youth, has not God's way of
dealing with you been just the same as St Paul's with those Corinthians,
teaching you to love and trust Him almost before He taught you the
difference between right and wrong? I know that some think otherwise.
Many who do not belong to the Church, and many, alas! who profess to
belong to the Church, will tell you that God's method is, first to
terrify men by the threats of the law and the sight of their sins and the
fear of damnation, and afterwards to reveal to them the gospel and His
mercy and salvation in Christ. Now I can only answer that it is not so.
Not so in fact. These preachers themselves may do it; but that is no
proof that God does it. What God's plan is can only be known from facts,
from experience, from what actually happens; first in God's kingdom of
nature, and next in God's kingdom of grace, which is the Church. And in
the kingdom of nature how does God begin with mankind? What are a
child's first impressions of this life? Does he hear voices from heaven
telling little children that they are lost sinners? Does he see
lightning come from heaven to strike sinners dead, or earthquakes rise
and swallow them up? Nothing of the kind. A child's first impressions
of this life, what are they but pleasure? His mother's breast, warmth,
light, food, play, flowers, and all pleasant things,--by these God
educates the child, even of the heathen and the savage:--and why? If
haply he may feel after God and find Him, and find that He is a God of
love and mercy, a giver of good things, who knows men's necessities
before they ask,--a good and loving God, and not a being such as I will
not, I dare not speak of.

I say with the very heathen God deals thus. We have plain Scripture for
that. For we have, and thanks be to God that we have, in such times as
these, a missionary sermon preached by St Paul to the heathen at Lystra.
And in that is not one word concerning these terrors of the law. He
says, I preach to you God, whom you ought to have known of yourselves,
because He has not left Himself without witness. And what is this
witness of which the apostle speaks? Wrath and terror and destruction?
Not so, says St Paul. This is His witness, that He has sent you rain and
fruitful seasons, filling your heart with food and gladness. His
goodness, His bounty,--it is the witness of God and of the character of
God. There is wrath and terror enough, s