This consciousness of power has come in part from Christ's revelation of God the Father. Whoever has sinned against his friend or unkindly wronged a child knows what sin does to personal relationships. How swift a change comes over a son's thought of his father when the son has sinned! The wrong may have been done secretly so that his sire does not know, and the boy alone on earth is conscious of it. But for all that the filial relationship has lost its glory. Before the sin, the son was happy with his father near; they were companions, confidants, and to the boy fatherhood was very beautiful. Now, he is most unhappy with his father near; the father's eyes like a detective's pierce him through, the face like a judge's waits sternly to condemn. He is looking at his father through the dark glasses of his sin, and they distort his vision. When one considers the gods whom men have worshiped, approaching them by bloody altar-stairs, offering their first-born to assuage wrath or win from apathy to favor, he sees, extended to a racial scale, our boyhood's tragedy. _Mankind has been looking at the Father through its ignorance and sin and it has seen him beclouded and awry._ Christ changed all that. By what he taught, by what he was, by what he suffered he has said to man, so that man increasingly has believed it--You are wrong about God. He does not stand aloof--careless or vindictive; he is not as he looks to you through the twisted lenses of your evil. He loves you. He _cares_ beyond your power to understand, and all my compassion but reveals in time what is eternally in him. He is pledged to the victory of goodness in you and in the world, and you have not used all your power until you have used his, for that, too, is yours. From that day the fight against sin has been a new thing, and men have gone into it with battle-cries they never used before--"_God_ was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself" (II Cor. 5:19); "_God_ commendeth his own love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8); "If _God_ is for us, who is against us?" (Rom. 8:31).