you to think for one moment, before I pass on, how
entirely different the whole aspect of this witness of the Spirit of
which Christian men speak so much, and sometimes with so little
understanding, becomes according as you regard it mistakenly as being
the direct testimony to you that you are a child of God, or rightly
as being the direct testimony to you that God is your Father. The two
things seem to be the same, but they are not. In the one case, the
false case, the mistaken interpretation, we are left to this, that a
man has no deeper certainty of his condition, no better foundation
for his hope, than what is to be drawn from the presence or absence
of certain emotions within his own heart. In the other case, we are
admitted into this 'wide place,' that all which is our own is second
and not first, and that the true basis of all our confidence lies not
in the thought of what we are and feel to God, but in the thought of
what God is and feels to us. And instead, therefore, of being left to
labour for ourselves, painfully to search amongst the dust and
rubbish of our own hearts, we are taught to sweep away all that
crumbled, rotten surface, and to go down to the living rock that lies
beneath it; we are taught to say, in the words of the book of Isaiah,
'Doubtless Thou art our Father--we are all an unclean thing; our
iniquities, like the wind, have carried us away'; there is nothing
stable in us; our own resolutions, they are swept away like the chaff
of the summer threshing-floor, by the first gust of temptation; but
what of that?--'in those is continuance, and we shall be saved!' Ah,
brethren! expand this thought of the conviction that God is my
Father, as being the basis of all my confidence that I am His child,
into its widest and grandest form, and it leads us up to the blessed
old conviction, I am nothing, my holiness is nothing, my resolutions
are nothing, my faith is nothing, my energies are nothing; I stand
stripped, and barren, and naked of everything, and I fling myself out
of myself into the merciful arms of my Father in heaven! There is all
the difference in the world between searching for evidence of my
sonship, and seeking to get the conviction of God's Fatherhood. The
one is an endless, profitless, self-tormenting task; the other is the
light and liberty, the glorious liberty, of the children of God.

And so the _substance_ of the Spirit's evidence is the direct
conviction based on the revelation of G