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 nothing, knew but too well that, after all, his success was a miserable failure. The sky was no doubt the most exalted, the only unchanging and infinite

being that had received a name, and that could lend its name to the-as yet unborn-idea of the Infinite, which disquieted the human mind. But the man who chose the name could not have meant that the visible sky was all he wanted, and that the blue canopy above was his God." This was the best, however, that could be done in the days of the world's infancy. Age succeeded age, and thinker followed thinker; men still yearned to comprehend the Being from whom their life was derived; but they could not even guess what His nature must be in order to satisfy the longings of the human heart. The Athenians, you remember, erected an altar, with the inscription, "To the unknown God." They could not name him; they did not try to do so. They felt that every word which suggested itself was inadequate, misleading and false. The Christian idea of the Fatherhood of God had never occurred even to such a poet as Plato. We find from the Old Testament that it had now and again flashed through the minds of one or two of the most spiritual of the Jewish seers. And we find, too, in studying philology, that the idea had suggested itself to our old Aryan ancestors in prehistoric times. But this, notwithstanding, we may safely

1 See 'Defects of Christianity, and other Sermons,' p. 183.

say, that the conception was never fully realised or developed before the time of Christ.

I have no intention in this sermon of attempting to prove the legitimacy of the idea that is to say, its conformability with reason.

I will

merely suggest to any one who may doubt this conformability, that there is nothing in Nature to contradict it. True, our own world has in it a vast amount of suffering, but still it has in it a much greater amount of joy. This is clearly and dispassionately argued in one of John Stuart Mill's posthumous essays.1 It is also forcibly stated in Lewis Morris's exquisite poem entitled "Evensong":

"Pain comes, hopeless pain, God knows, and we know, again and again;

But e'en pain has its intervals blest, when 'tis heaven to be free from pain.

And I think that the wretch who lies, pressed by a load of incurable ill,

With a grave pity pities himself, but would choose to have lived it still:

He pities himself, and yet knows, as he casts up life's chequered sum,

It were best on the whole to have lived, whatever calamity

come.

1 This argument in Mill's mouth is doubly powerful, because he was naturally inclined rather to pessimism than to optimism.

And the earth is full of joy. Every blade of grass that

springs;

Every cool worm that crawls, content as the eagle on soaring wings;

Every sunimer's day instinct with life; every dawn when from waking bird

And morning hum of the bee a chorus of praise is heard;

Every gnat that sports in the sun for his little life of a day; Every flower that opens its cup to the dews of a perfumed

May;

Every child that wakes with a smile, and sings to the ceiling at dawn;

Every bosom which knows a new hope stir beneath its virginal lawn;

Every young soul ardent and high, rushing forth into life's

hot fight;

Every home of happy content, lit by love's own mystical light;

Every worker who works till the evening, and takes before night his wage;

Be his work a furrow straight down, or the joy of a bettered age;

Every thinker who, standing aloof from the throng, finds a high delight

In striking, with voice or with pen, a stroke for the triumph

of right ;

All these know that life is sweet, all these with a consonant

voice,

Read the legend of time with a smile, and that which they read is 'Rejoice.""

Since then the pain and sorrow of our world seem to be more than counterbalanced by its pleasure and its joy; since, moreover, we know that suffering is sometimes productive of good,

and do not know but that it may be always productive of good, it follows that the idea of the Fatherhood of God is a conception which, to say the least of it, cannot be disproved by any of the facts of experience.

Our text embodies the most fundamental, the most comprehensive, doctrine of Christianity; and no system of theology can lay claim to any value which does not start from this point. Oliver Wendell Holmes tells us that, when asked by some one what was his creed, he replied, "The first two words of the paternoster." Those who think that his answer indicated a feeble faith and a contracted belief do not know the meaning of the words our Father. They are pregnant with significance. Some persons are afraid that if the love of God be too much insisted upon, there is a danger of His justice being ignored. They seem to imagine that if we too often speak about the Divine Fatherhood, it will be forgotten that punishment must follow sin. Now there could not be a greater mistake. All the more important practical doctrines of Christianity inevitably follow, and can be easily deduced, from the statement that God is our Father; whereas the systems of theology which have started from God's sovereignty, or omnipotence, or justice, have