to do anything that emboldens sin is, in reality, to act most unmercifully. Eli, in the treatment of his children, is a type, not of affection, but of indifference. It is only a sickly sentimentalism that withholds punishment when punishment would be useful. God is too merciful for this. "Whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth."

Plato, in his Gorgias,' argues, in reference to the punishments inflicted by society, that the man who manages to avoid them is to be pitied ; for since vice is a disease of the soul, and punishment its cure, he who gets off scot-free is left, so far as society is concerned, to die of his disease. And we may argue in a similar manner regarding punishments in general. Just as the caustic applied by a physician is meant to destroy the disease which might otherwise destroy the body, so the fire of retribution is intended to consume the sin which might else consume the sinner—which might eat away his manhood, and leave him wasted, marred, ruined, lost. God is not satisfied with the suffering that follows sin. The suffering is merely a means to an end, and that end is joy. God's glory can be no selfish pride. It must consist in the welfare of His creatures. "The Lord's portion is His people."

Hence, as Faber has finely said:

"God's justice is the gladdest thing
Creation can behold.

There is a wideness in His mercy
Like the wideness of the sea;
There is a kindness in His justice
Which is more than liberty.

For the love of God is broader

Than the measures of man's mind;

And the heart of the Eternal

Is most wonderfully kind."

So we have discovered that the two apparently contradictory statements of our text are really quite consistent. The first is a corollary easily deducible from the second. If God be love He must punish. Hence the fact of punishment is not an argument against the divine benevolence, but an additional argument for it. On the one hand, a retributive fire, consuming only to destroy, would be diabolical. On the other hand, a love which withheld the punishment essential to our wellbeing, would be contemptible and equally destructive. It would harm us while meaning to be kind. Out of pity it would ruin us. The love which consumes in order to save is alone worthy of being called divine.

232

The Fatherhood of God.

(SUNDAY-SCHOOL SERMON.)

"Our Father."

"IF there were no God,” said Voltaire, “it

would be necessary to create one." By this, I suppose he meant that men must have some object of worship; that they cannot avoid forming a conception of the Being, or Cause, or Force, however they may please to term it, which they can regard as the one great fact of the universe. The impossibility of dispensing altogether with religion was strikingly illustrated by Comte, the author of 'Positive Philosophy.' He rejected what he considered the fiction of a god, but supplied its place by the abstract idea of humanity, which he called the Grand Être, the Great Being. The cultus, or system of worship, which he instituted in honour of this

conception, involved a doctrine of immortality, the practice of prayer, as well as other religious observances; and, above all, it included the tyranny of a despotic priesthood, who were to determine not only what common people should believe, but also the subjects with which thinkers and scientific investigators should be occupied. The religion of Comte, the prince of atheists, has been well described by Professor Huxley as "a sort of Roman Catholicism minus Christianity."

The human heart, at any rate in its quieter and more sober moments, when it is resting. from the rush of life, craves and demands a God. The universality of this yearning has been forcibly described by Professor Max Müller in his lectures on the Science of Religion. "There was in the heart of man from the very first a feeling of incompleteness, of weakness, of dependence, of whatever we like to call it in our abstract language. We can explain it as little as we can explain why a newborn child feels the cravings of hunger or of thirst; but it was so from the first, and is so even now. Man knows not whence he comes, and whither he goes; he looks for a guide, a friend; he wearies for some one on whom he can rest; he wants something like a Father in heaven. In addition to all the

impressions he received from the outer world, there was a stronger impulse from within; a sigh, a yearning for something that should not come and go like everything else; that should be before and after, and for ever; that should hold and support everything; that should make man feel at home in this strange universe."

We are likely to forget the debt of gratitude which we owe to Christ for having revealed to us the doctrine of our text. The conception of the Fatherhood of God may seem a simple and natural idea, that might have easily occurred to any one. But this is not the case. History, and still more philology, show how hard and how long men struggled unsuccessfully to find a word which would fitly express, and an emblem which would worthily symbolise, the Deity. Max Müller has pointed out that the name of sky has been chosen for this purpose at one time or other by almost all nations. We have examples of this in the Roman Jupiter, and in the Greek Zeus. But he asks, "Was the sky the full expression of that within the mind which wanted expression? Far from it. The first man who, after looking everywhere for what he wanted, and who at last from sheer exhaustion grasped at the name of sky as better than