does not mean God is a Father, and He is also to be feared; that is to miss the whole point of his words; what he means is, God is a Father, and, therefore, He is to be feared; the fear follows necessarily on the true idea of Fatherhood.  Ah, brethren, if we understood Peter and Peter’s Lord aright, we should be not the less, but the more anxious about our sins, because we have learnt to call God “Father.”  “Evil,” it has been well said, “is a more terrible thing to the family than to the state."[12] Acts which the law takes no cognizance of a father dare not, and cannot, pass by; what the magistrate may dismiss with light censure he must search out to its depths.  The judgment of a father—­there is no judgment like that.  And if it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, for him who all his life through has set himself against the Divine law and love, it is a still more fearful thing because those hands are the hands of a Father.

But this is not the note on which to close a sermon on the Fatherhood of God.  Let us go back to a chapter from which, though I have only once quoted its words, we have never been far away—­the fifteenth of St. Luke, with its three-fold revelation of the seeking love of God.  The parables of the chapter are companion pictures, and should be studied together in the light of the circumstances which were their common origin.  “The Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, This man receiveth sinners and eateth with them.”  These parables are Christ’s answer.  Mark how He justifies Himself.  He might have pleaded the need of those whom the Pharisees and scribes had left alone in their wretchedness and sin, but of this He says nothing; His thoughts are all of the need of God.  The central thought in each parable is not what man loses by his sin, but what God loses.  As the shepherd misses his lost sheep, and the woman her lost coin, and the father his lost son, so, Christ says, we are all missed by God until, with our heart’s love, we satisfy the hunger of His.  The genius of a prose poet shall tell us the rest.  We have all read of Lachlan Campbell and his daughter Flora, how she went into the far country, and what brought her home again.  “It iss weary to be in London”—­this was Flora’s story as she told it to Marget Howe when she was back again in the glen—­“it iss weary to be in London and no one to speak a kind word to you, and I will be looking at the crowd that is always passing, and I will not see one kent face, and when I looked in at the lighted windows the people were all sitting round the table, but there was no place for me.  Millions and millions of people, and not one to say ‘Flora,’ and not one sore heart if I died that night.”  Then one night she crept into a church as the people were singing.  “The sermon wass on the Prodigal Son, but there is only one word I remember.  ‘You are not forgotten or cast off,’ the preacher said:  ‘you are missed.’  Sometimes he will say, ’If you had a plant, and you had