helping him to reach up and touch the hot thing?  I tell you, if you did that it would mean that you cared a great sight more about him than if you just slapped him and put it out of his reach; and yet, you see, you’d be helping him to do the wrong thing just because you wanted to take the naughtiness out of his heart, not because you were a devil that wanted him to be naughty.  Well, you see, between us and our children” (Toyner was talking as men do who get hold of truth, not as an individual, but as mankind) “it’s not the same as between God and us.  They have our life in them, but they’re outside us and we’re outside them, and so we get into the way, when we want them to be good, of giving them a punishment that’s outside the harm they’ve done, and trying to put the harm they are going to do outside of their reach; and when they do the right thing, half the time we don’t help them to do it again.  But that isn’t God’s way.  Nothing is ever outside of Him; and what happens after we have done a thing is just what must happen, nothing more and nothing less, so that we can never hope to escape the good or the evil of what we have done; for the way things must happen is just God’s character that never changes.  You see the reason we can choose between right and wrong when a tree can’t, or a beast, is just because God’s power of choice is in us and not in them.  So we use His power, and when we use it right and think about pleasing Him—­for, you see, we know He can be pleased, for our minds are just bits of His mind (as far as we know anything about Him; but of course we only know a very little)—­He puts a tremendous lot of strength into us, so that we can go on doing right next time.  Of course it’s a low sort of right when we don’t think about Him, for that’s the most of what He wants us to do; but I tell you” (a little personal fire and energy here broke the calm of the recital), “I tell you, when I do look up to God and say, ’Now I am going to do this for Your sake and because You are in me and will do it,’ I tell you, there’s tremendous power given us. That’s the law that makes the value of religion; I know it by the way I gave up drinking.  But now, look here; most of the time we don’t use God’s will, that He lends us, to do what’s right; well, then He doesn’t slap us and put the harm out of our reach.  He does just what the mother does when she takes the child’s hand and puts it against the hot thing, and the burn hurts her as much as it hurts the child; but He is not weak like we are to do it only once in a way.  I tell you, Ann, every time you do a wrong thing God is with you; that is what I saw when I was hard up and God showed me how things really were.  Now, look here, there isn’t any end to it that we can see here; it’s an awful lot of help we get to do the wrong thing if that’s the thing we choose to do.  It gets easier and easier, and at first there’s a lot of pleasure to it, but by-and-by it gets more and more dreadful, and then comes death, and that’s