GEORGE HERBERT, the poet and priest, urged his contemporaries to “pitch thy behaviour low and thy projects high; so shalt thou humble and magnanimous be”. He was writing just before the Civil War, his century’s form of terrorism.

Two of those in succeeding centuries, Thomas Coram (1688-1751), a shipbuilder and merchant, and Thomas Barnardo (1845-1905), a student at the London Hospital, accepted as their eventual vocation the welfare of children. They wore themselves out and used every means available in their culture to create projects high enough to heed Jesus’s grim prophecy that a millstone would be fastened round the necks of those who harm the generation that follows them. Thomas Coram and Thomas Barnardo eventually gave up other projects, shipbuilding in Massachusetts or being a missionary to China, for their children-centred London institutions.

The work carried on under their names is alive in imaginative forms today. The Coram Family has launched a survival pack scheme for young men and women leaving care or prison. Barnardo’s is raising £1million for its work with children who have been sexually exploited. A 13-year-old whose “boyfriend” posted indecent photographs of her on the internet wrote: “It started off as a bit of fun — I thought he loved me.”

Coram and Barnardo’s are in touch with more than a 100,000 children and Barnardo’s employ a staff of 6,000. The high inspiration which came centuries ago to the founders is now the spirit alive in a new generation of carers.

Hogarth gave Coram some of his paintings; Handel, his fair copy of The Messiah; and the foundation still possesses them. Today musicians and artists often support childcare.

In September 1905 London was magnanimous at the funeral of Thomas Barnardo. With hindsight he had not always been right: he never qualified as a doctor but used the title to aid the children’s cause. He was often autocratic, perhaps because he had been bullied at school. He avoided committees and accountants until several bankruptcies and court cases forced him to accept them. Today we would question sending children to families in Canada and using dubious “Before” and “After” photographs. But Edwardian England gave him a spectacular goodbye — a lying in state at the pub he had converted into a coffee house and a procession through streets filled with mourners from Limehouse to Liverpool Street. Best of all his debts were paid off and Barnardo’s continued to grow for the following century. Perhaps he would have been proudest of all about the pressure it and other organisations brought upon Westminster until finally last year Parliament appointed a Commissioner for Children for England. At 60 he had been worn out by work but his aim that no child should be turned away had been accepted by the nation.

There has been a massive effort by many children’s organisations working at home and abroad this year. Here is an arena where the words of Jesus about the antagonisms and power struggles between generations (Mark Xiii, 12) are experienced and, it is hoped, resolved. In 1968 the students at the Sorbonne proclaimed how they longed for freedom to be themselves and think for themselves. “Plus de maîtres, Plus de maîtres” they scribbled on the walls.

Mike, a boy in the care of Coram, put in homelier terms the constrictions of neglect and lack of love “I don’t have happy memories of childhood. My mum drank all the time and could not cope with having a kid. I never even met my dad . . . My story may not sound anything really great.”

Like the Sorbonne students he is asking for freedom which is denied by parents who do not put children first or by movements which simply call for more prisons. When George Herbert mentioned “behaviour low” he was asking for quiet hard work and consistent love in childcare. There is a need for forgiveness between generations in families and in the State. It is too easy to spot the eccentricities of Coram and Barnardo in a Lytton Strachey-style of biography and miss the height of the aims of the child philanthropists.

This year many events are designed to enable a sharing of their vision of justice and love for all children. There are celebrations — corporate, business community and sporting — as well as events in churches from St Giles Edinburgh to King’s College, Cambridge. These are all invitations to realise the imaginative magnanimity of childcare as proclaimed in the psalms and the gospels: “Thou has brought praise to perfection from the mouths of babes and sucklings” (Matt xxi, 16). On this ancient vision realised century after century depends the peace of humankind.

The Very Rev Alan Webster is Dean Emeritus of St Paul’s