loftier vantage-ground, to ignore its serious
defects and limitations. It was an exclusive faith. It magnified the
privileges of the Jews, but it shut out the Gentiles. God might be a
Father to Israel, but to no other nation under heaven did He stand in
any such relation. It was the refusal of Christ to recognize the
barriers which the pride of race had set up which more than anything
else brought Him into conflict with the authorities at Jerusalem. And
when once from the mind and heart of the Early Church the irrevocable
word had gone forth, "God is no respecter of persons; but in every
nation he that feareth Him, and worketh righteousness, is acceptable to
Him," the final breach was made; no longer could the new faith live with
the old. And even within the privileged circle of Judaism itself men's
best thoughts of God and of His relation to them were maimed and
imperfect. He was the God of the nation, not of the individual. Here and
there elect souls like the psalmists climbed the heights whereon man
holds fellowship with God, and spake with Him face to face, as a man
with his friend. But with the people as a whole, even as with their
greatest prophets, not the individual, but the nation, was the religious
unit.

Such was the Old Testament idea of God. Now let us return to the
teaching of Jesus. And at once we discover that Christ let go nothing of
that earlier doctrine which was of real and abiding worth. The God of
Jesus Christ is as holy, as sovereign--or, to use the modern term--as
transcendent as the God of the psalmists and the prophets. Their
favourite name for God was "King," and Christ spake much of the "kingdom
of God." To them God's people were His servants, owing to Him allegiance
and service to the uttermost; we also, Christ says, are the servants of
God, to every one of whom He has appointed his task, and with whom one
day He will make a reckoning. But if nothing is lost, how much is
gained! It is not merely that in Christ's teaching we have the Old
Testament of God over again with a _plus_, the new which is added has so
transformed and transfigured the old that all is become new. To Jesus
Christ, and to us through Him, God is "the Father."

It is, of course, well known that Christ was not the first to apply this
name to God. There is no religion, says Max Mueller,[11] which is
sufficiently recorded to be understood that does not, in some sense or
other, apply the term Father to its Deity. Yet this need