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THE GOSPEL OF SONSHIP.

IT has been seen that through the glory of fatherhood, the religious sense had apprehended a universal revelation of God to man. Through realisation of that glory, man gained his best conception of the One better than the best he could conceive. His brightest relations with his children were manifestations in the seen and temporal, of the unseen and eternal; sacraments of grace, by which, in some dim way, he might divine the depth of God's infinite patience.

The truth, that there was One better than self, above self, was for ever being opposed by the lower nature, of which the love of self was guide and ruler. Where the lower nature could not master the higher, it succeeded in perverting the conception of the One better than the best conceivable, into One opposed to man, at variance with him, which fact serves as answer to what is sometimes urged against the existence of a primeval Divine revelation of the Fatherhood of God, viz., that the most powerful religious

Probably the statement savages, there is trace of

motive with savages, is fear. is true, though even among more genial and friendly relationships with the unseen, as for instance, among a South African tribe,

with whom the explanation of thunder is, that “the king is playing." The inference to be drawn from the religious ideas of savages, would however seem to be in favour of a Divine revelation, rather than against it, for the fear of savages arises from a shrinking from One above them, One opposed to them, but whence the conception of opposition, save from the struggle between the animal instinct, love of self, and the religious sense, pleading the revelation of One better than the best conceivable? The struggle goes on to-day, as it has gone on from the beginning, between the two opposing factors in man's being—self salvation and self surrender. Every religion springs out of one of these motives or the other; worship, the voice of religion, is the expression of one of these feelings, or the other; in its lowest form, it is pitiable slavish dread, an everlasting prayer to be let free from punishment; its highest development is childlike loyalty, an unquenchable thirst for the Eternal Father, a proud humility, which demands communion with Him as its birthright. These two governing ideas of religion, these two formers of its character, are, and ever must have been, at variance with one another and could have had no common origin.

It is the distinctive glory of the Hebrew prophets, to have kept alive faith in the Divine revelation of the Fatherhood of God. Their task was no light one, for their countrymen, enslaved by Babylon, Assyria, and Rome successively, may well have been terror

ized by brute force, which did indeed for a time, kill in them all national sense of the Divine revelation, which had made their greatness. The triumph of brute force was no less disastrous for conqueror, than conquered; self-exaltation was the cause of the material and spiritual ruin of the ruling powers of the world. The name, Heaven Father, lost its charm as its earthly sacrament was despised; the pity, tenderness and love, which are the marks of earthly fatherhood, were effaced by the mercilessness, cruelty and passion, which stamp the animal nature. Childhood, among the ancients, was no season of joy and brightness, as in our associations. The life of each little one of Roman birth, was dependent on the caprice of his father; did he refuse it notice, the son was no child of the house, but was doomed to death or slavery.

The religious sense was fully avenged (if one may so say) for the neglect of its revelation, by men thus closing to themselves the simplest road towards the One better than the best conceivable,-communion with their children.

But though the easiest way of answering the questions about the unseen was forgotten, the questions themselves never ceased. In the schools of Greece, the difficulties of modern philosophers were puzzles; in various systems, our new foes meet us in their old garb. The immensities and unutterable unities; forces, substrata, powers not ourselves (not yet divided into eighths), Dr Strauss's

latest discovery, the universum, our new worship of the collective self-all wander like a restless crowd, and repeat the ceaseless sigh, "Our heart is disquieted within us, until it resteth on Thee."

Amid the doubts and difficulties of the old world, we first hear the recorded words of Jesus,-" Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven, that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven, for He is kind to the unthankful and to the evil; be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect; be ye merciful as your Father is merciful; pray to your Father in secret and your Father knoweth what ye have need of before ye ask him. Forgive men their trespasses and your heavenly Father will forgive you; take no anxious thought about your life, for your Father in heaven feedeth even the fowls of the air; if ye being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father in heaven give you His spirit. Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven."

Here is no new revelation, but a new proclamation of the old one, which we have heard from the beginning-the supreme glory of the Fatherhood of God, and here is a new appeal to the sacrament of earthly fatherhood. Moreover, there is a great deal more than a proclamation. For the life of Jesus was the

manifestation of what mere precept never can make real to mankind. From the moment when to his parents who sought him, he said "wist ye not, that I must needs be in my Father's house," to the last words of his perfected life, "Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit," the story of Jesus is the objective revelation of the old truth of the Fatherhood of God.

But the revelation had been set forth for ages; prophets had come and gone in one place and another, with the words telling of God's Fatherhood on their lips, and their voices had been drowned in the cries prompted by men's animal instincts. It was to brute force, not to fatherly pity and gentleness, that the weary world was bowing down, and unless brute force were to be enthroned in the earth, unless the race were to be enslaved by their animal instinct, was there now a necessity for a revelation, for a direct message from God to man. The road to the Eternal One had been forgotten; no amount of material prosperity, or literary and artistic culture, had succeeded in teaching men the way unto the Great Father of gods and men, which a little child could have shewn them. In Corinth, the light of Greece, as it is called by Cicero, there was a philosophical school at the corner of every street, while in the temple of Venus, a thousand prostitutes served as priestesses before the goddess. If a revelation were to be given which would satisfy and fill men, it must be the old revelation, for that was truth itself; but a manifestation was needed, of the

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