working beneath it, distinct from it but not distinguishable from it by anything but its consequences and its fruitfulness—­a deeper voice than yours—­a ’still small voice,’—­no whirlwind, nor fire, nor earthquake—­but the voice of God speaking in secret, taking the voice and tones of your own heart and your own consciousness, and saying to you, ’Thou art my child, inasmuch as, operated by My grace, and Mine inspiration alone, there rises, tremblingly but truly, in thine own soul the cry, Abba, Father.’

So much, then, for the form of this evidence—­my own conviction.  Then with regard to the substance of it:  conviction of what?  The text itself does not tell us what is the evidence which the Spirit bears, and by reason of which we have a right to conclude that we are the children of God.  The previous verse tells us.  I have partially anticipated what I have to say on that point, but it will bear a little further expansion.  ’Ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba, Father.’  ‘The Spirit itself,’ by this means of our cry, Abba, Father, ’beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.’  The substance, then, of the conviction which is lodged in the human spirit by the testimony of the Spirit of God is not primarily directed to our relation or feelings to God, but to a far grander thing than that—­to God’s feelings and relation to us.  Now I want you to think for one moment, before I pass on, how entirely different the whole aspect of this witness of the Spirit of which Christian men speak so much, and sometimes with so little understanding, becomes according as you regard it mistakenly as being the direct testimony to you that you are a child of God, or rightly as being the direct testimony to you that God is your Father.  The two things seem to be the same, but they are not.  In the one case, the false case, the mistaken interpretation, we are left to this, that a man has no deeper certainty of his condition, no better foundation for his hope, than what is to be drawn from the presence or absence of certain emotions within his own heart.  In the other case, we are admitted into this ‘wide place,’ that all which is our own is second and not first, and that the true basis of all our confidence lies not in the thought of what we are and feel to God, but in the thought of what God is and feels to us.  And instead, therefore, of being left to labour for ourselves, painfully to search amongst the dust and rubbish of our own hearts, we are taught to sweep away all that crumbled, rotten surface, and to go down to the living rock that lies beneath it; we are taught to say, in the words of the book of Isaiah, ’Doubtless Thou art our Father—­we are all an unclean thing; our iniquities, like the wind, have carried us away’; there is nothing stable in us; our own resolutions, they are swept away like the chaff of the summer threshing-floor, by the first gust of