temptation; but what of that?—­’in those is continuance, and we shall be saved!’ Ah, brethren! expand this thought of the conviction that God is my Father, as being the basis of all my confidence that I am His child, into its widest and grandest form, and it leads us up to the blessed old conviction, I am nothing, my holiness is nothing, my resolutions are nothing, my faith is nothing, my energies are nothing; I stand stripped, and barren, and naked of everything, and I fling myself out of myself into the merciful arms of my Father in heaven!  There is all the difference in the world between searching for evidence of my sonship, and seeking to get the conviction of God’s Fatherhood.  The one is an endless, profitless, self-tormenting task; the other is the light and liberty, the glorious liberty, of the children of God.

And so the substance of the Spirit’s evidence is the direct conviction based on the revelation of God’s infinite love and fatherhood in Christ the Son, that God is my Father; from which direct conviction I come to the conclusion, the inference, the second thought, Then I may trust that I am His son.  But why?  Because of anything in me?  No:  because of Him.  The very emblem of fatherhood and sonship might teach us that that depends upon the Father’s will and the Father’s heart.  The Spirit’s testimony has for form my own conviction:  and for substance my humble cry, ’Oh Thou, my Father in heaven!’ Brethren, is not that a far truer and nobler kind of thing to preach than saying, Look into your own heart for strange, extraordinary, distinguishable signs which shall mark you out as God’s child—­and which are proved to be His Spirit’s, because they are separated from the ordinary human consciousness?  Is it not far more blessed for us, and more honouring to Him who works the sign, when we say, that it is to be found in no out-of-rule, miraculous evidence, but in the natural (which is in reality supernatural) working of His Spirit in the heart which is its recipient, breeding there the conviction that God is my Father?  And oh, if I am speaking to any to whom that text, with all its light and glory, has seemed to lift them up into an atmosphere too rare and a height too lofty for their heavy wings and unused feet, if I am speaking to any Christian man to whom this word has been like the cherubim and flaming sword, bright and beautiful, but threatening and repellent when it speaks of a Spirit that bears witness with our spirit—­I ask you simply to take the passage for yourself, and carefully and patiently to examine it, and see if it be not true what I have been saying, that your trembling conviction—­sister and akin as it is to your deepest distrust and sharpest sense of sin and unworthiness—­that your trembling conviction of a love mightier than your own, everlasting and all-faithful, is indeed the selectest sign that God can give you that you are His child.  Oh, brethren and sisters! be confident; for it is not false confidence:  be confident if up from the depths of that dark well of your own sinful heart there rises sometimes, through all the bitter waters, unpolluted and separate, a sweet conviction, forcing itself upward, that God hath love in His heart, and that God is my Father.  Be confident; ’the Spirit itself beareth witness with your spirit.’