hese things.
It is one of the criticisms of to-day that sternness has died out of
theology. The preacher is no longer the representative of a _judge_;
no longer in God's stead the accuser of men. In every age the Church
displays favouritism in her doctrinal attachments. In our time it is
the doctrine of the divine Fatherhood of which the most is heard. This
were well if the whole truth were told; but what manner of fatherhood
is that of which we all too often hear? A fatherhood of colossal good
nature, of blind, of foolish, indulgence; a conception of paternal
wisdom and affection against which the conscience of the thoughtful
instinctively revolts. The man in the street is not satisfied, and
never will be satisfied, with a merely sentimental God. Some day,
perhaps, it may be discovered that he is outside the churches, not
because preaching, asking too much, has made him afraid, but because
preaching, asking too little, has left him contemptuous.

And how has the change come to pass? Some say that the lack of the
hour is a sense of sin. This sense, they tell us, has been lost as a
result of our theorising about the origin of moral evil. There are
some, indeed, who talk as if the tragedy of sin was not really a
tragedy at all, but actually a blessing in disguise. We have been
assured that the only hope for humanity lay in a moral fall which had
to come to pass that the race might achieve its destiny through its
experience of what is only called "wrong-doing," and of the suffering
resulting from it. Only by this rugged and shadowed road, so are we
informed, can we ever come to perfection and reach the golden age for
which our hearts are sighing. Others see in sin a proof that man is
struggling to be better. They regard his transgression as a hopeful
symptom of divine discontent. Many _do_ see tragedy in it all, but the
blame lies otherwhere than with the transgressor. Sin grows less
terrible, but more hopeless, as they talk about heredity, as they
transfer the responsibility from the criminal to his circumstances, his
education, the conditions of his life or the state of society. Not a
sentence of punishment but a vote of sympathy should crime evoke if all
that is said along such lines be true.

But not in any one of these things, nor in all of them put together,
lies the whole reason of our modern tenderness in dealing with sin.
Even preaching has its fashions, and he is a bold man who dares to
disrega