herefore shall Zion for your sake be ploughed as a field,
and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as
the high places of the forest." That was plain preaching, and the
people did not like it. They would not like it any better to-day; it
would come too near the truth.

But others seem to think that God is too kind, not to say
good-natured, to allow his children to suffer for their sins. This
is part of a creed, unconsciously very widely held to-day, that
comfort, not character, is the chief end of life. Now if God is too
kind to allow his children to suffer some of the natural
consequences of sin, he is not a really kind and loving father, he
is spoiling his children. Salvation is soundness, sanity, health;
just as holiness is wholeness, escape from the disease, and not
merely from the consequences of sin. A physician, unless a quack,
never promises relief from a deep-seated disease without any pain or
discomfort. And if the disease is the result of indulgence, he warns
us that relapse into indulgence will bring a worse recurrence of the
pain. Perhaps, after all, Socrates was not so far from right when he
maintained that if a man had sinned the best and only thing for him
is to suffer for it. "God the Lord will speak peace unto his people,
and to his saints: but let them not turn again to folly." And our
Lord says, "Think not that I am come to destroy the law or the
prophets; I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say
unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in
no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled. For I say unto you,
That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the
scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of
heaven." If we would be great in the kingdom of heaven we must do
and teach the commandments. One of the best lessons that the clergy
can learn from science is that law and penalty are not things of the
past. They are eternal facts; and if so, ought sometimes to be at
least mentioned from the pulpit as well as remembered in the pew.

But if God is a person striving to communicate with man, and if man
is a person intended to conform to environment by becoming like God,
what is more probable from the scientific stand-point than that God
should seek and find some means of making himself clearly known to
man in some personal way? I do not see how any scientific man who
believes in a personal God can a