, is stammering with
his poor, unskilled lips the name 'Abba! Father!' will one day come to
speak it fully. He that dimly trusts, he that partially loves, he that
can lift up his heart in some more or less unworthy prayer and
aspiration after God, in all these emotions and exercises, has the great
proof in himself that such emotions, such relationship, can never be put
an end to. The roots have gone down through the temporal, and have laid
hold of the Eternal. Anything seems to me to be more credible than that
a man who can look up and say, 'My Father,' shall be crushed by what
befalls the mere outside of him; anything seems to me to be more
believable than to suppose that the nature which is capable of these
elevating emotions and aspirations of confidence and hope, which can
know God and yearn after Him, and can love Him, is to be wiped out like
a gnat by the finger of Death. The material has nothing to do with these
feelings, and if I know myself, in however feeble and imperfect a
degree, to be the son of God, I carry in the conviction the very pledge
and seal of eternal life. That is a thought 'whose very sweetness
yieldeth proof that it was born for immortality.' 'We are the sons of
God,' therefore we shall always be so, in all worlds, and whatsoever may
become of this poor wrappage in which the soul is shrouded.

We may notice, also, that not only the fact of our sonship avails to
assure us of immortal life, but that also the very form which our
religious experience takes points in the same direction.

As I said, infancy is the prophecy of maturity. 'The child is father of
the man'; the bud foretells the flower. In the same way, the very
imperfections of the Christian life, as it is seen here, argue the
existence of another state, where all that is here in the germ shall be
fully matured, and all that is here incomplete shall attain the
perfection which alone will correspond to the power that works in us.
Think of the ordinary Christian character. The beginning is there, and
evidently no more than the beginning. As one looks at the crudity, the
inconsistencies, the failings, the feebleness of the Christian life of
others, or of oneself, and then thinks that such a poor, imperfect
exhibition is all that so divine a principle has been able to achieve in
this world, one feels that there must be a region and a time where we
shall be all which the transforming power of God's spirit can make us.
The very inconsistencie