Anything in you, which, in your own child, would make you feel him not
so pleasant as you would have him, is something wrong. This may mean
much to one, little or nothing to another. Things in a child which to
one parent would not seem worth minding, would fill another with horror.
After his moral development, where the one parent would smile, the other
would look aghast, perceiving both the present evil, and the
serpent-brood to follow. But as the love of him who is love, transcends
ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, so must he desire in his
child infinitely more than the most jealous love of the best mother can
desire in hers. He would have him rid of all discontent, all fear, all
grudging, all bitterness in word or thought, all gauging and measuring
of his own with a different rod from that he would apply to another's.
He will have no curling of the lip; no indifference in him to the man
whose service in any form he uses; no desire to excel another, no
contentment at gaining by his loss. He will not have him receive the
smallest service without gratitude; would not hear from him a tone to
jar the heart of another, a word to make it ache, be the ache ever so
transient. From such, as from all other sins, Jesus was born to deliver
us; not, primarily, or by itself, from the punishment of any of them.
When all are gone, the holy punishment will have departed also. He came
to make us good, and therein blessed children.

One master-sin is at the root of all the rest. It is no individual
action, or anything that comes of mood, or passion; it is the
non-recognition by the man, and consequent inactivity in him, of the
highest of all relations, that relation which is the root and first
essential condition of every other true relation of or in the human
soul. It is the absence in the man of harmony with the being whose
thought is the man's existence, whose word is the man's power of
thought. It is true that, being thus his offspring, God, as St Paul