re would be an end of all superstitions.
The root of all superstitions, fanaticisms, and false religions is this--
that they do not hallow the name of Father. They do not see that it is a
Holy name, a beautiful and tender as well as an awful and venerable name.
They think of fathers, like too many among themselves, proud, and
arbitrary, selfish and cruel. They say in their hearts, even such
fathers as we are, such is God. Therefore, they shrink from God, and
turn from Him to idols, to the Virgin Mary, or Saints, or any other
beings who can deliver them (as they fancy) out of the hands of their
Father in heaven. If men once learnt to hallow the name of Father, to
think of a father as one who not only possessed power but felt love, who
not only had rights which he would enforce, and issued commands which
must be obeyed, but who felt yearning sympathy for his children's
weakness, an active interest in their education, and was ready to labour
for, to sacrifice himself for, his family--That would be truly to hallow
the name of Father, and look on it as a holy thing, whether in heaven
above or in earth beneath.

To hallow the Father's name would abolish all the superstition of the
world. And so the coming of the Father's kingdom would abolish all the
misrule and anarchy of the world. For the kingdom of God the Father is a
kingdom of perfect order, perfect justice, perfect usefulness. Surely
the first consequences of that kingdom's coming would be, that every one
would be exactly in his right place, and that every one would get his
exact deserts. That would indeed be the kingdom of God on earth. The
prospect of such a kingdom would be painful enough to those who were in
their wrong place, to those who were undeserving. All who were useless,
taking wages either from man or from God, without doing any work in
return, all these would have but too good reason to dread the coming of
the kingdom of God.

But those who were trying earnestly to do their work, though amid many
mistakes and failures, why should they dread the coming of the kingdom of
God? Why should they shrink from remembering that, though God's kingdom
is not come in perfection and fulness, it is here already, and they are
in it? Why should they shrink from that thought? They will find it full
of comfort, of strength, and hope, if they will but hallow their Father's
name, and remember the fact of all facts--that they have