This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 edition. Excerpt: ... unless they fictitiously adopt the language they hear, they are painfully conscious that they know nothing of them as yet. They hear of a depression for sin which they certainly have never experienced--a joy in God, making His service and His house the gate of heaven; and they know that it is excessively irksome to them--a confidence, trust, and assurance, of which they know nothing--till they take for granted what has been told them, that they are not God's children. Taught that they are as yet of the world, they live as the world--they carry out their education, which has dealt with them as children of the devil, to be converted: and children of the devil they become. Of these two views, the last is by far the most certain to undermine Christianity in every Protestant country. The first at least assumes God's badge, an universal one; and in education is so far right, practically: only wrong in the decision of the question how the child was created a child of God. But the second assumes a false, partial, party-badge--election, views, feelings. No wonder that the children of such religionists proverbially turn out ill. III. We pass to the doctrine of the Bible and (I believe) of the Church. Christ came to reveal a Name--the Father. He abolished the exclusive "my," and He taught us to pray "our Father." He proclaimed God the Father--man the Son: revealed that the Son of Man is also the Son of God. Man--as man, God's child. He came to redeem the world from that ignorance of the relationship which had left them in heart aliens and unregenerate. Human nature, therefore, became, viewed in Christ, a holy thing and divine. The Revelation is a common humanity, sanctified in God. The appearance of the Son of God is the sanctification of the human...