at understands perfectly and utterly, and which does, which
must, desire the best and truest. "Give me courage, hope, confidence,"
says the desolate soul.

"I can endure Thy bitterest decrees,
If CERTAIN of Thy Love."

How would one amend all this if one had the power? Alas! it could only
be by silencing all stupid and clumsy people, all rigid parents, all
diplomatic priests, all the horrible natures who lick their lips with
a fierce zest over the pains that befall the men with whom they do not
agree. I would teach a child, in defiance even of reason, that God is
the one Power that loves and understands him through thick and thin;
that He punishes with anguish and sorrow; that He exults in forgiveness
and mercy; that He rejoices in innocent happiness; that He loves
courage, and brightness, and kindness, and cheerful self-sacrifice; that
things mean, and vile, and impure, and cruel, are things that He does
not love to punish, but sad and soiling stains that He beholds with
shame and tears. This, it seems to me, is the Gospel teaching about God,
impossible only because of the hardness of our hearts. But if it were
possible, a child might grow to feel about sin, not that it was a
horrible and unpardonable failure, a thing to afflict oneself drearily
about, but that it was rather a thing which, when once spurned, however
humiliating, could minister to progress, in a way in which untroubled
happiness could not operate--to be forgotten, perhaps, but certainly to
be forgiven; a privilege rather than a hindrance, a gate rather than a
barrier; a shadow upon the path, out of which one would pass, with such
speed as one might, into the blitheness of the free air and the warm
sun. I remember a terrible lecture which I heard as a little bewildered
boy at school, anxious to do right, terrified of oppression, and
coldness, and evil alike; given by a worthy Evangelical clergyman, with
large spectacles, and a hollow voice, and a great relish for spiritual
terrors. The subject was "the exceeding sinfulness of sin," a
proposition which I now see to be as true as if one lectured on the
exceeding carnality of flesh. But the lecture spoke of the horrible
and filthy corruption of the human heart, its determined delight in
wallowing in evil, its desperate wickedness. I believed it, dully and
hopelessly, as a boy believes what is told him by a voluble elderly
person of obvious respectability. But what a detestable theory of life