(1) That means, first of all, that God is love, that behind all the suffering, the misery, the inequality, and the injustice which confront us in this wild and irregular scene of human life, there beats always and everywhere the heart of a Father, the heart of a personal and impartial love. You ask how it was that Christ persuaded men of this truth. It was because of what He was. It was because He was a " man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief." If some bright angel had come down from heaven with all the glory of miracles, and had flown to the earth and had pro- claimed in a voice of thunder and with works of wonder that God was love, we might have shaken our heads and said, " It is all very curious and mysterious, and it is a very nice thing to listen to, but I know better." Our Lord persuaded men that God was love because He came a man among men, hiding not Himself from His own flesh, moving among men in free and open contact, bear- ing men's sicknesses and carrying their infirmities ; because He went down Himself into the dark valley of failure and suffering ; because He bore all the pains of body, all the racking agonies of mind, all the mysterious sense of failure and desolation, that, generation after generation, have turned philanthropists into cynics and made them mad ; all the human history that has lain behind that bitter cry of righteous men forsaken — that cry which we hear in the Psalm, " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " — those words which rang out of the lips of Christ on the Cross.
I02 THE FATHER AND THE FAMILIES
^ In our great cities we seem as if we were lost in a crowd. What am I but a tiny little element in some vast human machine that sweeps along in the sway of great forces which move from one end of the industrial world to another and seem to annihilate any sense of the individuality of a single life ? It is crushed under the great forces which rush along. So even the old Jew could feel years ago in the Book of Ecclesiasticus, where the writer says : " Say not thou, I shall be hidden from the Lord ; and who shall remember me from on high ? I shall not be known among so many people; for what is my soul in a boundless creation ? " We feel it even more in our modern time, but the assurance of Christ is that it is not true ; that there is no one of us lost in the crowd ; that there is no one of us created by acci- dent ; that we were not turned out in hundreds or in thousands or in nations, that we were created individuals, that God is the Father of each and all ; and that behind all the seeming inequali- ties of position and comfort there is the perfect rectifying justice and equality of God. I believe that God is my Father. That means that He knows all my circumstances, that He values me, not in proportion to my performance, but in proportion to how much I am tried ; because, to keep my temper, if I am naturally an angry man, is worth in His sight ten thousand times more than to keep my temper if I am naturally an amiable person without a bad temper to contend with. He knows my circum- stances. He knows me and cares about me with the infinite knowledge of the Creator and the Father of everything that goes to make the individuality of my lot, which means the individual love of God.^ J
(2) And then, the Fatherhood of God, St. Paul says, is the •pattern and source of every fatherhood in heaven, and on earth. It means that God rules by a method of fatherhood. Men are set in groups and societies, and each group and society has one at the head of it, and the model of government is to be fatherhood. So it is in the family, and Christian civilization depends upon main- taining the sanctity and the dignity of the family. To believe in the Fatherhood of God is to set to work to be a good father, a good head of a household in our own families.
^ The other day I had occasion to find out, in very large works, about a great mass of very intelligent men who were workers there, that they were very unwilling that their wives should know how much money they were getting. I thought
' Bishop Gore.
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that was a very bad sign. There can be no sound and healthy married life where the wife does not know what money the hus- band is getting, because there can be no confidence ; there can be nothing of that confidence of heart to heart, that real unity of life, that real fellowship and co-operation which means complete trust ; and you know we have a great job to-day if we are to re- store home life to its proper sanctity and dignity.^
^ Now, look for a moment how the small families of the earth are all made after the fashion of the heavenly family. Did it ever occur to you — surely it must — that God's invention of the family in this world is just to compel our thoughts to rise up to the great Father, and to recognize the great family ? Love is the secret of God ; love is the creative power. It is symbolized in birth. See how the child comes into the world, dependent on the mother. See how the child has no notion of bliss but in the mother's arms, surrounded with the protection of those arms, looking up into the heaven of her face, reading the infinite in her eyes. The child, I say, is compelled to love the mother. He cannot help himself. Of course, there is the faculty of loving in the child, or else he could not love. It is his Divine nature ; he is born of love, and he is love ; but it can be brought out only in this way — that he shall, through helplessness, passivity in bliss, feeding on the very body of the mother that bare him, seeking the shelter of her bosom at every dread or anxiety or fear that comes upon him, learn that there is an overshadowing, an uphold- ing love, and that love is his very servant, and, I had almost said, slave. Surely there is no servant in His house like God Himself, for He does everything for His little ones.^