A small question?  Look at these two little words, Father and Son.  Father and Son!  Are they not the most deep and awful, as well as the most blessed and hopeful words on earth?  Do they not tell us the very mystery of God’s being?  Are they not the very name of God, God The Father and God The Son, knit together by one Holy Spirit of Love to each other and to all, who proceeds alike from The Father and from The Son?  And then, will you think it a light matter to ask fallen creatures made in the likeness of that perfect Father and that perfect Son, what sort of fathers and sons they have been?  God help us all, and give us grace to ask ourselves that question morning and night, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come, lest He come and smite this land with a curse.

I have been led to think deeply and to speak openly upon this solemn matter, my friends, by seeing, as who can help seeing, the great division and estrangement between the old and the young which is growing up in our days.  I do not, alas!  I cannot, deny the complaints which old people commonly make.  Old people complain that young people are grown too independent, disobedient, saucy, and what not.  It is too true, frightfully, miserably true, that there is not the same reverence for parents as there was a generation back;—­that the children break loose from their parents, spend their parents’ money, choose their own road in life, their own politics, their own religion, alas! too often, for themselves;—­that young people now presume to do and say a hundred things which they would not have dreamed in old times.  And they are ready enough to cry out that all this is a sign of the last days, of which, they say, St. Paul speaks in 2 Tim. iii. 4—­when men ’shall be disobedient to parents, unthankful, boasters, heady, high-minded, despisers of those who are good, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.’  My friends, my friends, it is far better for us who have children, instead of prying into the times and seasons which God has kept in His own hand, to read our Bibles faithfully, and when we quote a text, quote the whole of it, and not just those bits of it which help us to throw blame on other people.  What St. Paul really says, is that ’in the last days evil times will come;’ just as they had come, he shows, when he wrote; and what he means I will try and show you presently.  And, moreover, remember that Malachi says, that the hearts of the parents in Judea needed turning to their children, as well as the hearts of the children to their parents.  Take care lest it be not so in England now.  Remember that St. Paul, in that same solemn passage, gives other marks of ‘last days,’ which have to do with parents as well as with children, and some which can only have to do with parents—­for they are the sins of grown-up and elderly people, and not of young ones.  He says, that in those days men shall also be ’covetous, proud, without natural affection, breakers of their word, blasphemers;