ity on
the prophets of the Old Testament, gave a course of lectures lately on
his own subject to a summer school of theology. His aim in one of
these prelections was to show how the prophet Jeremiah developed
himself by debate and discussion with God. At its close an elderly
clergyman, shaking the lecturer by the hand, said to him: "I was
delighted to hear what you said about Jeremiah. I myself have for
forty years preached the right and duty of men to stand up to their
Maker."

It was, to say the least, a crude way of expressing himself; but the
man had a meaning, and I think I know what it was. We may, to a large
extent, have grown out of the old Calvinistic representation of God;
but its reflex influence abides in a greater degree than we perhaps
realize. This representation puts its emphasis, not so much upon the
Fatherhood as upon the Sovereignty of God. It holds man responsible
for the moral quality of his actions to God; but all reference to man's
claims upon God are met with the stern question: "Shall the thing
formed say to Him that formed it, Why hast Thou made me thus?"

Whatever the Apostle may have meant, this question has been used to
support an intolerable position, and the clergyman spoke out his revolt
against it. His divinely implanted instinct of justice assured him
that a God, who is to command our intellectual confidence and
heart-trust, must, while exercising the prerogatives of a Sovereign,
accept the responsibilities of a Father. Family life would break all
to pieces if we as fathers did not carry our recognition of the claims
and rights of children past a severe, however just, parental authority
and control into the larger realm of wise liberty and undoubted
affection. And it is out of the best and highest we know of our
relations to one another, that we are to understand what we ought to be
to God, and what God has promised to be to us.

For God not only affirms His responsibility to us, He challenges us to
say, whether, having done our part, we have weighed His part in the
balance and found it wanting. It is the declaration of the Scriptures
from beginning to end, that the Lord our God is a faithful God.
Through the mouth of one of His prophets He confronts us with a
question which, were it not His own question, would hurt us as almost
profane: "What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they have
gone far from me?"

We need not shrink, therefore, from talking reverently