e balance compared to the
sins they themselves commit every day, while they claim for
themselves clearer light and knowledge than the child, and thereby
condemn themselves rather than the child; when they darken and
defile the pure and beautiful trust and admiration for its Heavenly
Father, which God's Spirit puts into the child's heart, by telling
it that it is doomed to I know-not-what horrible misery and torture
when it dies; but that it can escape from that wretched end by
thinking certain thoughts, and feeling certain feelings; and so
(after stirring up in the child all manner of dreadful doubts of
God's love and justice, and perhaps driving it away from religion
altogether by making it believe that it has committed sins which it
has not committed, and deserves horrible tortures which it has not
deserved), do perhaps at last awaken in it a new love for God, but
one which is not like that first love, that childlike love; one
which, I fear, is hardly a love for God at all, but principally a
selfish joy and delight at having escaped from coming torments.
This is the reason, my friends; and this hindrance, at least, I
know. I will not copy those parents, my friends, and tell them, as
they tell their children, that they are bringing on themselves
endless torture; but I must tell them, for the Lord Christ has told
them, that they are bringing on themselves something--I know not
what--of which it is written, that it were better for them that a
millstone were hanged about their necks, and that they were drowned
in the depth of the sea. Oh, my friends, if I speak sternly, almost
bitterly, when I speak of parents' sins, it is because I speak for
those who cannot speak for themselves. I plead for Christ's little
ones: I plead for the souls and consciences of those little
children of whom Christ said, 'Suffer the little children to come
unto me;' not that they might become His, but because they were His
already; not that they might win His love, but because He loved them
from all eternity: not that they might enter into the kingdom of
heaven, but, because they were in the kingdom of heaven already;
because the kingdom of heaven was made up of such as them, and the
angels who ministered unto them always beheld the face of our Father
who is in heaven. Yes; I plead for those children, of whom the Lord
said, 'Except ye be converted,' that is, utterly turned and changed,
'and become as little children, ye shall in no wise ent