They seem to me to find it, not in the Bible at
all, but in their own hearts, judging that God must be as hard upon His
children as they are apt to be upon their own. I know that God is never
content with us, or with any man. How can He be? But in what sense is
He not content? In the sense in which a hard task-master is not content
with his slave, when he flogs him cruelly for the slightest fault? Or in
the sense in which a loving father is not content with his child,
grieving over him, counselling him, as long as he sees him, even in the
slightest matter, doing less well than he might do? Think of that, and
when you have thought of it, believe that in this grand text St Paul
speaks really by the Spirit of God, and according to the mind of God, and
teaches not these old Corinthians merely, but you and your children after
you, what is the mind of God concerning you, what is the light in which
God looks upon you. For, if you will but think over your own lives, and
over the Catechism which you learned in your 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.
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