world he has made—­“the beauty, and the wonder, and the power,” as Browning says.  The poet tells us that what followed was that “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”  The sight was so good that song and shout came instinctively, almost involuntarily.  Is it not the same picture which Jesus draws of “joy in heaven in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth”?  We can believe in such joy when God made the world; but can we believe that there was the same joy in the presence of God yesterday when a coolie gave his heart to God?  Jesus does.  That is the central thing, it seems to me, in his teaching about God—­that God cares for the individual to an extent far beyond anything we could think possible.  If we can wrestle with that central thought and assimilate it, or, as the old divines said, “appropriate” it, make it our own, the rest of the Gospel is easy.  But one can never manage it except with the help, and in the company, of Jesus.

Jesus goes a step further, and believes in the possibility of a man loving God and God enjoying that too.  If he speaks of prayer, must we not think he means that God wants it as much as his child can want it?  How much is involved in the name “Father,” which Jesus so uniformly gives to God?  Something less than the word carries in the case of a human father, or more?  What is the attitude of a father to his child?  Jesus, as we have seen, uses this illustration to bring out God’s care for the actual needs of his children.  But is that all?  What is the innermost thing in a father’s relation to his children?  Surely something more than the bird’s instinct to feed her young, or to gather them under her wings (Luke 13:34).  Is not one of the most real features of parenthood enjoyment of the child?  Do not men and women frankly enjoy the grappling of the little mind with big things?  Is there not a charm, as says one of the Christian Fathers (Minucius Felix), about the “half-words” that a child uses, as he learns to talk and wrestles with a grown-up vocabulary?  About the extraordinary pictures he will draw of ships or cows—­the quaint stories he will invent—­the odd ways in which his gratitude and his affection express themselves?  Is it a real fatherhood where such things do not appeal?  Jesus’ language about God, his whole attitude to God, implies throughout that God is as real a Father as anybody, and it suggests that God loves his children the more because they are real; because they are not very clever; because they do make such queer and imperfect prayers; because, in short, they need him; and because they fill a place in his heart.

We have to remark how firmly Jesus believes in his Gospel of God and man needing each other and finding each other—­his “good news,” as he calls it.  He bases all on his faith in what has been called “Man’s incurable religious instinct”—­that instinct in the human heart that must have God—­and in God’s response to that instinct which he