I. A CHILD.

This is the highest of our relations to God. Heaven and earth know no tie nearer or dearer than that between father and child. For Jesus Himself is the Son, and Father is His favourite name for God. He uses it seventeen times in the Sermon on the Mount. You must then reverence your father on earth, for there is something divine about him, and he wears one of the highest titles of God. He is twice over in God's image-both as a man and as a father. If you don't reverence him, you can't rightly reverence God, or yourself, or anyone. The Lord's Prayer thus clothes your earthly father with supreme honour.

How awful is our lot if there is no God; if, as one puts it, when we look up to heaven, we see not a loving eye, but only a hideous, empty eye-socket! How lonely and desolate the human heart must be that does not believe in God, but feels a perishing outcast in a fatherless world, orphaned for time and eternity! Many a one in this case has feared life more than death, and sought a guilty refuge in self-destruction. "All the world is but as one orphanage without God."

I was speaking lately to an organ-builder.

He could not understand how any man could look on this world and doubt for one moment whether it had a maker. "Only a madman," he said, "would tell you that my organ had just grown into its present shape, or that Fate, or Destiny, or the laws of nature had built it. But what a poor bit of work my organ is, compared with the earth, the sea, the sky, and man!" It was a good argument and a good illustration. Yes; you feel in your heart of hearts that this world and yourself must have had a Maker. And to you He is not the Great Nameless, far-off Someone; for Christ has taught you to say, “Our Father." He is more than your Creator, Law-giver, and Judge. If you are a pupil in Christ's school, you will never think of God only as a Stern Judge. For every one who loves Christ calls God "Father." "Our Father which art in heaven"; which art, not wast or art to be. You should feel very sure of God: He is, and He is in heaven He is also on the earth, and very

near at hand: He casing air.

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besets us like the en

"( Our Father" seems utter impossibility to nearly all the heathen. They believe that their gods can do them much harm, but no good. This is their whole divinity. Theirs

are not religions of love, or grace, or trust.

God is the Father of all men by nature; for "we also are His offspring." He is "the Father of our spirits" as well as the Framer of our bodies our spirit is nearer Him than our body our spirit is the part of us that is likest God. But a child may become a rebel and an outcast. God's touching lament is, "I have nourished and bought up children, and they have rebelled against me." Maybe you have known a bad son. He has changed his name, and for shame fled over seas. His name is now never mentioned at home; his photo, with many bitter tears, has been slipped out of the family album; his school prizes have been locked up out of sight; and he is breaking the hearts of father and mother. Such a son was the Prodigal. He fled from the best of homes, took to a swinish life, and would soon have perished had his mind not been changed. He only is a child blessed word, who

in the full sense of that gladly trusts in and tries to be like Christ, the Father's Holy Child.

Think how a child turns to, leans on, uses, and rejoices in, his father. To a healthyhearted little child, the father is even as a home-god he seems so very kind, so wise, so strong. To him he clings and cleaves;

towards him he has no doubts or fears, or half-faith. Now, God planted a father's love in your father's breast, and it must be like something in His Own bosom, else we could not truly call Him "Our Father." Your father's love is just a drop from God's ocean. From faith in a human lover and helper you should rise, as by easy stepping-stones, to faith in God and Christ. You should thus rise from home to heaven that you may draw down heaven to your home. You may thus find heaven at your mother's feet. You trust, you love, and you obey your father on earth; pray that you may carry up all these fine feelings, each of them at its very best, up to your Father in heaven. This is true religion; for the love due to God and the love due to your father are blended into one, and called by the one name of piety. "Let them learn," says St Paul, "first to shew piety at home." This outgoing affection should guide your spirit to your Father in heaven.

I saw lately that some one had been speaking of "Our Father-Mother God." The Romanists worship Mary, the mother of Christ, because they yearn for a mother's heart as well as a father's.

Heavenly Father.

But we have both in Our

For God says in Isaiah (lxvi. 16), "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you"; and in Deut.

xxxii. 11 He compares Himself to the mothereagle when she carefully trains her nestlings for flight. God is the All-good as well as the Almighty.

The other day I came across a fine story in a magazine. The late Thomas Erskine of Linlathen once met a shepherd on a Highland hill, and asked him, "Do you know the Father"? The shepherd knew what the stranger meant, but, as he could not answer Yes, he turned away to his sheep and left the question unanswered. But though the stranger went, the question remained and haunted the shepherd till he could answer it rightly. After many years the stranger and the shepherd met again among the hills. The shepherd knew him, greeted him heartily, and said earnestly, "I know the Father now."

These two words, "Our Father," hold enough for all our needs. I quote here two of the greatest of the sons of men. The night before his death, Dr Chalmers was walking in his garden, and was overheard by one of his family, in low and earnest tones, saying, "O my heavenly Father, O my heavenly Father." The last recognisable words of Mr Gladstone "Our Father." What the Christian said as he entered the Kingdom of Grace, he may say again as he enters the Kingdom of Glory: "I will arise and go to my Father,"

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