can give power to the understanding, press upon men’s minds their wretched interpretations of the will of the Father, instead of the doing of that will upon their hearts.  They call their philosophy the truth of God, and say men must hold it, or stand outside.  They are the slaves of the letter in all its weakness and imperfection,—­and will be until the spirit of the Word, the spirit of obedience shall set them free.

The babes must beware lest the wise and prudent come between them and the Father.  They must yield no claim to authority over their belief, made by man or community, by church any more than by synagogue.  That alone is for them to believe which the Lord reveals to their souls as true; that alone is it possible for them to believe with what he counts belief.  The divine object for which teacher or church exists, is the persuasion of the individual heart to come to Jesus, the spirit, to be taught what he alone can teach.

Terribly has his gospel suffered in the mouths of the wise and prudent:  how would it be faring now, had its first messages been committed to persons of repute, instead of those simple fishermen?  It would be nowhere, or, if anywhere, unrecognizable.  From the first we should have had a system founded on a human interpretation of the divine gospel, instead of the gospel itself, which would have disappeared.  As it is, we have had one dull miserable human system after another usurping its place; but, thank God, the gospel remains!  The little child, heedless of his trailing cloud of glory, and looking about him aghast in an unknown world, may yet see and run to the arms open to the children.  How often has not some symbol employed in the New Testament been forced into the service of argument for one or another contemptible scheme of redemption, which were no redemption; while the truth for the sake of which the symbol was used, the thing meant to be conveyed by it, has lain unregarded beside the heap of rubbish!  Had the wise and prudent been the confidants of God, I repeat, the letter would at once have usurped the place of the spirit; the ministering slave would have been set over the household; a system of religion, with its rickety, malodorous plan of salvation, would not only have at once been put in the place of a living Christ, but would yet have held that place.  The great brother, the human God, the eternal Son, the living one, would have been as utterly hidden from the tearful eyes and aching hearts of the weary and heavy-laden, as if he had never come from the deeps of love to call the children home out of the shadows of a self-haunted universe.  But the Father revealed the Father’s things to his babes; the babes loved, and began to do them, therewith began to understand them, and went on growing in the knowledge of them and in the power of communicating them; while to the wise and prudent, the deepest words of the most babe-like of them all, John Boanerges, even now appear but a finger-worn rosary of platitudes.  The babe understands the wise and prudent, but is understood only by the babe.