by honourable, respectable, moral men and women, because they are not what is called sensibly converted, or else what is called orthodox.  They have been taught to look on God, not as a loving and merciful Father, but as a tyrant and a task-master, who watches to set down against them the slightest mishap or neglect; who is extreme to mark what is done amiss; who wills the death of a sinner.  Often—­ strangest notion of all—­they have been told that, though God intends to punish them, they must still love Him, or they will be punished—­ as if such a notion, so far from drawing them to God, could do anything but drive them from Him.  And it is no wonder if persons who have been taught in their youth such notions concerning God, find it difficult to love Him.  Who can be frightened or threatened into loving any being?  How can we love any being who does not seem to us kind, merciful, amiable, loving?  Our love must be called out by God’s love.  If we are to love God, it must be because He has first loved us.

But He has first loved us, my friends.  The dark and cruel notions about God—­which are too common, and have been too common in all ages—­are not what the world about us teaches, nor what Scripture teaches us either.

Look out on the world around you.  What witness does it bear concerning the God who made it?  Who made the sunshine, and the flowers, and singing birds, and little children, and all that causes the joy of this life?  Let Christ Himself speak, and His apostles.  No one can say that their words are not true; that they were mistaken in their view of this earth, or of God who gave it to us that it might bear witness of Him.  What said our Lord to the poor folk of Galilee, of whom the Scribes and the Pharisees, in their pride, said, ’This people, who knoweth not the law, is accursed.’—­What said our Lord, very God of very God?  He told them to look on the world around, and learn from it that they had in heaven not a tyrant, not a destroyer, but a Father; a Father in heaven who is perfect in this, that He causeth His sun to shine upon them, and is good to the unthankful and the evil.

What of Him did St. Paul say?—­and that not to Christians, but to heathens—­That God had not left Himself without a witness even to the heathen who knew Him not—­and what sort of witness?  The witness of His bounty and goodness.  The simple, but perpetual witness of the yearly harvest—­’In that He sends men rain and fruitful seasons, filling their hearts with food and gladness.’

This is St. Paul’s witness.  And what is St. James’s?  He tells men of a Father of lights, from whom comes down every good and perfect gift; who gives to all liberally, and upbraideth not, grudges not, stints not, but gives, and delights in giving,—­the same God, in a word, of whom the old psalmists and prophets spoke, and said, ’Thou openest Thine hand, and fillest all things with good.’

And if natural religion tells us thus much, and bears witness of a Father who delights in the happiness of His creatures, what does revealed religion and the Gospel of Jesus Christ tell us?