s reading shifts attention from eligibility to welcome. His appeal does not erase the child’s legal or social circumstances, nor does it settle Emma’s beliefs; it gives Blackie grounds to include her in a religious rite without submitting her identity to public scrutiny. The verse thus makes the private ceremony an act of acceptance where Emma fears institutional judgment.