t, pervades all nature, and underlies all our lives,
notwithstanding the universal adaptation and intention of Christ's
work, notwithstanding the wooing of His tender voice and the
unceasing beckoning of His love, it still remains true that there are
men in the world, created by God, loved and cared for by Him, for
whom Christ died, who might be, but are not, sons of God.

Fatherhood! what does that word itself teach us? It speaks of the
communication of a life, and the reciprocity of love. It rests upon a
divine act, and it involves a human emotion. It involves that the
father and the child shall have kindred life--the father bestowing
and the child possessing a life which is derived; and because
derived, kindred; and because kindred, unfolding itself in likeness
to the father that gave it. And it requires that between the father's
heart and the child's heart there shall pass, in blessed interchange
and quick correspondence, answering love, flashing backwards and
forwards, like the lightning that touches the earth and rises from it
again. A simple appeal to your own consciousness will decide if that
be the condition of all men. Are you, my brother, conscious of
anything within you higher than the common life that belongs to you
because you are an immortal soul? Can you say, 'From God's hand I have
received the granting and implantation of a new and better life?' Is
your claim verified by this, that you are kindred with God in holy
affections, in like purposes, loving what He loves, hating what He
hates, doing what He wills, accepting what He sends, longing for
Himself, and blessed in His presence? Is your sonship proved by the
depth and sincerity, the simplicity and power, of your throbbing
heart of love to your Father in heaven? Or are all these emotions
empty words to you, things that are spoken in pulpits, but to which
you have nothing in your life corresponding? Oh then, my friend, what
am I to say to you? What but this? no sonship except by that
spiritual birth; and if not such sonship, then the spirit of bondage.
If not such sonship, why then, by all the tendencies of your nature,
and by all the affinities of your moral being, if you are not holding
of heaven, you are holding of hell; if you are not drawing your life,
your character, your emotions, your affections, from the sacred well
that lies up yonder, you are drawing them from the black one that
lies down there. There are heaven, hell, and the earth that lie