The people whom Christ denounced with
indignation so fiery, so blasting, that it even seems inconsistent
with His perfect gentleness, were the people who thus professed to
know and interpret the mind of God, who bade the sinner believe
that He was a merciless judge, extreme to mark what is done amiss,
when the one secret was that He was the tenderest and most loving
of Fathers. But according to this preacher's terrible doctrine God
pours into the world a stream of millions of human beings, all
children of the devil, with instincts of a corrupt kind, hampered
by dreadful inheritances, doomed, from their helpless and reluctant
birth, to be sinful here and lost hereafter, and then prescribes to
them a hard and difficult path, beset by clamorous guides, pointing
in a hundred different directions, bidding them find the intricate
way to His Heart, or perish. The truth is the precise opposite. The
divine voice says to every man: "Hampered and sore hindered as you
are, you are yet My dearly beloved son and child; only turn to Me,
only open your heart to Me, only struggle, however faintly, to be
what you can desire to be, and I will guide and lead you to Myself;
all that is needed is that your heart should be on My side in the
battle.
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