telling little children that they are lost sinners? Does he see lightning come from heaven to strike sinners dead, or earthquakes rise and swallow them up? Nothing of the kind. A child's first impressions of this life, what are they but pleasure? His mother's breast, warmth, light, food, play, flowers, and all pleasant things,--by these God educates the child, even of the heathen and the savage:--and why? If haply he may feel after God and find Him, and find that He is a God of love and mercy, a giver of good things, who knows men's necessities before they ask,--a good and loving God, and not a being such as I will not, I dare not speak of. I say with the very heathen God deals thus. We have plain Scripture for that. For we have, and thanks be to God that we have, in such times as these, a missionary sermon preached by St Paul to the heathen at Lystra. And in that is not one word concerning these terrors of the law. He says, I preach to you God, whom you ought to have known of yourselves, because He has not left Himself without witness. And what is this witness of which the apostle speaks? Wrath and terror and destruction? Not so, says St Paul. This is His witness, that He has sent you rain and fruitful seasons, filling your heart with food and gladness. His goodness, His bounty,--it is the witness of God and of the character of God. There is wrath and terror enough, says St Paul elsewhere, awaiting those who go on in sin. But then what does he say is their sin? Despising the goodness of God, by which He has been trying to win mankind to love and trust Him, before He threatens and before He punishes at all. So much for the terrors of the law coming before the good news of the gospel in God's kingdom of nature. And still less do the terrors of the law come first in God's kingdom of grace, which is the Church. They did not come first to you or to me, or to any one in His Church who has been taught, as churchmen should be, their Catechism. If any have been, unhappily for them, brought up to learn Catechisms and hymns which do not belong to the Church, and which terrify little children with horrible notions of God's wrath, and the torments prepared not merely for wicked men, but for unconverted children, and then teach them to say,-- "Can such a wretch as I Escape this dreadful end?"