ays St Paul elsewhere, awaiting
those who go on in sin. But then what does he say is their sin?
Despising the goodness of God, by which He has been trying to win mankind
to love and trust Him, before He threatens and before He punishes at all.
So much for the terrors of the law coming before the good news of the
gospel in God's kingdom of nature.

And still less do the terrors of the law come first in God's kingdom of
grace, which is the Church. They did not come first to you or to me, or
to any one in His Church who has been taught, as churchmen should be,
their Catechism. If any have been, unhappily for them, brought up to
learn Catechisms and hymns which do not belong to the Church, and which
terrify little children with horrible notions of God's wrath, and the
torments prepared not merely for wicked men, but for unconverted
children, and then teach them to say,--

"Can such a wretch as I
Escape this dreadful end?"

so much the worse for them. We, who are Church people, are bound to
believe that God speaks to us through the Church books, and that it was
His will that we should have been brought up to believe the Catechism.
And in that Catechism we heard not one word of these terrors of the law
or of God's wrath hanging over us. We were taught that before we even
knew right from wrong, God adopted us freely as His children, freely
forgave us our original sin for the sake of Christ's blood, freely
renewed us by His Holy Spirit, freely placed us in His Church;--that we
might love Him, because He first loved us; trust Him because He has done
all that even God could do to win our trust; and obey Him, because we are
boundlessly in debt to Him for boundless mercies. This is God's method
with us in His Church, and what is it but St Paul's method with these
Corinthians?

Believe this, then, you who wish to be Churchmen in spirit and in truth.
Believe that St Paul's conduct is to you a type and pattern of what God
does, and what you ought to do. That God's method of winning you to do
right is to make you love Him and trust Him; and that your method of
winning your children to do right is to make them love and trust you.
Let us remember that if our children are not perfect, they at least
inherited their imperfections from us; and if our Father in heaven, from
whom we inherit no sin, but only good, have patience with us, shall we
not have patience with our children, who owe to