upon the path, out of which one would pass, with such speed as one might, into the blitheness of the free air and the warm sun.  I remember a terrible lecture which I heard as a little bewildered boy at school, anxious to do right, terrified of oppression, and coldness, and evil alike; given by a worthy Evangelical clergyman, with large spectacles, and a hollow voice, and a great relish for spiritual terrors.  The subject was “the exceeding sinfulness of sin,” a proposition which I now see to be as true as if one lectured on the exceeding carnality of flesh.  But the lecture spoke of the horrible and filthy corruption of the human heart, its determined delight in wallowing in evil, its desperate wickedness.  I believed it, dully and hopelessly, as a boy believes what is told him by a voluble elderly person of obvious respectability.  But what a detestable theory of life, what an ugly picture of Divine incompetence!

Of course there are abundance of facts in the world which look like anything but love;—­the ruthless and merciless punishment of carelessness and ignorance, the dark laws of heredity, the wastefulness and cruelty of disease, the dismal acquiescence of stupid, healthy, virtuous persons, without sympathy or imagination, in the hardships which they were strong enough to bear unscathed.  One of the prime terrors of religion is the thought of the heavy-handed, unintelligent, tiresome men who would make it a monopoly if they could, and bear it triumphantly away from the hands of modest, humble, quiet, and tender-hearted people, chiding them as nebulous optimists.

Who are the people in this short life of ours whom one remembers with deep and abiding gratitude?  Not those who have rebuked, and punished, and satirised, and humiliated us, striking down the stricken, and flattening the prostrate—­but the people who have been patient with us, and kind, who have believed in us, and comforted us, and welcomed us, and forgiven us everything; who have given us largely of their love, who have lent without requiring payment, who have given us emotional rather than prudential reasons, who have cared for us, not as a duty but by some divine instinct, who have made endless excuses for us, believing that the true self was there and would emerge, who have pardoned our misdeeds and forgotten our meannesses.

This is what I would believe of God—­that He is not our censorious and severe critic, but our champion and lover, not loving us in spite of what we are, but because of what we are; Who in the days of our strength rejoices in our joy, and does not wish to overshadow it, like the conscientious human mentor, with considerations that we must yet be withered like grass; and Who, when the youthful ebullience dies away, and the spring grows weak, and we wonder why the zest has died out of simple pleasures, out of agreeable noise and stir, is still with us, reminding us that the wisdom we are painfully and surely gaining is a deeper and more lasting quality than even the hot impulses of youth.