as He is, the Spirit of righteousness, and love, and joy, and peace,
long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, meekness, temperance: or
when, again, parents by their own teaching, do despite to the Spirit
of Grace in their own child, and destroy their child's good
conscience toward God, by telling the child that it does not really
love God, when it loves Him, perhaps, far better than they do; by
telling the child that its sins have parted it from God, when its
sins are light, yea, are as nothing in the balance compared to the
sins they themselves commit every day, while they claim for
themselves clearer light and knowledge than the child, and thereby
condemn themselves rather than the child; when they darken and
defile the pure and beautiful trust and admiration for its Heavenly
Father, which God's Spirit puts into the child's heart, by telling
it that it is doomed to I know-not-what horrible misery and torture
when it dies; but that it can escape from that wretched end by
thinking certain thoughts, and feeling certain feelings; and so
(after stirring up in the child all manner of dreadful doubts of
God's love and justice, and perhaps driving it away from religion
altogether by making it believe that it has committed sins which it
has not committed, and deserves horrible tortures which it has not
deserved), do perhaps at last awaken in it a new love for God, but
one which is not like that first love, that childlike love; one
which, I fear, is hardly a love for God at all, but principally a
selfish joy and delight at having escaped from coming torments.
This is the reason, my friends; and this hindrance, at least, I
know. I will not copy those parents, my friends, and tell them, as
they tell their children, that they are bringing on themselves
endless torture; but I must tell them, for the Lord Christ has told
them, that they are bringing on themselves something--I know not
what--of which it is written, that it were better for them that a